GUIDI, IGNAZIO - RITATTO.
[He] made contributions of great importance to Arab-Muslim studies by publishing and studying literary texts (Ibn Hisâmi commentarius..., 1871–74; Studi su... Calila e Dimna, 1873; Tables alphabétiques du Kitâb al-Agâni, 1900), grammatical and lexicographical works (Il Kitâb al-Istidrâk, 1890; Il libro dei verbi di Ibn al-Qûtiyya, 1894), historical works (Annales... at-Tabari, 1882–86), and juridical-religious works (an annotated translation of Halîl’s summary of mâlikite law, 1921), while also conducting historical research (Roma nei geografi arabi, 1877; L'Arabie antéislamique, 1921). Above all, however, he must be remembered for the imposing body of monographic studies on the principal Christian literatures of the East—Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, and Ethiopic—the last of which he was, in his writings and teaching, the greatest master of the modern age. Fully imbued, through faith and practice, with the Christian tradition, a profound connoisseur of Greek ecclesiastical literature, unequalled in detailed philological work and in the investigation of the genetic relationships among the various literatures, he offered programmatic examples of his method in the Testi orientali inediti sui Sette Dormienti di Efeso (1884–85), Le traduzioni dei Vangeli in arabo e in etiopico (1888), Gli Atti apocrifi degli Apostoli nei testi copti arabi ed etiopici (1888), and the Textes orientaux inédits du martyre de Judas Cyriaque (1904–1906). He published and studied an extraordinary number of texts: in Syriac, La lettera di Simeone di Beth Arsham, the statutes of the school of Nisibis, Chronica Minora, several homilies of Severus of Antioch, the index of the Acta martyrum et sanctorum of P. Bedjan, etc.; in Coptic, the life of Daniel of Scete, the apocryphal Testamenti dei patriarchi, etc.; in Ethiopic, besides a mass of minor historical, hagiographical, and liturgical texts, the great legislative collection Fetha Nagast, part of the Synaxarium, and several royal annals. On the civil and ecclesiastical history of Ethiopia he wrote a very large number of articles, including works intended for a wider readership, culminating in the brief but fundamental Storia della letteratura etiopica (1932). The founder of the scientific study of Ethiopia’s principal modern language, Amharic, G. promoted it not only through the grammar already mentioned and the edition of texts, but also through the great Vocabolario amarico-italiano (1901, photomechanical reproduction 1935, posthumous supplement 1940).
G. was co-director and contributor to the two great collections of texts of the Christian East, Corpus scriptorum christianorum orientalium and Patrologia Orientalis; with unparalleled generosity, for more than six decades he gave advice and assistance to innumerable enterprises and studies undertaken by others.
His son MICHELANGELO, born in Rome on 19 March 1886 and died there on 15 June 1946, professor of Muslim History and Institutions at the University of Rome, in addition to felicitous essays on various Oriental literatures, devoted the best of his intellectual gifts to Arabic and Islamic studies, with novel and profound insights inspired by a broad critical and Christian conception of history. His finest work is La religione dell'Islam (in Storia delle Religioni, directed by p. P. Tacchi Venturi, II, 3rd ed., Turin 1949).