Translating the Crusades: Historical Legacies of the Orientalist Translation Movement

Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Arabe 1666, f. 1.

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Published between 1872–1906, the five volumes of the Recueil des historiens des croisades: historiens orientaux contain abridged editions and French translations of medieval Arabic sources relating to the crusading period. This collection has influenced how generations of historians have engaged with Arabic-Islamic perspectives on the crusades, a key historical facet of Christian-Muslim relations. Even today, non-Arabists remain reliant upon the Recueil and other contemporaneous translations. By subjecting the Recueil to close scrutiny from a general perspective and on the basis of concrete case studies, this paper engages with ongoing debates, over the relevance and legacy of scientific projects produced in the heyday of Orientalist and colonialist thought.

James Wilson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg and Department of History at the University of Konstanz, Germany. He obtained his PhD from Queen Mary, University of London in 2020, and his first monograph, Medieval Syria and the Onset of the Crusades, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023.