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Translating Christianity in an Age of Reformations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2017
Abstract
This article argues that the age of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and the global spread of the latter brought with it the challenge that not only was it necessary to learn new languages in order to communicate the Christian message to non-European peoples encountered during the so-called ‘Age of Discovery’, but some kind of control had to be exercised over the new, global circulation of sacred images and relics. The latter facilitated the visual (and virtual) translation of such holy sites as Jerusalem and Rome and its specific holy treasures in the mental prayers of the faithful. It concludes that it was less Lamin Sanneh's ‘triumph of [linguistic] translatability’ and more the physical translatability of the sacred that made possible the emergence of Roman Catholicism as this planet's first world religion.
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References
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52 Ibid., unfoliated (emphasis added).
53 Martin, Roma sancta, 27.
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65 ‘Firstly, we must also acquire some use of the language, or, if not, preach through a faithful interpreter, if there is such a thing’. All subsequent references are to José de Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute, ed. and transl. G. Stewart McIntosh, 2 vols (Tayport, 1996), 1: 92 (bk 2, ch. 17); cf. ibid. 29–30 (bk 1, ch. 9): ‘Fear of the difficulty of the language ought not to hinder the propagation of the gospel’.
66 Ibid. 2: 18 (bk 4, ch. 7); cf. ibid. 2: 137–8 (bk 6, ch. 13): ‘Skill in the Indian language is needed to hear confession’.
67 Cf. Rubén Vargas Ugarte, Concilios Limensis 1551–1772, 3 vols (Lima, 1951–4), 1: 310 (actio 5, cap. 3).
68 Acosta, De procuranda, ed. and transl. McIntosh, 2: 21 (bk 4, ch. 8). Acosta actually wrote: ‘The Incas, with the wisest of laws (consultissima lege perfici) were able to achieve that [a general language] in all the scattered provinces of their kingdom’. For the original text, see Acosta, De natura novi orbis libri duo et de promulgatione evangelii apud Barbaros (Cologne, 1596), 378. For the wider picture, see now the special issue: ‘Langues indiennes et empire dans l'Amérique du Sud colonial / Lenguas indígenas e imperio en la América del Sur colonial’, Mėlanges de la Casa de Velázquez n.s. 45/1 (2015), 9–151.
69 Acosta, De procuranda, ed. and transl. McIntosh, 2: 21–2 (bk 4, ch. 8); cf. idem, De natura novi orbis libri duo et de promulgatione Evangelii apud barbaros, sive de procuranda indorum salute, (Salamanca, 1588), 379. Notwithstanding such an endorsement, the Jesuits stopped admitting mestizos as early as 1576, the very year when Acosta finished De procuranda, and the 1582 provincial congregation voted for a definitive ban: cf. A. Durston, Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550–1650 (Notre Dame, IN, 2007), 83.
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71 Ibid. 132.
72 Ibid. 136–7. Recent work on the Christianization of Central America emphasizes the role of indigenous scribes, authors and consumers in the creative adaptation of catechisms and confession manuals: see in particular Christensen, Mark Z., Nahua and Maya Catholicisms: texts and Religion in Colonial Central Mexico and Yucatan (Stanford, CA, 2013)Google Scholar; idem, Translated Christianities: Nahua and Maya Religious Texts (University Park, PA, 2014).
73 ‘Iam vero in illa sua veluti inculta barbarie adeo pulchros, adeo elegantes idiomatismos habet formulasque dicendi mirabili brevitate multa complexas ut delectet vehementer quorum unius vocis vim si Latinus, Hispanus exprimere velit, pluribus ipse vix possit’: Acosta, De natura novi orbis libri duo. . . et de procuranda indorum salute, 382–3.
74 Acosta, De procuranda, ed. and transl. McIntosh, 2: 25 (bk 4, ch. 9); cf. the challenge facing Jesuit missionaries working among the Iroquois who were trying to communicate ideas of the Christian soul and spirit, as discussed in the introduction to Steckley, J. M., ed. and transl., De Religione: Telling the Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Story in Huron to the Iroquois (Norman OH, 2004)Google Scholar, in particular 24–45.
75 Rubiés, Joan-Pau, ‘Real and Imaginary Dialogues in the Jesuit Mission of Sixteenth-Century Japan’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 55 (2012), 447–94;CrossRefGoogle Scholar cf., in this volume, idem, ‘Ethnography and Cultural Translation in the Early Modern Missions’, 272–310, at 304. See also Cooper, M., Rodriguez the Interpreter: An Early Jesuit in Japan and China (New York and Tokyo, 1974), 284–5.Google Scholar
76 Acosta, De procuranda, ed. and transl. McIntosh, 2: 24–5 (bk 4, ch. 9). The word Acosta used was stridentes, which might literally be translated as ‘rattling’: Acosta, De natura novi orbis, 383.
77 ‘Saepe et audacter errandum, ut aliquando non erretur’: ibid. 2: 25 (bk 4, ch. 9); cf. Acosta, De natura novi orbis libri duo. . . et de procuranda indorum salute, 384.
78 Acosta, De procuranda, ed. and transl. McIntosh, 2: 26 (bk 4, ch. 9); cf. a letter dated Vembar, 31 October 1548, from the Jesuit missionary and author of the first Tamil grammar, Arte da Lingua Malabar (1549), Henrique Henriques, to Ignatius Loyola and his companions, which explains how since he was without an interpreter he relied on a member of his Tamil congregation to repeat his sermon, which he had just attempted to deliver in the local language, so that its content was better understood: ‘digo las palabras en la misma lengua Malavar, y hago que las torne a dezir otro, que es como topaz [sic], para que todos las entendien mejor’: Wicki, J., ed., Documenta Indica (1540–97), 18 vols (Rome, 1948–88)Google Scholar, 1: 276–300, at 286–7 (letter 45).
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84 Gauvin Bailey, ‘Translation and Metamorphosis in the Catholic Ivories of China, Japan and the Philippines, 1561–1800’, in idem, Massing, J.-M. and Vassallo e Silva, N., Marfins no Império Português / Ivories in the Portuguese Empire (Lisbon, 2013)Google Scholar, 243–82; the illustration of St Jerome is on page 298.
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