The Aljamiado Phenomenon in Early Modern Europe

This book offers the first systematic comparative study of Aljamiado as a genuinely European phenomenon. Moving beyond regional approaches, it brings together three major Islamic manuscript traditions: the writings of the Mudéjars and Moriscos of the Iberian Peninsula, the Bosnian corpus, and the textual culture of the Tatars of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. By proposing ‘European Aljamiado’ as a new analytical framework, the authors show how Muslim communities across early modern Europe transmitted, translated, adapted, and localized Islamic knowledge in vernacular languages written in Arabic script. Attentive to political, linguistic, confessional, and cultural diversity, the book reveals both a shared Islamic foundation and distinctive local forms of textual creativity. Combining philology, codicology, linguistics, literary history, and manuscript studies, it makes a major contribution to Aljamiado studies and opens new perspectives on religion, translation, and Europe’s multilingual manuscript cultures.