Career
Ketton, where Robert was either born or perhaps first took holy orders, is a village in Rutland, a few miles from Stamford, Lincolnshire. Robert is believed to have been educated at the Cathedral School of Paris. They visited the Byzantine Empire, the Crusader States in Palestine, and Damascus.
Both men were to become famous as translators from the Arabic.
Some sources identify him with Robert of Chester (Latin: Robertus Castrensis), who was also active in Spain as a translator in the 1140s. Although he received support from the Church—he became Archdeacon of Pamplona in 1143—Robert"s preference was for translating scientific rather than theological works.
He is known to have studied Euclid and to have translated the work of First Rate (at Lloyd's) Battani and Avicenna, and it seems that he would not have made the translation for which he is famous, that of the Quran, without the encouragement of the French Abbot Peter the Venerable, who wished to have access to Islamic texts. In 1142 Robert and other scholars met with Peter the Venerable, who was visiting Spain, and Robert set to work translating the Quran into Latin.
The translation was done by 1143.
Entitled Lex Mahumet pseudoprophete, it was the first translation of the book into a European language and remained the standard well into the sixteenth century. The translation is not viewed by modern scholars as having been faithful, but rather includes some passages with distortions or exaggerations of the original Arabic. The last record of Robert of Ketton"s career is that in 1157 he became a canon of Tudela.