A tool for the mobility of texts, persons, and ideas: the Vocabulista in Arabico

In the framework of mobility studies, the mobility of texts plays a key role: texts are conveyed by books and books travel with people in time and space, circulating ideas, notions, words, names and expressions. Among the texts, vocabularies, dictionaries and lexicons offer an excellent point of view for studying the process and dynamics of mobility. Since different languages and cultures are involved, dictionaries are tools for the mobility of ideas and people, linked as they are to teaching, learning, studying, researching, translating and preaching. Our contribution aims to reconstruct the history of the studies that concern the Vocabulista in Arabico, an Arabic–Latin–Arabic dictionary composed between the 12th and 13th centuries and attributed by some historians to the preacher friar Raimondo Martí, who was in charge of learning Arabic in Tunis around 1269 for the conversion of the Muslims.