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BOOKS

        Penguin Books India is bringing out a book which would be a reconstruction of the life of the great Renaissance geographer al-Hasan al-Wazzan, also known as Leo Africanus by historian Natalie Zemon Davis.

        Trickster Travels, in search of Leo Africanus - A sixteenth century Muslim between Worlds is published by Faber and Faber and distributed by Penguin Books India.

        The man whom historians know as Leo Africanus, author of the first geography of Africa is a celebrated but hitherto an elusive figure.

        He was captured by Christian pirates in the Mediterranean in 1518 and imprisoned by the Pope then released, baptised and allowed an European life of scholarship at the Christian writer Giovanni Leone.

        In Trickster Travels, the distinguished historian Natalie Zemon Davis offers a virtuoso study of the fragmentary partial and often contradictor traces that al- Hasan al-Wazzan left behind him.

        Davis describes this dramatic life in rich detail, scrutinising the evidence of al-Wazzan's movement between cultural worlds, the Islamic and Arab traditions and ideas available to him and his adventures with Christians and Jews in a European community of learned men, powerful church leaders and among its ordinary street life.