Early Modern Encounters between Africa and Europe in Leo Africanus’s The Cosmography and Geography of Africa (1526)

Abstract With al-Ḥasan ibn Muḥammad al-Wazzān al-Zayyātī (more commonly known as Leo Africanus) and his The Cosmography and Geography of Africa (1526) at its center, this article examines an early modern traveller and a text that journeyed across time, space, and multiple translations. Understanding both al-Wazzān and The Cosmography as mobile agents navigating often-clashing worlds, the article foregrounds early modern encounters between Africa and Europe as mediated, relational and always contested. By tracing the ambiguities, contradictions, and subversions within al-Wazzān’s text and its many translations, I attend to how the global circulation of such works shaped and intertwined early European and African imaginaries.