Leone Caetani (September 12, 1869 – December 25, 1935), Duke of Sermoneta (also known as Prince Caetani), was an Italian scholar, politician, and historian of the Middle East.
Caetani is considered a pioneer in the application of the historical method to sources of the early Islamic traditions, which he subjected to minute historical and psychological analysis.[1]
He was the father of Italian-Canadian visual artist Sveva Caetani.
^From Babel to the dragomans Bernard LewisThen came a second phase, when the great nineteenth-century scholars began to apply critical method, treating Muslim historians in the same way they had treated Greek, Latin, and their own historians, trying to detect biases, distortions, variant versions and so on. Here I am thinking particularly of the work of such founding fathers of our discipline as de Goeje, Wellhausen, Caetani and others.