Ramon Llull – vir phantasticus (crazy man); doctor illuminatus (enlightened doctor); arabicus christianus (Arabic Christian); philosophus barbatus (bearded philosopher); “founder of Catalan prose and one of Catalonia’s greatest medieval writers” (Bonner in Llull, Doctor 45); “author of a vast number of works – 265 according to the latest catalogue of works – on countless subjects and in numerous literary forms” (45); “the first European to write prose novels on contemporary themes” (1); author of the million-word Book of Contemplation (written first in Arabic – all of Llull’s Arabic writings have been lost or were destroyed – then in Catalan) – was able “to elaborate a theory of the universe which, of all medieval theories, came closest to a general hypothesis which should explain all observable phenomena” (Hillgarth 17). Furthermore, Llull, who is also recognized as one of the founders of the European study of Near Eastern languages, established in 1276 an Arabic language school in Miramar on Majorca, and in 1311 he successfully petitioned the Church Council of Vienne to establish chairs of Arabic at the Universities of Paris, Louvain, and Salamanca.

If Llull is less known today than he perhaps ought to be, this fall into relative obscurity is a rather recent phenomenon. As Peers remarked concerning Llull’s fame through the eighteenth century, “there really were those who could take seriously the refrain: ‘Tres sabios hubo en el mundo, / Adán, Salomón y Raymundo’ [There have been three wise men in the world / Adam, Solomon, and Ramon], and there were even those who could quote the notorious remark, attributed to one Père Rossell, that the Old Testament was the work of God the Father, the New Testament of God the Son, and the writings of Ramon of God the Holy Spirit” (402).