方法论 Translating - Catechisms - Translating - Cultu

Translating Catechisms, Translating Cultures
An Introduction
Antje Flüchter
In the light of the current political debate regarding refugees from the Middle
East in the European Union, Christianity is being more discussed and is
claimed as being a European characteristic and a European value than it has
been in recent decades.1 The term ‘Christian occident’ has become a discursive
weapon and an important cornerstone for constructing European identity.2
This is even more astonishing because, from its very beginning, Christendom
was a global, and certainly not a European, religion. Founded in the Middle
East, Christianity spread to the East as well as to the West.3 Therefore, against
the backdrop of claims of a homogenised, and specifically European or
Western, Christianity, it is more than relevant to historicise Christianity and its
Europeanness and to analyse Christian diversity as it is the aim of this book.
Using the example of early modern evangelisation, we want to unearth the
transcultural dimensions of Christianity, which were (and still are) often con-
cealed under the narratives of cultural and religious purity, but are nevertheless
* I am very grateful to Rouven Wirbser for his comments on this paper and for his constructive
criticism. I also want to thank Anna Dönecke for being such a great help in the edition of this
volume.
1 Bernd Wagner, for example, describes the ethnising charging of Christianity in recent years,
referring to Arne Breivig in Norway, Heinz Christian Stracher in Austria, and most of all
PEGIDA in Germany as well as to the German Defence Leage. Christendom thus became
again a central category in the process of constructing Europeanness or Germandom Bernd
Wagner, “Beobachtungen zum Rechtsradikalismus und ‘Volkstumsidentitäten’,” Journal Exit-
Deutschland: Zeitschrift für Deradikalisierung und demokratische Kultur 2 (2016): most of all:
82–6, 104–5. Cf. also Wolfgang Knöbl, Matthias Koenig, and Willfried Spohn, “Europäisierung,
multiple Modernitäten und kollektive Identitäten – Religion, Nation und Ethnizität in einem
erweiterten Europa,” Forschungsprojekt. Hannover: VolkswagenStiftung (2008): [https://www.
uni-goettingen.de/de/97415.html, 20.2.2016].
2 Cf. the attempts to arianise Jesus in the 19th and 20th century which may still be relevant,
cf. Wolfgang Fenske, Wie Jesus zum “Arier” wurde: Auswirkungen der Entjudaisierung Christi
im 19. und zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
2005). Simon Ditchfield traced such an ethnicisation and territorialisation even back to
Gregory VII (1073–85), Simon Ditchfield, “Decentering the Catholic Reformation: Papacy and
Peoples in the Early Modern World,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 101 (2010): 187.
3 It is part of the Western master narrative of a European Christianity to forget all the Eastern
variations of Christianity, cf. about the many Eastern Christianities: Ibid.
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4 Flüchter
fundamental for understanding the past and contemporary religions and the
identities of their communities. We will explore this claim by using the exam-
ple of the early modern global Jesuit endeavour, with a focus on the catechisms
they used, translated or wrote, which will be analysed in a conceptual framing
of translation.
Global Catholicism – Between Uniformity and Diversity
Being a proselytising religion, Christianity was from the beginning exposed to

numerous cultural encounters, and these hugely increased in the context of
European expansion. Therefore, it can be assumed that these encounters led
to numerous negotiations of religious differences. Conversely, the exposure
did not fundamentally challenge the Western master narrative of the homoge-
neity and Europeanness of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church always
claimed to be a universal church, but – at least until recently – this claim must
be differentiated from the globally acting and living church.4 For a long time,
the evangelisation endeavour was understood as a simple transfer, that is,
Christendom, its theology and rituals etc. were just transported from Europe to
the world, without any change during this process.5
This conception of Catholicism was so important and influential because
the master narrative of Catholic (and not only Catholic) purity was, and is,
central for the Catholic self-image and identity. Purity and the concept of ortho-
doxy were crucial for Christianity more or less from the beginning. Therefore,
Christian history can be told as a process of defining the Christian dogma in an
increasingly concrete manner, thus striving to diminish all types of ambiguity.6
This urge to erase ambiguity increased after the reformation and in the context
4 Cf. about the difference between global and universal Luke Clossey, Salvation and
Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 9.
5 This refers to the traditional ‘transfer’ concept; in contrast, most of the recent research on
transfer stresses, that everything transferred is also changed in this process, cf. Matthias
Middell, “Kulturtransfer und historische Komparatistik – Thesen zu ihrem Verhältnis,”
Comparativ 10 (2000): 7–41; Michel Espagne, “Jenseits der Komparatistik: Zur Methode der
Erforschung von Kulturtransfer,” in Europäische Kulturzeitschriften um 1900 als Medien trans-
nationaler und transdisziplinärer Wahrnehmung, ed. Ulrich Mölk (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 2006), 13–32.
6 This starts with the formulation of central dogmatic texts like De doctrina Christiana by
Augustine of Hippo (354–430). The early time attempts to create a cannon of orthodox
biblical text can be understand as a “forging of orthodoxy,” cf. Mark Vessey, “The Forging of
Orthodoxy in Latin Christian Literature: A Case Study,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4,

Translating Catechisms, Translating Cultures 5
of religious division into several denominations, each claiming to be the true

Christian church, and each making considerable effort to unify the practices
and the beliefs of its members, thereby creating a pure, confessionalised com-
munity. Compared to the Medieval Latin church, confessionalised churches
relied far more on the fact that all their members – and not only the office
holders and clerics – knew about the specific denominational orthodoxy, and
could distinguish their own orthodoxy from other heretic Christian groups.7
On the Catholic side, this homogenisation obtained its doctrinal fundament
via the Council of Trent (1545–63), and according to the post-Tridentine doc-
trine numerous efforts followed there to unify both the belief system and the
religious practices. New institutions and procedures were established across
Catholic Europe and also in the Catholic mission areas overseas.8 As these insti-
tutions began with the idea of a homogenised and uniformed post-Tridentine
church, these institutions could only spread a Tridentine homogenised
Catholicism in the world. The guidelines of orthodoxy came from Europe, and
were developed as a result of European problems and, first and foremost, for
European Christians; therefore this orthodoxy was consequently European.
Such conceptions of both a homogenised confessional and a primarily
European Catholic Church have been contested in recent research, which has
questioned the homogenising effect of the Council of Trent.9 For example, it
no. 4 (1996): 495–513. Even more the purification process is obvious in the fights with and
against medieval heresies.
7 This perspective is most obvious in the concept of confessionalisation as it was developed
in the 1980ies by Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling: Wolfgang Reinhard, “Pressures
Towards Confessionalization? Prologomena to a Theory of the Confessional Age,” in
The German Reformation: The Essential Readings, ed. C. Scott Dixon (Oxford: Wiley, 1999),
172–92; Heinz Schilling, “Die Konfessionalisierung im Reich: Religiöser und gesellschaftlicher
Wandel in Deutschland zwischen 1555 und 1620,” Historische Zeitschrift 246 (1988): 1–45; Ute
Lotz-Heumann, “Confessionalization,” in Reformation and Early Modern Europe: A Guide to
Research, ed. David M. Whitford (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2008), 136–69.
8 Central for these efforts is the foundation of the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide,
cf. Josef Metzler, “Foundation of the Congregation ‘De Propaganda Fide’ by Gregory XV,” in
Sacrae congregationis de propaganda fide memoria rerum: 350 anni a servizio delle missioni;
350 Jahre im Dienste der Weltmission (1622–1972), ed. Josef Metzler (Rom: Herder, 1971–72),
79–112. The influence of papal institutions in non-European world regions was at least dis-
puted, the colonial powers Spain and Portugal claimed their own spiritual rule, cf. about such
conflicts: Pius Malekandathil, “Cross, Sword and Conflicts: A Study of the Political Meanings
of the Struggle between the Padroado Real and the Propaganda Fide,” Studies in History 27,
no. 2 (2011): 251–67.
9 Cf. Simon Ditchfield, “Tridentine Catholicism,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to the
Counter-Reformation, ed. Alexandra Bamji, Geert H. Janssen, and Mary Laven (Farnham:

