Dr Giovanni Maria Martini

Giovanni Maria Martini’s (PhD, Un. “L’Orientale” Naples, 2014) main research area is Islamicate intellectual history with a special focus on Sufism, Occult Sciences and their intersection with Qurʾanic disciplines. In 2015 he took up the post of PostDoc at the University of Oxford for the ERC Project IMPAcT, From Late Medieval to Early Modern: 13th to 16th Century Islamic Philosophy And Theology. He was subsequently a PostDoc at the Alexander von Humboldt Kolleg for Islamicate Intellectual History, at the University of Bonn. In 2018 he was awarded a two-year individual research grant by the Gerda Henkel Foundation to work on a project entitled Shīrīn Maghribī: A Key Agent in the Transmission of Mystical Knowledge in 14th to 17th Century Sufi Networks. As part of the EuQu Project in Naples Martini will follow two lines of research: first investigating Athanasius Kircher’s (d.1680) knowledge of Islamic sources and his reflections on the central role of the Qurʾan in the definition of 'Islamic magic' according to his work entitled De Cabala Saracenica (Rome 1653), and secondly preparing a study on Gustav L. Flügel’s (d.1870) very influential edition of the Qurʾan (Corani Textus Arabicus, Leipzig 1834) which after its release served as the reference edition text of the Qurʾan for many western scholars and translators for over a century.