Penguin Classics has recently published the first new translation in over 400 years of Johannes Leo Africanus’s monumental text The Cosmography and Geography of Africa. Anthony Ossa-Richardson (University of Southhampton) and Richard Oosterhoff (University of Edinburgh) are the first to translate from the original 1526 manuscript written in Italian.

Leo Africanus is a North African diplomat and scholar. He was born in Fez, Morocco and went by the name Al-Hassan Ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan until a run-in with pirates brought him to Rome where he became a Christian and changed his name. Most of what he records in The Cosmography is based on his travels through Cairo all the way to the Songhai Empire. The book was published in the sixteenth-century and details the history and geography of Northern Africa. It was composed in Italian for a largely European and Christian audience.

The translators say that it is “the first book about Africa written in a European language and the first book about Africa published in Europe.” Apparently, The Cosmography was an instant success, with reprints and multiple translations from its original Italian. As the translators note, it is a book about Africa written for a specifically European audience. This contemporary translation gives us unprecedented access to Africanus’s original text in addition to a useful introduction and contextualizing notes. Given that the book is addressed to Europeans, it likely also provides deep insights into the European imagination of non-European worlds and reveals what Europe thought of Africa.

Read the full description from the publisher below:

In 1518, al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan, a Moroccan diplomat, was seized by pirates while traveling in the Mediterranean. Brought before Pope Leo X, he was persuaded to convert to Christianity, in the process taking the name Johannes Leo Africanus. Acclaimed in the papal court for his learning, Leo would in time write his masterpiece, The Cosmography and the Geography of Africa.

The Cosmography was the first book about Africa, and the first book written by a modern African, to reach print. It would remain central to the European understanding of Africa for over 300 years, with its descriptions of lands, cities and peoples giving a singular vision of the vast continent: its urban bustle and rural desolation, its culture, commerce and warfare, its magical herbs and strange animals.

Yet it is not a mere catalogue of the exotic: Leo also invited his readers to acknowledge the similarity and relevance of these lands to the time and place they knew. For this reason, The Cosmography and Geography of Africa remains significant to our understanding not only of Africa, but of the world and how we perceive it.

You can buy the book here!