Anyone reading John Donne’s ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’, in which he calls his paramour an ‘angel’ who brings about ‘a heaven like Mahomet’s Paradise’, might assume that the poet had little knowledge of, or interest in, the Islamic world. The denigration of Jannah, the Islamic vision of the afterlife, as a hedonistic garden of earthly delights, after all, was widely prevalent at the time, and does not speak to any sophisticated grasp of the religion’s teachings.

Donne did read a version of the Qur’an, albeit in the flawed medieval Latin translation of Robert of Ketton, which was printed in Basel in the mid-sixteenth century. But what is equally interesting is his curiosity about the Arabic language, a subject that attracted increasing attention in seventeenth-century England: Donne’s contemporary William Bedwell was one of the greatest Arabists in Europe, and the first professorships of Arabic at Oxford and Cambridge were founded in the mid-1630s, shortly after Donne’s death. While Christian Europeans had various reasons to try to learn oriental languages in this period, ranging from commercial gain to fantastical dreams of converting the Ottoman Empire, divines like Dr Donne looked to Arabic principally as a means of better understanding the Bible. Since they are both related as Semitic languages, comparing words in Hebrew and Arabic allowed scholars to gain insights into the grammar and vocabulary of the Old Testament. Arabic translations of biblical texts, on the other hand, could be examined alongside the Hebrew and Greek versions, potentially revealing new facets of sacred scripture.

As early as 17 July 1613 Donne remarked that he was ‘busying myself a little in the search of the Eastern tongues’. References in his sermons to Arabic vocabulary and to Arabic versions of Genesis, the Psalms, and the Gospel of John show clearly that, at least by the 1620s, Donne’s interest in ‘Eastern tongues’ extended to Arabic. The same references also suggest some of his probable reading, including for instance the Lexicon Pentaglotton (1612), a comparative dictionary of Semitic languages compiled by the German scholar Valentin Schindler, and an Arabic paraphrase of the Gospel of John rendered into Latin by the Dutch orientalist Thomas Erpenius, which was printed in 1629. The latter is particularly striking, for it indicates that in the final years of his life (Donne died in 1631) the poet-divine was engaging with the latest oriental scholarship from the Continent.

Figure 1: Valentin Schindler’s Lexicon Pentaglotton (1612), a comparative dictionary of Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Arabic (courtesy of the Bavarian State Library, Munich)

Figure 2: Paul Tarnow’s 1629 commentary on the Gospel of John, advertising its inclusion of an Arabic paraphrase translated into Latin by Thomas Erpenius (courtesy of the Bavarian State Library, Munich)

Donne never really learned Arabic, at least not in any serious way. Suitable materials and teachers were simply too hard to come by, and the subject defeated even some of the most indefatigable scholars. Yet it is remarkable that Donne looked into the subject as much as he did, and his familiarity with the language, very limited though it was, intimates that Arabic was a more pervasive element of early modern English culture than one might think.

Further reading

Feingold, Mordechai. ‘Learning Arabic in Early Modern England’, in The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in Early Modern Europe, edited by Jan Loop, Alastair Hamilton, and Charles Burnett, 33–56. Leiden: Brill, 2017.

Goodblatt, Chanita. The Christian Hebraism of John Donne: Written with the Fingers of Man’s Hand. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010.

Hamilton, Alastair. William Bedwell the Arabist 1563–1632. Leiden: Brill, 1985.

Toomer, G. J. Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Vozar, T. M. ‘“In the search of the Eastern tongues”: John Donne’s Arabic Learning’, forthcoming in Notes & Queries (https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjad042.