6 Flüchter
has been doubted whether the Tridentine decrees could be implemented on

a wider scale and beyond areas where people such as Carlo Borromeo (1538–
84), archbishop of Milan, put all their will and power into realising the spirit
of reform.10 Mark Forster showed that the rural population in the bishopric of
Speyer quite efficiently resisted all efforts at regularisation and homogenisation.11
If the implementation of the post-Tridentine aim of homogenisation was
already difficult in Catholic Europe, we must further query the degree of ho-
mogenisation regarding early modern global Roman Catholicism.12
Moreover, there has been decreasing interest in the development of homog-
enous confessionalised cultures in Western Europe, which was for decades
the main focus of research following the confessionalisation concept. Anglo-
American historiography has long called the idea of genuinely homogenised
confessionalised cultures and identities into question, and German historians
have also recently followed suit.13 This idea has been replaced by concepts stat-
ing that that confessional identity is rather produced in local and situational
interactions. Current research now focuses on transreligious phenomena,
interreligious interactions and religious ambiguity.14 This new perspective
Ashgate, 2013), 15–31; John W. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge,
Mass.; London: Belknap, 2013); O’Malley, “The Council of Trent: Myths, Misunderstandings,
and Misinformation,” in Spirit, Style, Story: Essays Honoring John W. Padberg, SJ, ed.
Thomas A. Lucas (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2002), 205–26.
10 Simon Ditchfield, “Carlo Borromeo in the Construction of Roman Catholicism as a World
Religion,” Studia Borromaica 25, no. 25 (2011): 3–23; Wietse de Boer, The Conquest of the
Soul: Confessions, Discipline, and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (Leiden: Brill,
2001); John M. Headley and John B. Tomaro, eds., San Carlo Borromeo: Catholic Reform
and Ecclesiastical Politics in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century (Washington: Folger
Shakespeare Library, 1988).
11 Marc R. Forster, The Counter-Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the
Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
12 Simon Ditchfield raised this question quite explicitly: Ditchfield, “Tridentine Catholi-
cism,” 20.
13 Cf. the criticism regarding the confessionalisation concept: Mary Laven, “Introduction,”
in The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation, ed. Alexandra Bamji,
Geert H. Janssen, and Laven (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 3–4; Thomas Max Safley,
“Multiconfessionalism: A Brief Introduction,” in A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in
the Early Modern World, ed. Safley (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 12.
14 Kaspar von Greyerz et al., eds., Interkonfessionalität – Transkonfessionalität – Binnen-
konfessionelle Pluralität: Neue Forschungen zur Konfessionsthese (Gütersloh: Gütersloher
Verlagshaus, 2003); Andreas Pietsch and Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, eds., Konfessionelle
Ambiguität: Uneindeutigkeit und Verstellung als religiöse Praxis in der Frühen Neuzeit
(Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2013); Safley, “Multiconfessionalism.”

follows the general trend towards distrust of all types of static and homog-
enous entities and fixed (cultural) boundaries, which led to the transcultural
perspective that is central to the aim of this volume. Consequently, the focus
shifted instead to processes of blending, and the discussion of identity, as well
as cultural difference, and this trend merged with another: Since the late 20th
century, a too simplistic understanding of power, and consequently a sim-
plistic implementation and enforcement of new rules and norms, has been
scrutinised. In parallel with the questioning of state-building in the traditional
top-down sense,15 the confessionalisation process, initiated and ordered by
the authorities, was also questioned. It was asked how common people under-
stood the confessionalised messages from above, and how they changed and
appropriated them, thus it was claimed that an independent confessionalisa-
tion from below was most relevant.16
These new(er) approaches led to numerous high-quality regional, and
often micro-historical, studies of 16th century Catholic culture. However, de-
spite, or maybe because of, these (very) detailed studies, the larger picture is
blurred.17 Although most historians nowadays are understandably wary of all
kinds of grand narratives, it appears that some more general lines of explana-
tion are necessary after decades of deconstruction. The need for new, more
general, results comes together with the demand that European and non-
European history must be studied as one, or at least that the interconnections
and the interdependences between all world regions must be considered, a
claim that now also holds true for the history of Christianity. For example,
15 Cf. André Holenstein, “Empowering Interactions: Looking at Statebuilding from Below,”

in Empowering Interactions: Political Cultures and the Emergence of the State in Europe,
1300–1900, ed. Holenstein et al. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 1–31; for a transcultural con-
text: Antje Flüchter, “Structures on the Move: Appropriating Technologies of Governance
in a Transcultural Encounter,” in Structures on the Move: Technologies of Governance in
Transcultural Encounter, ed. Flüchter and Susan Richter (Berlin; Heidelberg: Springer,
2012), 1–27.
16 Most influential in German historiography were Peter Blickle and his students: Peter
Blickle, Gemeindereformation: Der Mensch des 16. Jahrhunderts auf dem Weg zum Heil
(München: Oldenbourg, 1985); Heinrich R. Schmidt, Dorf und Religion: Reformierte
Sittenzucht in Berner Landgemeinden der Frühen Neuzeit (Stuttgart; New York:
G. Fischer, 1995); Heinrich R. Schmidt, “Sozialdisziplinierung? Ein Plädoyer für das Ende
des Etatismus in der Konfessionalisierungsforschung,” Historische Zeitschrift 265 (1997):
639–82.
17 Cf. to this phenomenon regarding the Atlantic world and with many bibliographic ref-
erences: Megan Armstrong, “Transatlantic Catholicism: Rethinking the Nature of the
Catholic Tradition in the Early Modern Period,” History Compass 5 (2007): 1942–66.

8 Flüchter
Simon Ditchfield demanded that early modern Catholicism, its belief system
and its practices should be examined in a “truly global perspective.”18 Luke
Clossey’s book describing the early Jesuit mission from a global perspective
served as a milestone in this respect.19 However, the important question arises
as to how such a global perspective can be achieved, without just scratching
the surface and without dilettantism, because no scholar has a globally pro-
found expertise.
The requirement – and this book is certainly not the only one in making this
claim – offers a more glocal or translocal perspective towards the history of
Christianity. We need a combination of global and local perspectives: The glob-
al connections in the Catholic Church have to be joined with with local com-
munities an actors, the universal claim with local interaction, the processes of
theological and canonical discussion and appropriation at the fore withe the
attempts to impose and implement them. Whereas theologians and the cen-
tral institutions attempted to shape and stabilise religious homogeneity, par-
ticularly in the confessional age, local religious practice was far more diverse
and transcultural, even more so in the non-European missionary context.20
We assume that there was not only far more multiconfessionalism or multi-
religiousness but that religious communities were always changing and that
a highly relevant factor in their dynamics was the mingling with other groups.
Consequently, the changing has always been accompanied by (dynamic)
transcultural elements and dimensions.21 Rather than another reproduction
of the “fundamentally Eurocentric cultural geography of Christian expansion,”
a morphology of the transcultural dimension of early modern Catholicism is
required.22 A global perspective on the history of Christianity and Catholicism
is not new; however, such claims have remained primarily claims, and have
18 Ditchfield, “Decentering,” 187.

19 In the introduction Luke Clossey discusses many recent books about the history of
Christianity and why they do not really use a truly global perspective as he wants to intro-
duce: Clossey, Salvation, 2–5.
20 The difference between a homogenisation in the Catholic centre and increasing het-
erogeneity in the catholic contact zone is a point Christian Windler made convincingly,
Christian Windler, “Uneindeutige Zugehörigkeiten: Katholische Missionare und die Kurie
im Umgang mit Communicatio in Sacris,” in Konfessionelle Ambiguität: Uneindeutigkeit
und Verstellung als religiöse Praxis in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Andreas Pietsch and Barbara
Stollberg-Rilinger (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2013), 314–45.
21 Cf. about our concept of transculturality later on in the introduction, 15ff.
22 Ditchfield, “Decentering,” 187.

