This project focuses on the politics of worship, understood as and developed through the vernacularization and dissemination of devotional texts, both biblical and issuing from religious and lay communities, produced to shape individual and collective, local and national identities in Italy and the British Isles in the Early Modern period.
Early modern England and Scotland are known to have been steeped in religious culture: the Anglican Schism and the Scottish Reformation had, if possible, increased the intensity of religious fervour and caused theological disputes and devotional practices to shape the lives of individuals and entire communities alike. While the late Middle Ages had been marked by religious controversies and dissent centered on the reading and translation of the Bible, a decade before Elizabeth’s accession, under the direction of Archbishop Cranmer and of King Edward VI’s Protectors Somerset and Northumberland, the Book of Common Prayer had been compiled and drastic changes brought about in the liturgy: as of August 1547, it was ordered that the ‘Epistles’ and ‘Gospels’ from the Great Bible be read in English at high Mass; in 1548, an English Communion was introduced and all Latin service books were replaced by a single book, entirely in English. In stages, a new devotional koinè was inaugurated, as reformers aimed at subsuming private devotion within the liturgy of the church.
In combination with the Bible, parts of which are considered as the first prayer books used by religious communities, mostly within a context of Reformation, a proliferation of devotional texts contributed to the development of a religious unity, on a public and private level, connecting lay piety to civic identity. Considering this context, the intellectual exchange and the clash between Catholicism, Anglicanism and Protestantism, this research group will examine the political role played by the process of vernacularization and diffusion of devotional discourse from a comparative, literary and historical-linguistic perspective: a network of case studies will be investigated, examining translation, adaptation and re-creation as forms of approach to and manipulation of the biblical text in Italy and in the British Isles, and migrations of such forms from one country to another.
The project is also concerned with gauging the linguistic and cultural awareness that emerges in discussions on biblical intralingual and interlingual (re)translation as an act of ideological dissemination intended to affirm or challenge religious, political and cultural discourses. Instances in which Biblical translation transmutes into creative poetic writing will be explored, as is the case with psalters in general, and the Book of Psalms in particular, a fundamental text for both Judaism and Christianity, a site of theological, political, artistic, and poetic engagement in late medieval and early modern culture, and the most frequently transcribed and translated biblical book.