Translating the Sacred (original) (raw)

3The sacred did not travel or translate easily in early modernity.4 Sacrality relied on a communal agreement that was deemed holy, and such agreements inevitably engendered friction. Words, images, objects, and bodies that conveyed the sacred took on varied and sometimes unpredictable resonances as they were shared between people and as they moved across space, place, and time. Who and what, as in the case of the corporal remains of a saint’s relic, could authoritatively proffer the “voice of God,” and how, and in what form, the sacred should be expressed preoccupied artistic patrons, as did incommensurable modes of belief.5 The translation of scripture into new languages had already long concerned Catholics, from Jerome’s vulgate Bible to vernacular prayer books printed by Protestant Reformers, well before the papal institution of the Propaganda Fide in 1622 and its mandate to promulgate the faith universally through polyglot publications. Over the course of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, Jesuit, Mendicant, and Puritan evangelists founded orders and missionary companies across Africa, the Americas, and Asia that employed variegated strategies of religious conversion, using pedagogy as well as punishment to convince and coerce nonbelievers.6Such evangelism not only coincided with, but was often constitutive of, the colonial expansion of European empires.