barely been tested in empirical studies.23 Such a global, or glocal, perspective

cannot be pursued by an individual scholar, but must be conducted via the
cooperation of experts in different areas and fields. The comparison of Jesuit
missionary activities, most of all their catechisms, as is presented in this vol-
ume, appears to be a good starting point for such a cooperation.
To demand a glocal perspective implies a turning away from the concept of
evangelisation as a one-way street. Rather than focusing only on the transfer
from Western Europe to the world, we must also consider and analyse the cir-
culation between non-European regions of the world, as well as the repercus-
sions from the periphery to the centre;24 the global mission and inner mission
must be analysed as connected. Such insights are not new; as long ago as the
1980s, Marc Vernard as well as Adriano Prosperi demanded that the history of
European and non-European Christianity must be analysed in such a manner,25
and many early modern Jesuits compared their work in Europe with the glob-
al spread of Christianity.26 At first, we considered the transfer of evangelisa-
tion conceptions and strategies, that is, whether experience gained in South
America or Asia should be used in attempts to regain Protestant European
23 Cf. for example Megan Armstrong demanded a more interconnected perspective regard-
ing the history of Christianity and evangelisation regarding the Atlantic world, but she
could only start with a summary of important insights concerning the regions building
the Atlantic world but not the interaction itself, Armstrong, “Transatlantic Catholicism.”
24 The terms centre and periphery were often and justly criticised. However, it seems appro-
priate to understand Rome and the Curia as centre of Catholic orthodoxy in the context
of this volume. Certainly these places could not rule the Catholic world in a quasi absolut-
ist way, starting with the problem how long it took to communicate, however, they raised
the claim to be the dogmatic centre and this claim was (mostly) acknowledged, at least in
theory.
25 Marc Venard, “ ‘Vos Indes sont ici’ : missions lointaines ou/et missions intérieures dans
le catholicisme Français de la premièremoité du XVIIe siècle,” in Les réveils missionaires
en France: du Moyen-âge à nos jours (XIIe–XXe siècles); Actes Du Colloque De Lyon, 29–31
Mai 1980 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984), 83–9; Adriano Prosperi, “The Missionary,” in Baroque
Personae, ed. Rosario Villari (Chicago; London: University of Chicago, 1995), 160–94.
26 Cf. about the Holy Roman Empire: Thomas P. Becker, “ ‘Kein geringeres Verdienst vor Gott
als in den weit entfernten Heidenländern’: Die Geschichte der Jesuiten in Münstereifel,”
in Eiflia Sacra: Studien zu einer Klosterlandschaft, ed. Johannes Mötsch (Mainz:
Selbstverl. der Gesellschaft für Mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte, 1994), 407–28;
Catherine Balleriaux collected many such quotations from Jesuits: Catherine Balleriaux,
“Reformation Strategies: Conversion, Civility, and Utopia in Missionary Writings About
the New World, c. 1610–1690” (Dissertation, University of Auckland, 2012), 73–7.

10 Flüchter
countries.27 Moreover, the repercussions of the explained global diversity of

Catholicism for Europe must be examined for both the European ideal of a
homogenised Tridentine Catholicism, as well as for the perception and evalua-
tion of real existing differences inside European Catholicism.28
The Jesuits and Transcultural Dimensions of a Religion
The Jesuit order is a most promising research subject for the outlined question
because the Jesuits are both global and local: As an order, it is a global actor,
and with many members in virtually all parts of the world, this order consists
of a multitude of local actors who interact with one another, as well as with the
global network.
Nevertheless, an analysis of the Jesuit order from a global perspective meets
similar problems as does that of a global history of Christianity, as previously
explained. Although the Jesuit order is always described and perceived as a
global actor, the actual research has primarily focused on particular world re-
gions or has followed a methodological nationalism, that is, it focused on Jesuits
that came from one European territory.29 We must acknowledge that, with the
focus on local missionary practice, numerous highly relevant case studies were
written, which refuted the existence of a homogenised Catholicism and in-
stead stressed the different adaptations of Catholic doctrine by missionaries,
as well as the appropriation by neophytes and other groups of the culture at
which the missionary effort was addressed.30 Nevertheless, the focus on Jesuit
27 Paolo Broggio made a case that missionaries carried older conceptions about interreli-
gious interaction into the world, but moreover the new encounters helped also for a new
way to conceptualise evangelisation: Paolo Broggio, Evangelizzare il mondo: Le missioni
della Compagnia di Gesù tra Europa e America (Secoli XVI–XVII); Prefazione di F. Cantù
(Roma: Carocci, 2004). This perspective could also give a new drive to the Christianisation
debate, started by Delumeau and Muchembled, quite refuted in the meantime, Jean
Delumeau, Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire (Paris: Pr. Univ. de France, 1971).
28 For example Armstrong asked, “how did the expansion of Catholicism throughout
the Atlantic shape the character of the Early Modern Catholic Church?”, Armstrong,
“Transatlantic Catholicism,” 1955.
29 Cf. about the epistemological nationalism: Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, “Jenseits des
methodologischen Nationalismus: Außereuropäische und europäische Variationen der
zweiten Moderne,” Soziale Welt 61 (2010): 187–216; Ulrich Beck and Patrick Camiller, “The
Truth of Others: A Cosmopolitan Approach,” Common Knowledge 10, no. 3 (2004): 430–49.
30 To give only some examples James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures
in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Sara E. Melzer,

work in specific world regions was also associated with some problems. For
example, limited to the local perspective it is very difficult to assess whether
or not certain phenomena were specific to this particular locality or whether
these phenomena followed a general Jesuit pattern.31
A morphology of transculturalism could provide us with further insights
into how to consider general Jesuit strategies versus the specificities of a region,
the participating cultural groups and actors, and maybe even the individual
personalities of the missionaries. Therefore, we must entangle the mission-
ary work; we must examine the local events and strategies as embedded in a
global network. The demand that the Jesuit order should not only be under-
stood, but also be analysed from the perspective of a connected and entangled
history, has been made for several years, most explicitly by Luke Clossey.32 In
comparison with similar demands regarding the history of Christianity, sat-
isfactory empirical studies remain rare.33 However, an increasing number of
Colonizer or Colonized: The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Alida C. Metcalf, Go-Betweens and the Colonization
of Brazil: 1500–1600 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005).
31 Many scholars tend to praise the exceptionality of their research object: For example
scholars about the South Indian Madurai Mission highlight their interest in language
studies; other stress that the Jesuits used in China much more rational arguments than
in other countries, cf. Thierry Meynard, “The Overlooked Connection between Ricci’s
Tianzhu Shiyi and Valignano‘s Catechismus Japonensis,” Japanese Journal of Religious
Studies 40, no. 2 (2013): 304. But it works also the other way round: The special relevance of
gender in the Jesuit mission in New France, as analysed by Karen Anderson, was received
in gender studies and thus often understood as a more common strand of Jesuit work, cf.:
Karen Anderson, “As Gentle as Little Lambs: Images of Huron and Montagnais‐Naskapi
Women in the Writings of the 17th Century Jesuits,” Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue
canadienne de sociologie 25, no. 4 (1988): 560–76.
32 Clossey, Salvation; cf. also Bronwen Catherine McShea, “Introduction: Jesuit Missionary
Perspectives and Strategies,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 1, no. 2 (2014): 171–6.
33 There are however, some scholars who at least compare the missionary work in several
world regions, for example: Ana Carolina Hosne, The Jesuit Missions to China and Peru,
1570–1610: Expectations and Appraisals of Expansionism (London; New York: Routledge,
2013), Takao Abé, The Jesuit Mission to New France: A New Interpretation in the Light of
the Earlier Jesuit Experience in Japan (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Tobias Winnerling, Vernunft
und Imperium: Die Societas Jesu in Indien und Japan, 1542–1574 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 2014); Emanuele Colombo, “ ‘Infidels’ at Home: Jesuits and Muslim Slaves
in Seventeenth-Century Naples and Spain,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 1, no. 2 (2014): 192–
211; Youssef El Alaoui Jésuites, Morisques et Indiens: Étude comparative des méthodes
d’évangélisation de la compagnie de Jésus d’après les traités de José de Acosta (1588) et
d’Ignacio de las Casas (1605–1607) (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2006).

