Robert Wilkinson, currently a research fellow at Wesley College in Bristol, U.K., completed his Ph.D. in history at the University of the West of England in 2004 after reading Oriental Studies at Cambridge. The present work and its companion volume, Kabbalistic Scholars of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (Leiden: Brill, 2007), flow directly from work on his dissertation, “Origins of Syriac Studies in the Sixteenth Century.” On one level, Orientalism is a specialist's study that provides and corrects important details in the forty-year history of the publication of the 1555 editio princeps of the New Testament in Syriac in Vienna. On another, however, it is a well-crafted and readable narrative of the introduction of Syriac studies into the circles of Roman intelligentsia between the Fifth Lateran Council and the middle stages of the Council of Trent. On yet a third level Wilkinson paints in broad strokes an intriguing picture of the reasons behind and the state of Semitic language study in mid-century Rome.

Though the subject has generated ample scholarship, with which Wilkinson maintains a steady and unobtrusive dialogue, the story of the publication of the Syriac New Testament is not widely known. It centers on a single manuscript brought by a small delegation of Maronite Christians to the Lateran Council at the invitation of Pope Leo X. This came into the hands of the perfect recipient, the lawyer and canon at St. John Lateran, Teseo Ambrogio, a pioneering linguistic and liturgical scholar who had produced a parallel edition of Eucharistic liturgies in Latin, Greek, Armenian, Ethiopic, and Syriac. Though tasked with publishing this text and a Syriac psalter, Tesio experienced delays and ended up losing the psalter manuscript during the battle of Pavia in 1527. In 1529, at the age of sixty, Tesio passed the text to the young German scholar Johann Widmanstetter, who was accompanying Charles Habsburg to his imperial coronation in Bologna. Tesio went on to publish the first Western study of Syriac and Armenian (Introductio, 1539) but died a year later. In 1555 Widmanstetter published the New Testament in Vienna with the aid of the relatively well-known French scholar Guillaume Postel, with whom Tesio had earlier studied Armenian in Venice.

On the eve of Luther's revolt many Catholic intellectuals had been linking the recent geographical “discoveries” by the Spanish and Portuguese with the beginning of the end times and the associated imperative to unite the Christian Church, east and west. This eschatological imperative fueled the efforts of men like Tesio to bridge the linguistic and ecclesiological gaps and to provide the printed Bibles and other texts in the many languages—including Syriac and related Semitic languages—needed to complete the conversion of the world. Wilkerson further links this impulse and the progress of the Syriac New Testament to another, parallel strand, the Roman intellectuals' interest in Jewish Kabbalah, which had been piqued by members of the Medici popes' entourages with roots in the syncretic interests of the Florentine Academy of Pico della Mirandola's day. For Tesio and others the Syriac language was related closely enough to Hebrew to shed important light on the esoteric intricacies of the Jewish texts. These, they believed, held further keys to understanding eschatological matters. Wilkinson introduces the reader to Egidio (Giles) of Viterbo, the cardinal, humanist, supporter of Reuchlin, and general of the Augustinian Order, as a major proponent of this movement, which died or scattered during the anti-Talmud activities of the Roman Inquisition beginning in 1553. With support from the esoterically inclined Ferdinand I, however, Widmanstetter and Postel, at the time a professor of Arabic at Vienna's University, published the work two years later as the first Oriental-language text printed in Vienna.

This short overview suggests the ways in which Wilkinson's story is interwoven with the events, personalities, and trends of mid-sixteenth-century Catholic intellectual and religious history. For the non-specialist with knowledge of the period, the story provides new and insightful narrative layers that interlink major phenomena and personalities. Wilkerson chose to organize his chapters by focusing each on one of the key players, which allows him to develop each person's thread, but necessitates foreshadowing and backfilling that disturb the narrative flow. For the specialist, Wilkerson explains important links between the era's kabbalistic interests and the study of Syriac in Rome, a linkage that came naturally to Renaissance scholars but has been missed by historians. He also places Postel, excluded from Widmanstetter's dedication, in his rightful place as associate in the project, a role generally denied him by history. In addition, Wilkerson delineates the otherwise unacknowledged patronal role of Marcello Cardinal Cervini, the briefly serving Pope Marcellus II.

Marring this edition is a series of proper noun variations that may lead to confusion and should have been caught during proofreading—for example, Padua for Pavia, Padova/Padua, Striedl/Streidl, de la Forêt/de la Forest, Giorgio/Georgio—a reminder of the care that should go into a fine scholarly publication.