Missionizing is widely perceived as a form of oppressive power-relations: one side is active and hegemonic, while the other is either passive and submissive or entirely oppositional. This all-too-tidy understanding of the relationship between Christian missionaries and their religious others dovetails with the scholarly tendency to adopt a one-dimensional approach, focusing almost exclusively on Christian attitudes towards the objects of their missionary endeavours. Recent scholars of religion have begun to expose a more nuanced dynamic, revealing the impact of space and polycentricity on missionary Christianities and highlighting the role of missionary encounters in inter-cultural exchange, including, among other things, how missionizing affected knowledge transfer. The varied responses of the religious other in this relationship, beyond conversion, have yet to receive sufficient scholarly attention. [read more…]

Anja Wolkenhauer and Julia Heideklang invite: “Based on our research in context of the DFG project Versio Latina, we aim to decidedly change our perspective and to focus particularly on early modern Latin translations, looking, as Peter Burke once articulated ‚into the wrong direction‘ (Burke 2007). What are their functions? Who translated and for what kind of readership; which expectations were placed on these translations by translators, editors, and printer-publishers? Were they successful, reprinted, overruled by rival products, or was their efficiency augmented by being intermediary versions for translations into other languages? [read more…]

Fifth annual conference of SPP 2130