12 Flüchter
academic events are attempting to bring together scholars who are examining
various regions of the world, and it is in this context that we also consider our
own volume.34
The feature that predestined the Jesuit order as a most promising research
subject for our question is its Janus face: on the one hand, the Jesuits stood
for the homogenising ideal of Tridentine Catholicism and its implementation;
in Europe, they were considered to be very close to the pope and his orders,
and they personified the post-Tridentine impetus to homogenise Catholicism.35
On the other hand, the Jesuits were famous for their particular mission-
ary method of accommodation. This method which is mostly known for the
Jesuits in Japan and China and the following rites controversy, is characterised
by a high degree of flexibility to adapt to local conditions, customs and belief
systems, and it is often discussed as cultural dialogue or also as a type of cul-
tural translation.36
Such flexibility regarding the wearing of certain clothes or definitive social
customs was theoretically never a problem.37 However, in most missionary
contexts, and with most missionary orders, this flexibility referred rather to the
neophytes’ lifestyle than to the missionaries themselves. The degree to which
the neophytes had to become European in order to become a Christian was
discussed, such as whether or not they could keep their traditional dress or hair
style, for example. Conversely, the Jesuits adapted to the indigenous lifestyle in
some regions of the world and sometimes even denied their European origin.38
34 Cf. for example the conference “The Rites Controversy in the Early Modern World” in May
2011 organised by Ines G. Županov and Pierre-Antoine Fabre, or the summer conference
of the Ecclesiastical History Society “Translating Christianity” in York in July 2015.
35 Cf. for example: Paolo Broggio, “Roman Doctrinal Orthodoxy and Periphery’s Expectations:
The Collegium Germanicum and the Teaching of Scholastic Theology (1552–1600),” in
Konfessionskonflikt, Kirchenstruktur, Kulturwandel: Die Jesuiten im Reich nach 1556, ed. Rolf
Decot (Mainz: von Zabern, 2007), mostly 67–74.
36 Joan-Pau Rubiés, “The Concept of Cultural Dialogue and the Jesuit Method of
Accommodation: Between Idolatry and Civilization.” Archivum Historicum Societatis
Iesu 74 (2005): 237–80; Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, “The Catholic Mission and Translation in
China: 1583–1700,” in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter Burke and
Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 39–51.
37 Last but not least it was also practiced and discussed in the early evangelisation in Latin-
America, cf. Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate
and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523–1572 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1974), 34.
38 The denial of their European origin seem to be most obvious in the context of the South
Indian accommodation practice, cf. Antje Flüchter, “Pater Pierre Martin – Ein ‘Brahmane
aus dem Norden’: Jesuitische Grenzgänger in Südindien um die Wende zum 18.

Moreover, the Jesuits were also open to some adaptations of rituals or prac-
tices that went too far for other orders or the secular clergy. All missionaries
agreed that the core of the Christian message must not be changed. However,
there were different opinions regarding the degree to which Christian ritu-
als and practices could be altered, combined with different understandings
where the line between the orthodox essence of Catholicism and adiaphora
had to be drawn. Generally speaking, this so-called Jesuit openness to other
cultures was most pronounced in Asia, that is, a high level of accommodation
to local customs and culture is understood as being limited to East Asia, pri-
marily the court of the Chinese emperor, as well as Japan and maybe Southern
India. Jesuits in the Americas are rather better understood with regard to their
relationship with European colonial power, either as collaborators or as their
counterparts, for example, as founders of their famous reductions.39 Moreover,
the Jesuit accommodation in Asia is regarded as being a temporally limited
experience, in that it was only a practiced evangelisation strategy during the
17th and early 18th century, before it was forbidden by papal order in 1744.40
Therefore, its geographical and temporal limitation meant that the accommo-
dation was not accredited with much relevance with regard to the develop-
ment of global Catholicism.
We want to question the extraordinariness of Jesuit accommodation in Asia:
The Jesuit adaptation in East Asia was certainly the most visible. Moreover,
under the conditions of power that were particular to Asia, where Jesuit mis-
sionaries often had to act without colonial support, adaptation to local cultures
was certainly more necessary than in areas, where the Jesuits were supported
by the coloniser’s sword. However, accommodation, that is, a translation of the
Jesuit or Catholic doctrine to the respective local surroundings, had already
Jahrhundert,” Zeitenblicke 11, no. 1 (2012) [http://www.zeitenblicke.de/2012/1/Fluechter/

index_html, 15.03.2016].
39 Cf. for the estimation Susanne Lang, Bilder zur Mission: Die Jesuitische Literatur und ihre
Illustration (Petersberg: Imhof, 2012), 35; Horst Gründer, “Mission und Kolonialismus –
Historische Beziehungen und strukturelle Zusammenhänge,” in Christliche Heilsbotschaft
und weltliche Macht: Studien zum Verhältnis von Mission und Kolonialismus; Gesammelte
Aufsätze, ed. Gründer (Münster: Lit, 2004), 7–19.
40 This limited time and space serves a twofold aim regarding Christian and European mas-
ter narratives: Christian purity was challenged only for a short period of time, then the
Jesuits were stopped and their failed experiment was followed by an again purified global
expansion of orthodox Catholicism. Moreover, in a European perspective and against the
backdrop of the emerging idea of Western superiority such an accommodation was only
possible regarding the interaction with so called high cultures.

14 Flüchter
been described in Ignatius’s instructions.41 Thus, it was not restricted to some

parts of the world, but was a general characteristic of Jesuit work. We want to
argue that adaptation and transculturalisation are an integral part of all mis-
sionary endeavours, of Christian life and practices on a local level.42
Moreover, we must question whether accommodation is an exclusively
Jesuit strategy. It could be especially pronounced in their work, but other or-
ders had comparable strategies. For example, the Franciscans were very open
to the local culture in their early years in South America.43 The fact that the
Jesuit flexibility has been repeatedly emphasised may also be due to the afore-
mentioned compartmentalisation of the academic world; until recently, most
scholars, primarily members of the respective orders themselves, studied ei-
ther Jesuits or Franciscans and did not know a sufficient amount about each
other’s work. This is the reason why we have included one article about the
Franciscans in this volume.44
The strategy of accommodation is undoubtedly a highly relevant topic
in the analysis of the diversity of global Catholicism in early modern times.
However, the concept has also been highly disputed in recent decades. This
appears to be less because of the phenomenon itself, but rather as a result of its
highly normative evaluation. The Jesuit adaptation was for quite some time –
and mostly in Jesuit studies themselves45 – praised as a sign of tolerance to-
wards other religions.46 First of all, to apply ‘tolerance’ as a criterion of early
41 Cf. John W O’Malley, “The Distinctiveness of the Society of Jesus,” Journal of Jesuit Studies
3, no. 1 (2016): 5.
42 There are several studies that support this notion. Cf. the studies about Jesuit adaptation
to popular culture in the Holy Roman Empire, for example: Trevor Johnson, “Blood, Tears
and Xavier-Water: Jesuit Missionaries and Popular Religion in the Eighteenth-Century
Upper Palatinate,” in Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe 1400–1800, ed. Bob
Scribner and Johnson (Basingstoke, London: Houndsmill, 1996), 183–202. Also in David
Gentilcores study about Jesuits in Terra D’Otranto their missionary strategy can be under-
stand as accommodation, even if the author uses a slightly different concept of accom-
modation, cf. David Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early
Modern Terra D’otranto (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), 70; cf.
also Adriano Prosperi, Tribunali Della Coscienza: Inquisitori, Confessori, Missionari (Turin:
Giulio Einaudi, 1996), most of all 600–49.
43 Cf. Ricard, Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, 30–5.
44 Cf. Ødemark in this volume.
45 Ronnie Po-chia Hsia pointed out that for a long time the majority of studies about Jesuit
missionaries were done by Jesuits themselves, Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, “Jesuit Foreign
Missions: A Historiographical Essay,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 1 (2014): 64.
46 Cf. for example from a rather recent study: “The Jesuits were always prudent and
anxious to maintain the trust of the Indians and were quite tolerant of this hybrid culture”,

modern phenomena is fairly anachronistic. Interestingly, the same anachro-

nism was later directed against the Jesuits,47 when they were criticised for not
being as tolerant as modern, that is, 20th and 21st century, political correctness
expected them to be. Early modern Jesuit missionaries must be historically
contextualised in the same way as every other past event. It is not astonish-
ing that Jesuits firstly wanted to evangelise non-Christian people (or homoge-
nise lax, premodern European Christians); the understanding and openness
towards foreign cultures and religion was for them not a value in itself, but a
means to an end, and the end was Christianisation.48 In this volume, we want
to analyse accommodation as an early modern practice that facilitated the
emergence of transcultural dimensions of Catholicism. This perspective nei-
ther implies that the participating actors were tolerant or open, nor that the
processes were peaceful or harmonious.
Some introductory remarks regarding our understanding of ‘transcultural’
appear to be necessary at this point, not least because this term has become
fairly ubiquitous in recent years, meaning that it often appears to be rather
vague.49 For several decades now, a closed or static concept of culture or na-
tion or society, along with other labels for social groupings, has been chal-
lenged. Research is keen to discover the combinations and mingling within
these groupings, as well as their hybrid or transcultural structures, procedures
and institutions. With regard to the transcultural dimension of Catholicism,
the label ‘culture’ is used for social, ethnic or religious groups that meet in the
Maneesha Taneja, “Translation as a Dialogue between Cultures: The Jesuit Experiences,”

