Translating Inspired Language, Transforming Sacred Texts: An Introduction

In late medieval-early modern Iberia, translations of sacred texts often involved changes beyond those concerning linguistic and cultural frameworks. The sacred nature of the source text turned it into a potentially powerful tool for a variety of purposes. Translations were used to advance didactic and cultural policies and to disseminate political and religious propaganda. They became building blocks for communal identities under fatal threat. When need be, they could be manipulated both as weapons of self-defense or of belligerent attack against rival religiosities and institutions that harbored them. The power generated by the divine authority that spoke through sacred texts also made their translations and their translators, targets of suspicion and victims of strict control, and at times, destruction. The five articles that I introduce represent a wide spectrum of these possibilities as they examine translation projects of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim sacred texts and the transformations they catalyzed.