DIEU, Lodewijk de and TAWUS, Jacob.

First edition of this Persian grammar printed with the first two books of Genesis in Persian, followed by two parallel Latin-Persian texts, apparently issued together (though often treated as separate works). The Genesis extracts are the first printed translation of any part of the Bible into Persian using Persian script, and this is only the second ever book printed in Persian.

Dieu’s grammar, written in Latin but with occasional examples given in Dutch, begins with the Persian alphabet, noting in particular those letters that are easily confused with one another, as well as the similarities and differences between Persian and Arabic orthography, noting pronunciation. The second book discusses verbs, third cases, tenses and adjectives, names, numbers and pronouns, while the fourth discusses adverbs, negations, demonstratives, interrogatives, prepositions, conjugations and interjections. The translator of the Genesis extracts was Jacob Tawus, a Persian translator who worked in Constantinople in the sixteenth century; his biblical translations had been printed in the Polyglot Bible published in Constantinople in 1546, but transliterated into Hebrew letters.

The second part is a life of St. Peter derived from a ‘contaminated’ source, while the final work, an equally corrupted account of the life of Christ, uses the Latin translation from a Persian text by Jeronimo Xavier, grand-nephew of Francis Xavier, who assisted in the foundation of the Jesuits. Jeronimo was a missionary in the Mughal courts in the first years of the C17th, where he learned Persian and spent time translating Persian texts. To both works, Dieu provides an extensive textual commentary, which criticises the accuracy of the text and in the latter case, Jeronimo’s translation. With the second part are included two letters sent from Lahore in 1598, the first containing Jeronimo’s brief history of the Mughals, the second an account by a fellow Jesuit of Jeronimo’s describing the conversion of Muslims there to Christianity.

‘The history of early Persian printing with moveable type is inextricably intertwined with the development of Arabic types. Apart from the matter of stylistic preferences, a sixteenth-century Arabic type could be used to print Persian books merely by the addition of three dots to the existing (non-dotted) letterforms. For this reason, the gap of over a century between the publication of the first Arabic and the first Persian books cannot be due only to the lack of available printing types. It is better explained by … the role of Arabic as the prime language of Islam’ (Borna Izadpanah, ‘Early Persian Printing and Typefounding in Europe’ in Journal of the Printing Historical Society, 29 (2018), p. 89). Early efforts by Giovanni Battista Raimondi (1536-1614) at the Medici Oriental Press in Rome were never published. In 1633 (often erroneously dated earlier) the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide brought out a small – and very scarce – Persian grammar, Alphabetum Persicum, making Dieu’s only the second book to be printed using Persian type.

William Aspin was admitted a pensioner at Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1652 and gained his DD in 1683. He was rector of Emberton in Buckinghamshire until his death in 1714.