in St Francis Xavier and the Jesuit Missionary Enterprise. Assimilations between Cultures /
San Francisco Javier Y La Empresa Misionera Jesuita. Asimilaciones Entre Culturas, ed.
Ignacio Arellano and Carlos Mata Induráin (Pamplona: Publicaciones de la Universidad
de Navarra, 2012 ), 270. Very typical for this praise of the Jesuits also the foreword by Robert
J. Schreiter in Peter Phan, Mission and Catechesis: Alexandre de Rhodes and Inculturation
in Seventeenth-Century Vietnam (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1998).
47 Cf. for example Chockalingam Joe Arun, “Religion as Culture: Anthropological Critique
of de Nobili’s Approach to Religion and Culture,” in Interculturation of Religion: Critical
Perspectives on Robert de Nobili’s Mission in India, ed. Arun (Bangalore, India: Asian
Trading, 2007), 19–41.
48 On this paradox see Clossey, Salvation, 7–9.
49 Our definition was developed in the context of the Heidelberg Cluster of Excellency
cf. Monica Juneja and Christian Kravagna, “Understanding Transculturalism: Monica
Juneja and Christian Kravagna in Conversation,” in Transcultural Modernism, ed. Fahim
Amir et al. (Berlin; New York: Sternberg Press, 2013), 22–33; Antje Flüchter and Jivantha
Schöttli, “The Dynamics of Transculturality: Concepts and Institutions in Motion,” in
The Dynamics of Transculturality: Concepts and Institutions in Motion, ed. Flüchter and
Schöttli (Heidelberg: Springer, 2014), 1–23.

16 Flüchter
context of everyday interaction and more so in the missionary and pastoral

context. Of course, these groups or cultures are conceptualised as dynamic,
not as a given entity, but as one that has been constructed. They are a result
of different ascribing practices.50 Several concepts have been discussed in the
process of doubting fixed entities. Our notion of transculturality is influenced by
Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity and the postcolonial theory in general.51
However, the concept of transculturality differs from hybridity, because it
is more flexible and can be applied to conditions of varying power asymme-
tries existent in the contact zones in which these hybrid socio-cultural forma-
tions appear, and is thus not restricted to a colonial or postcolonial context.52
Thus, the local power asymmetries are part of the research question and not
a condition of the research topic. This is highly relevant for a comparison of
Jesuit evangelisation endeavours. Jesuits worked under quite different power
asymmetries (e.g. the court of the Chinese emperor, or in a capital of Iberian
colonialism), and the respective power structures were of great relevance for
the transcultural outcome of the encounter.
With the understanding that human history is always a result of processes of
exchange and interaction, we can always claim that everything is transcultural
(Welsch).53 However, for us, this is where the enquiry begins because the way
in which ideas and practices mingle, as well the different outcomes of such
mingling, as, for example, the quite different forms of global Catholicism, re-
mains unexplained. We are interested in the processes and dynamics of trans-
culturality. Everything may be transcultural, but not always in the same way,
50 First, the historical actors can understand themselves as a group or culture. Second,
the identification of a culture or group as that can also result from an ascription by the
researcher.
51 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 1994 ). The
term transculturality itself was brought into the discussion by Fernando Ortiz, Cuban
Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onís (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1995), Spanish original 1940. Cf. also a quite recent application of Ortiz’ concept
combined with the theories of D. Mignolo, with a research interest similar to this volume,
however a different concept of transculturality: Indrani Mukherjee, “Syncretisms Amidst
Indigenous Peoples in Goa/South India and Paraguay/South America,” in St Francis and
the Jesuit Missionary Enterprise between Cultures: Assimilations between Cultures, ed.
Ignacio Arellano and Carlos Mata Induráin (Pamplona: Servicio de Publicaciones da la
Universidad de Navarra, 2012), 155–67.
52 Flüchter and Schöttli, “Dynamics,” most of all 3.
53 Wolfgang Welsch, “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today,” in Spaces of
Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash (London: Sage, 1999),
194–213.

and it is always changing, that is, transculturality itself is dynamic.54 We want

to ask why and how transculturality occurs, if it evolves or if it is discussed,
whether there is any variation in the impact or in the dynamics by which it is
propelled. Therefore, the comparative approach taken in this volume aims to
begin a morphology of the transcultural elements of global Catholicism.
Catechism – A Global Genre?
To explore the scope of transculturation and the morphology of the transcul-

tural dimensions of Catholicism, of religious and dogmatic discussion, we have
chosen to explain the example of Jesuit missionary strategies. In order to focus
more specifically on our question, the articles analysed catechisms as they
were translated or written for a specific missionary context. Corresponding to
our global perspective, we chose a comparative approach that brings together
examples from different world regions, including Europe. It is generally com-
mon knowledge that catechisms are a central instrument in educating and
communicating Christian beliefs and dogma. Moreover, they are the genre in
which cultural, religious and confessional differences had to be explained and
discussed, both in the missionary and in the confessionalising context. It is
astonishing that catechisms were rather neglected in studies of both confes-
sional identity and global evangelisation.55
As well as being very particular, catechisms also constitute a genre that has
quite different forms. They are tools for explaining such things as doctrine, sac-
raments and practices. On the one hand, this genre has a long history, while
54 It has been criticised that the assumption that everything is transcultural can risk the
temptation to understand transculturality itself as a static given and thus again as
an essentialisation, cf. regarding Welsch’s conceptualisation: Juneja and Kravagna,
“Understanding Transculturalism.”
55 There are of course exceptions, cf. for example regarding the relevance of catechisms
and learning for the formation of Protestant identity: Gerald Strauss, Luther‘s House of
Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in German Reformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1978); Karen Carter also highlights an odd lack of interest in catechisms,
cf. Karen E. Carter, Creating Catholics: Catechism and Primary Education in Early Modern
France (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). Regarding the mission-
ary context, Peter Phan put catechisms and catechesis in the centre of his study, however,
his study’s perception beyond Vietnamese or Southeast Asian history is rather limited, cf.
Phan, Mission and Catechesis.

18 Flüchter
on the other hand it was not clearly defined for a long time.56 Most of the
acknowledged authors of catechisms, such as Martin Luther, Peter Canisius
(1521–97) and Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), wrote at least two different types:
A primarily large and more elaborate catechism for priests or even theologians,
in which doctrine was explained in depth and often contrasted with the doc-
trines of the opposing denomination, and a shorter catechism for the common
people and children, which was much simpler and more didactical than argu-
mentative. The small ones were written exclusively for pastoral reasons, while
the larger ones were also part of theological or philosophical discussions and
often more resembled a summa, a theological tract, than a catechism in the
modern understanding.
Catechisms certainly gained new popularity and relevance in the confes-
sional age, but medieval times were not as catechism-free as it has often been
claimed. In particular, texts by Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas main-
tained their relevance until early modern times.57 Moreover, in the course of
the Middle Ages, the number of instructions for confession increased, and,
in the 14th and 15th century, a rising number of explanations of the Apostles’
Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the sacraments, works of charity and the notion of
sin were written.58 Therefore, it must be stressed that the topics addressed
in early modern catechism were primarily already canonised in late medi-
eval times,59 and this established structure does not even much differ if we
56 This uncertainty of the genre catechism starts with the fact, that there were many
terms for this genre (e.g. doctrina, enchiridion, summa), cf. Gerhard J. Bellinger, “Der
Catechismus Romanus, seine Geschichte und bleibende Bedeutung für Theologie und
Kirche,” in Katechismus der Welt – Weltkatechismus: 500 Jahre Geschichte des Katechismus;
Austellungskatalog, ed. Matthias Buschkühl (Eichstätt: Universitätsbibliothek Eichstätt,
1993), 41–5.
57 Cf. Strauss, House, 156–9; John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambride, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1995), 116. Most relevant were Augustine of Hippo’s ‘texts De catechizan-
dis rudibus and De doctrina Christiana, cf. Strauss, House, 157, Peter Brown, Augustine
of Hippo: A Biography; New Edition with an Epilogue (Berkeley; New York: University of
California Press, 2000), 157–8. For the Jesuits maybe even more important were the texts
written by Thomas of Aquinas, his Summa theologica and his Summa contra gentiles, cf.
regarding Thomas Aquinas’s relevance for the Jesuits: Peter A. Dorsey, “Going to School
with Savages: Authorship and Authority among the Jesuits of New France,” The William
and Mary Quarterly 55, no. 3 (1998): 400; as well as Amaladass in this volume.
58 Cf. Strauss, House, 157; Hosne, Jesuit Missions to China and Peru, 98–9.
59 Cf. Bellinger, “Katechismus,” 46. For post-Tridentine catechisms this structure was again
codified by the mentioned structure of the Catechismus Romanus, published 1566, that is:
1. creed, 2. sacraments, 3. commandments and divine law, 4. prayers.

compare different denominations in the 16th century. Of course, the details,

and more so the content, were quite different.60
Following the reformation, and in the age of confessionalisation, cate-
chisms had a revival and gained a central relevance for the construction of
denominational identity. Denominational competition meant that catecheti-
cal work became even more important: Now, all Christians, that is, common
people, peasants and children and not just theologians and other religious
experts, needed to know what their specific denomination understood as
orthodox Christian belief; or at least that was the aim of theological reform-
ers and confessionalising rulers. Gerald Straus highlighted the fact that in-
troducing a catechism was often the first action followed by the introduction
of reformation, as well as attempts to re-implement Catholicism in a region:
Both sides regarded the catechism as the best medium for propagating the
right religion, the only feasible method of mass indoctrination, the most
reliable shield of orthodoxy, and the most efficient agent on uniformity.61
Consequently, some historians even regard the 16th century as an “age of the
Catechism.”62
The catechisms’ revival began with Luther’s two catechisms, the large and
the small, which were both published in 1529. O’Malley conceded that “we
must recognise that they symbolised and powerfully stimulated a radical
change in the history of this traditional Christian institution.”63 With regard to
the history of the genre and its didactical success story, it is highly relevant that
Luther introduced the question and answer pattern in his small catechism.
This was not actually a new pattern, it had evolved from confessional manuals
and denominational dialogues, but after Luther’s small catechism it became
the dominant form for catechisms in all Christian denominations.64
60 The Protestant catechisms mentioned only two or three sacraments and not seven and
did not elaborate on the Church and its salutary institutions, Strauss, House, 206–14;
amongst others Strauss compared the catechisms written by Luther and Canisius.
61 Ibid., 171–2, quotation 172.
62 For example Charlotte Appel, “Asking, Counting, and Memorizing. Strategies in Religious
Writing and Publishing for the Common Man in 17th Century Denmark,” in Scripta volant,
verba manent: Schriftkulturen in Europa zwischen 1500 und 1900, ed. Roger Chartier and
Alfred Messerli (Basel: Schwabe, 2007), 191–214.
63 O’Malley, First Jesuits, 117.
64 Gerald Strauss elaborated how the question-answer-pattern of most catechisms very
well fitted the contemporary pedagogical theories and concepts: “In form and method,
catechization was a technique uniquely suited to what was presumed to be the mental
condition of the multitude.” Strauss, House, 71, similar 154.

20 Flüchter
In some way, Luther’s catechisms established a paradigm, and thus exerted

some pressure on the Catholic Church to formulate something in opposition
to the Protestant didactic works. Therefore, numerous Catholic catechisms
were soon written, many of them by Jesuits. One of the first important cate-
chisms was Peter Canisius’ Summa doctrinae Christianae, which was published
in 1555, before the Council of Trent was even finished.65 The Council of Trent
demanded the composition of a central Catholic catechism; however, none
was finished before the council ended, and the Roman Catechism was only
published in 1566.66 Although this catechism was relevant and programmatic
in a theological context, it was not really written for a wider audience. It was
aimed at priests and was therefore not useful for pastoral care. However, fur-
ther catechisms were soon written, focusing on specific concerns and different
audiences.67 In the historiography of catechisms, the one written by Robert
Bellarmine is always mentioned as being highly relevant. He wrote his two
catechisms because he considered the Catechismus Romanus as not useful for
teaching the common folk. His work has sometimes been declared as being the
most important post-Tridentine catechism.68 Other authors claim that the cat-
echisms by Canisius were used far more often than that written by Bellarmine.
Another Jesuit author whose catechisms are ascribed much relevance to is
Edmund Auger (1530–91).69 The respective estimation of how much a cat-
echism was used markedly differs in historiography, and appears to primarily
The usefulness of this form showed also in its transfer to the so called civil and political
catechisms in modern times, cf. Eugenia Roldán Vera, “Reading in Questions and Answers:
The Catechism as an Educational Genre in Early Independent Spanish America,” Book
History 4 (2001): 24.
65 Cf. in detail about Canisius‘s catechisms, their publication history and their circulation in
Europe and the world: Paul Begheyn, “The Catechism (1555) of Peter Canisius, the Most
Published Book by a Dutch Author in History,” Quarendo: A Quarterly Journal from the Low
Countries 36 (2006): 51–84. Moreover, Petrus Canisius had tailored a new edition of his
catechism in 1562 to the decrees of the still ongoing Council of Trent. Gerhard J. Bellinger,
Der Catechismus Romanus und die Reformation: Die katechetische Antwort des Trienter
Konzils auf die Haupt-Katechismen der Reformatoren (Hildesheim; New York: Georg Olms
Verlag, 1987), 49.
66 Cf. to its authors and history of publication: ibid., 20–37, Bellinger, “Katechismus,” 49–51.
67 Cf. Karen F. Scialabba, “The Protestant Reformation and Catholic Publishing: A Framework
for Contemporary Understanding,” Journal of Religious & Theological Information 12,
no. 3–4 (2013): 80. Ana Hosne evaluates the Catechismus Romanus higher, most of all
because of his standardizing effects, cf. Hosne, Jesuit Missions to China and Peru, 100.
68 For example Phan, Mission and Catechesis, 108, also: Berard L. Marthaler, The Catechism
Yesterday and Today: The Evolution of a Genre (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1995), 51.
69 Cf. ibid.; Phan, Mission and Catechesis, 109.

depend on the region in which the respective author worked.70 These are a
few examples of the plurality of Catholic early modern catechisms; moreover,
with regard to the European Catholic landscape, we must also mention the
large amount of episcopal catechisms, which were omitted in the context of
this volume.71
These few examples already show an interesting paradox: The aim was to
achieve a unified and homogenised Catholic community, which was central
for post-Tridentine Catholicism, and Canisius stressed the relevance of one
Jesuit catechism for all of Europe already in his 1561 edition.72 However, inside
Western Europe, catechisms were already not as uniform as it has often been
claimed.73 It is significant that the confessionalised Tridentine church could
not form one canonical catechism, but that quite different texts were used si-
multaneously. In addition, all of these problems could be expected to an even
greater degree in global Catholicism.
If we shift to a global perspective, the first noteworthy observation is that
other Jesuit authors now come to the fore: Canisius was fairly relevant in
North Western Europe, but rarely outside of Europe,74 and the literature shows
that Roberto Bellarmine’s catechisms were far more widespread across the
world. Marthaler stated that his catechism was most relevant in the Spanish
and Portuguese world, but it was also translated into over 60 languages.75
70 Moreover, Petrus Canisius had tailored a new edition of his catechism in 1562 to the
decrees of the still ongoing Council of Trent, Bellinger, Catechismus Romanus, 49.
71 Cf. Karen E. Carter, “The Science of Salvation: French Diocesan Catechisms and Catholic
Reform (1650–1800),” The Catholic Historical Review 69, no. 2 (2010): 234–61.
72 Bellinger, Catechismus Romanus, 49.
73 Cf. at the occasion of the celebration of the 500 Jubilee of the Catholic world catechism:
“Der Weltkatechismus ist ein wichtiges Hilfsmittel zur Förderung und Sicherung der
Einheit im Glauben und damit auch eine wesentliche Voraussetzung für die Einheit
der Kirche”, Karl Braun, “Der ‘Katechismus der Katholischen Kirche’ – Förderung der
Einheit des Glaubens,” in Katechismus der Welt – Weltkatechismus: 500 Jahre Geschichte
des Katechismus; Austellungskatalog, ed. Matthias Buschkühl (Eichstätt: Universitätsbi-
bliothek Eichstätt, 1993), 18.
74 Paul Begheyn states that the first biographer of Canisius (in 1614) mentioned translations
into Ethiopian, Indian and Japanese; however, Begheyn as well as Carlos Sommervogel
before could not find any traces of such translations, cf. Begheyn, “Catechism (1555) of
Peter Canisius,” 59. Fitting this statement the catechism by Canisius is only, but in great
detail, tackled in the article about Jesuits in England by Alexandra Walsham.
75 Marthaler, Catechism. It is interestingly how the numbers of translations vary; Phan
counts for example about 56 translations, though with more than 500 editions, Phan,
Mission and Catechesis, 156. Peter Burke, however, knows only of translations in 20 other
languages, Peter Burke, “Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe,” in Cultural

22 Flüchter
It certainly helped that pope Clement VIII (1536–1605) had mandated that
both Catechisms by Bellarmine to be used in the papal territories, and had
also supported their diffusion throughout the world.76 However, in the articles
collected in this volume, Bellarmine is not very prominent; catechisms written
in Spanish or Portuguese appear to be of greater relevance. For example, the
Catechism written by Marcos Jorge (1524–71) was used as a model in Japan.77
Interestingly, Iberian catechisms were not only used in the context of Iberian
expansion; Jesuits did not always choose catechisms in their mother tongue
or in the language of the Catholic territory that supported their mission. For
example, the French Jesuit Jean de Brébeuf (1593–1649), who worked amongst
the First Nations in New France, translated the catechism by the Spanish Jesuit
Diego de Ledesma (1519–75) into Wendat, the local indigenous language, rath-
er than using, for example, the popular French catechism written by his com-
patriot Emond Auger (1530–91).78 This is even more surprising as Ledesma’s
Doctrina christiana was not specifically widespread in the European context.79
Without questioning the relevance of Luther’s work, the fact that the ‘normal’
histories of Christianity explain the history of catechisms via the reformation
and the following denominational competition appears to be symptomatic.
However, we can argue that – at least regarding the Catholic catechisms –
the Christian expansion beyond Europe was as important as the reformation
with regard to the development of catechisms. The evangelisation process fre-
quently forced missionaries to actually rewrite and rethink the pattern and the
Translation in Early Modern Europe, ed. Burke and Ronnie Po-chia Hsia (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 17.
76 David S. Schaff, “Cardinal Bellarmine – Now Saint and Doctor of the Church,” Church
History 2, no. 1 (1933): 45. Leonardo Cohen argues that Bellarmine might be the model
for an early modern Ethiopian catechism, Leonardo Cohen, The Missionary Strategies
of the Jesuits in Ethiopia (1555–1632) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009), 99–100. This seem
quite plausible because Bellarmine’s catechism is known to be more focused on confes-
sional demarcation and full of confessional polemic, at least much more than the one
by Canisius, cf. Bellinger, Catechismus Romanus, 288. And in Ethiopia the Jesuits had to
argue against older indigenous Christians, cf. Cohen in this volume.
77 Cf. Wirbser and Abé in this volume. Jorge‘s catechism was quite popular, for example
it was also translated in Bantu, cf. Otto Zwartjes, Portuguese Missionary Grammars in
Asia, Africa and Brazil: 1550–1800 (Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing
Company, 2011), 210.
78 Cf. Steckley in this volume; John Steckley, De Religione: Telling the 17th Century Jesuit Story
in Huron to the Iroquois (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004).
79 However, the Catalonian bishops presribed the catechism for their sees in 1588, see
Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the Counter
Reformation (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1999), 103.

formulations of the European models.80 Moreover, in the European context,

and its preponderance of reformation events, it is often forgotten that the first
early modern Catholic catechisms were written outside of Europe, that is, be-
fore Canisius or Bellarmine.81 For them, Luther was not the model or antipode,
but rather it was texts such as that by Juan de Ávila (1499–1569), published in
1527, or Ignatius of Loyola’s (1491–1556) spiritual exercises themselves.82
Many European post-Tridentine catechisms were translated into other
European languages. Such translation processes increased with the spread of
Christianity, following European expansion. In the context of global evangeli-
sation, catechisms were required everywhere. Those brought from Europe by
the missionaries, primarily written in Latin, or more often in the languages
of the expanding European powers, were translated into the indigenous lan-
guages, but some catechisms were also especially written for specific cultural
settings in respective parts of the world and the local missionary context. This
volume’s starting point is that all these texts adapted to the respective cultural
contexts in some degree. The claim and the pressure of Tridentine homogeni-
sation was accompanied by, or even contrasted with, a growing heterogeneity;83
Christian expansion thus produced increasing transcultural elements in the
Catholic Church.
Translation as an Analytical Tool
The concept of translation appears to be the optimal analytical tool for ana-
lysing these transcultural elements and dimensions. Evangelising strate-
gies always involve literary translation processes, such as the translation of
catechisms or prayers. Therefore, methods and strategies regarding transla-
tion were, from the beginning, a highly relevant aspect for scholars studying
mission and evangelisation. In recent cultural history, and primarily in stud-
ies concerning cultural encounters, ‘cultural translation’ has been used as a
much larger concept, and has become the most popular in cultural studies and
80 Peter Phan equals the relevance of the reformation and the Christian missions regarding
the history of catechisms, Phan, Mission and Catechesis, 107; he mostly refers his elabora-
tions on: Pietro Braido, Lineamenti di storia della catechesi e dei catechismi: Dal “tempo
delle riforme” all’età degli imperialismi (1450–1870) (Torino: Leumann, 1991).
81 Cf. Phan, Mission and Catechesis, 112.
82 Cf. Hosne, Jesuit Missions to China and Peru, 98–100.
83 Cf. Windler, “Uneindeutige Zugehörigkeiten.”

24 Flüchter
cultural history in recent years, and maybe even decades.84 The term cultural
translation means that the concept is no longer restricted to texts, but can be
applied to practices, institutions etc. That is most relevant for the missionary
context: Evangelising, as well as Christian life, encompasses not only texts and
doctrines, but also practices and rather general ways of life. These had to be
translated into the language and culture of the people who were to be evan-
gelised or converted. And this is even more the case with regards to the Jesuit
accommodation method.
The ubiquity of the term cultural translation has met with some criticism;
for example, the complaint that it is more or less only used as a metaphor,
or that the term is overly expanded.85 The use of translation as metaphor is
tempting, and has also led to some highly relevant results.86 Nevertheless, to
obtain maximum potential from this term, some further reflection on transla-
tion, primarily the concepts translation studies offered, can often be useful,
if not necessary. The recent theoretical developments in translation studies
allow us to form an analytical concept of translation that can be applied to
analyse processes of evangelisation and how catechisms were used in it. They
help us to uncover the different layers of the translation processes in the mis-
sionary context.
This use of the translation concept is possible because translation studies
had their own cultural turn in recent decades.87 Consequently, the cultural
84 Most relevant is the work of Peter Burke, “Cultures of Translation,”. Cf. also: Michael
Cronin, Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages, Cultures (Cork: Cork University
Press, 1996); Hsia, “Catholic Mission and Translation in China,”; Christina Lutter, “What
Do We Translate When We Translate? Context, Process, and Practice as Categories of
Cultural Analysis,” in The Trans/National Study of Culture: A Translational Perspective, ed.
Doris Bachmann-Medick (New York; Berlin: De Gruyter 2014), 155–67.
85 Harish Trivedi, “Translating Culture vs. Cultural Translation,” in In Translation –
Reflections, Refractions, Transformations, ed. Paul St-Pierre and Prafulla C. Kar
(Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007), 277–87; regarding the question if cul-
tures can be translated at all cf. Talal Asad, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British
Social Anthropology,” in Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James
Clifford (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1986), 151–64.
86 Cf. about the usefulness of using translation as a metaphor Ruth Evans, “Metaphor of
Translation,” in Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies, ed. Mona Bake and
Gabriela Saldanaha (New York: Routledge, 1998), 149–53.
87 Cf. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, “Introduction: Where Are We in Translation
Studies,” in Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation, ed. Bassnett and
Lefevere (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1998), 1–11; Bassnett, “The Translation Turn in
Cultural Studies,” in Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation, ed. Bassnett and
André Lefevere (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1998), 123–40; Doris Bachmann-Medick,

context again became more relevant for translation processes. In order to trans-
late a text, knowledge of the culture in which, and for which, the original text
was written, as well as the target culture, is required. With this opening to the
cultural context, rather than a primarily text immanent approach, translation
concepts have become more attractive for cultural studies. For our endeavour,
two aspects are most relevant amongst the manifold concepts developed in
translation studies: The estimation of originality and faithfulness, as well as
the relevance of power structures for every translation process.
The new evaluation of the paired original/copy met a central concern of the
transcultural perspective: The more recent approaches moved away from the
(until then) central categories of the faithfulness of the copy to the translated
original and of finding the best equivalence. Now, every act of translation is
instead understood as both a creation in itself and as a space for discussion of
cultural differences.88 Therefore, the question of whether a translator correctly
translated the object of translation or whether he misunderstood the latter lost
its relevance. This assumption opens the door to numerous varieties of trans-
lating and the resulting translation. This is fairly relevant for the evaluation
of the missionaries’ work because we are not so much interested in whether
our authors understood or misunderstood their target culture and its belief
systems, but rather we want to ascertain how they understood them and how
they appropriated, and maybe changed, it by attempting its understanding and
translation. Moreover, this shift also implies that translation involves a change.
The translated item is never the same as the original, which is another reason
why translation is a promising concept in exploring processes of transcultur-
alisation, and thus as well the evolution of transcultural elements in local types
of Christianity.
In recent translation studies, the focus on the relevance of power structures
for all translation processes has significantly increased, and the influence of
postcolonial theory is most obvious. There is no neutral translation, as there is
“Translation: A Concept and Modell for the Study of Culture,” in Travelling Concepts for
the Study of Culture, ed. Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter,
2012), 23–44.
88 Building on Walter Benjamin‘s thoughts Homi Bhabha developed the concept of cultural
translation as a negotiation of difference, cf. Bhabha, “11. How Newness enters the World,”
in: Bhabha, Location of Culture, 303–25; Walter Benjamin, “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,”
in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tillman Rexroth, vol. IV/1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1972), 9–21, cf. about this: Susan Bassnett, Translation (Abingdon, Oxon; New York:
Routledge, 2014), 54–5; Boris Buden et al., “Cultural Translation: An Introduction to the
Problem, and Responses,” Translation Studies 2, no. 2 (2009): 200–202.

26 Flüchter
no neutral knowledge production.89 With regard to our case studies, we must

consider different power relationships. First are those that are obvious: There
is certainly an important difference, between whether evangelisation was part
of establishing European colonial rule, as in South America, or whether it hap-
pened in areas with no real European power, for example, at the Chinese court,
but also in the heartlands of many world regions, such as New France or in
central India.
However, power relationships are not only to be considered as such genuine
power asymmetries; the discursive power asymmetries, maybe not as obvious
were certainly as important. The ruling discourse set boundaries of the sayable,
which reduced the range of the perceivable, understandable and translatable.90
In the context of missionary work and missionary translation processes, the
master narrative of Christian purity and orthodoxy was crucial. A Jesuit could
not act and preach outside Christian orthodoxy and he could write about it
even less.
In this volume, the term translation is used on two different levels: In addi-
tion to its use as an analytical term, as has been elaborated on so far, translation
is also the central research subject of the articles collected in this volume: The
missionaries were translators. Moreover, the missionaries were not only trans-
lators in the literary sense, they were also translating their experience for
themselves, as well as for their audience. Therefore, the perception of the mis-
sionary context by the missionaries, and their attempts to understand it, can
already be framed as (cultural) translation. Actors in a cultural encounter at-
tempt to understand the world they experience and their practices; they must
translate these practices and their cultural or social meaning, because other-
wise they cannot successfully interact,91 or, in the missionary context, they
89 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” in Outside in the Teaching

Machine, ed. Spivak (New York: Routledge, 1993), 179–200. For an ethnographic and his-
toric approach maybe Eric Cheyfitz was even more important, because he highlighted not
only the power, but also the violence inherent in the act of translation, Eric Cheyfitz, The
Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from the Tempest to Tarzan (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991).
90 Considerations about the structuring power of the discourse are of course inspired
by Foucault’s work; however, more concrete we are referring here to: Pierre Bourdieu,
Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); about
the difference between the boundaries of the thinkable and the boundaries of the sayable:
Robert F. Barsky, Constructing a Productive Other: Discourse Theory and the Convention
Refugee Hearing (Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 1994), 101.
91 Very often this aspect is tackled in recent work about diplomatic encounter beyond
Europe, for example: Susann Baller et al., eds., Die Ankunft des Anderen: Repräsentationen

cannot successfully evangelise. However, the degree of translation was always

disputed, most obvious in the rites controversy.
Another step in translation occurred when the missionaries wrote to their
superiors or broader European audience about their environment.92 This di-
mension of cultural translation is crucial for the context of evangelisation and
for writing or translating catechisms. During the process of evangelisation, the
Jesuits often met with indigenous social institutions or practices that were dif-
ficult to harmonise with Catholic doctrine, practices or morality. They often
asked their superiors, or the relevant groups in Rome, for a decision on how to
proceed. The decision concerning how to regulate such problems, or whether
or not some phenomena were acceptable, depended not least on the way the
Jesuits had translated them for the European reader.93
If we examine translation as a research subject and not as an analytical
term, the questions of power structure, and even more faithfulness, have a dif-
ferent meaning. Although we do not want to judge whether or not the trans-
lated catechisms remained orthodox, this question was central for the authors,
as well as for their readers and their superiors. At this point, further classic
translation theories might be useful in analysing the work of the translating
Jesuits,94 whereas recent theories shape our analytical tool.
Moreover, the boundaries of the sayable are not only relevant in premodern
times; there are also limits and potential for conservation, memory, reactivation
sozialer und politischer Ordnungen in Empfangszeremonien (Frankfurt am Main; New

York: Campus, 2008); Peter Burschel and Christiane Vogel, eds., Die Audienz: Ritualisierter
Kulturkontakt in der Frühen Neuzeit (Köln; Weimar; Wien: Böhlau, 2014).
92 This assumption refers to the understanding of travelogues as “a form of cultural transla-
tion”, cf. Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through
European Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge: Past&Present Publications, 2000), XIV; Susanna
Burghartz, “ ‘Translating Seen into Scene?’ Wahrnehmung und Repräsentation in der
frühen Kolonialgeschichte Europas,” in Berichten – Erzählen – Beherrschen: Wahrnehmen
und Repräsentation in der frühen Kolonialgeschichte Europas, ed. Burghartz, Maike
Christadler, and Dorothea Nolde (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2003), 161–75.
93 This relation is most significant regarding the decision about Japanese marriages, cf.
Wirbser in this volume.
94 For example the work of Eugene Nida, who developed a translation theory for the mis-
sionary context, cf. Eugene A. Nida, “Principles of Correspondence,” in The Translation
Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2012), 126–40;
Nida, Message and Mission: The Communication of the Christian Faith (New York: Harper,
1960); R. Daniel Shaw, “The Legacy of Eugene A. Nida: A Contribution to Anthropological
Theory and Missionary Practice,” Anthropos 102, no. 2 (2007): 578–85; for application of
his concept for the missionary context cf. for example: Taneja, “Translation,” as well as
Dürr in this volume.

28 Flüchter
and appropriation. For example, from the perspective of Western supremacy, it

appears that it was easier to remember a European accommodation in China,
an accepted high culture, than in a Native American culture.95 An example
of current boundaries of the sayable is the triad colonisation-evangelisation-
civilisation. Against the background of 19th century colonialism and imperial-
ism, and as a result of the master narrative of European hegemony, this triad
is very convincing. However, this assumption blocks first the possibility that
evangelisation without civilisation was possible or probable, or in other words,
starting from this assumption it is quite unbelievable that evangelisation can
occur without the wish or the hope of civilising the target culture just because
they are on the same, or an even more, civilised level.96 Second some schol-
ars have argued that the assumed flexibility towards accommodation regard-
ing the process of evangelisation in Latin America depends on the perceived
civilisation gap.97
Translation is a promising approach for analysing the transcultural dimen-
sion as evolving and being discussed in the missionary context. Moreover, cat-
echisms are also a very promising source in applying the concept of cultural
translation. Translation theory chose the translation of the Bible as a particular
issue, which is quite plausible, as the Bible is – at least in the Protestant con-
text – one of the most often translated texts, meaning that, from early times
onwards, translation theory was developed in the context of translating the
Bible.98 That is both understandable and astonishing: At first sight, the Bible
appeared to be the more relevant text compared to catechisms. However, that
is a Protestant and, more so, a modern perception. The Bible also became the
centre of everyday piety in Protestantism, except for some branches of the
radical reformation, not before movements like pietism. Before – and not
least – for Luther himself, catechisms were understood to be the most impor-
tant book for the common man.99 Moreover, for cultural translation, with its
95 Cf. for example the highlighting of accommodation as specific Asian or even East Asian
phenomenon: Claudia von Collani, “Aspekte und Problematik der Akkommodation der
Jesuiten in China,” in “… usque ad ultimum terrae”: Die Jesuiten und die transkontinentale
Ausbreitung des Christentums 1540–1773, ed. Johannes Meier (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2000), most of all 100–3.
96 This problem arises most often, if scholars for Latin America or Africa share a discussion
with ones who study Asian phenonema.
97 Cf. Ricard, Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, 33–4 and again 284.
98 For example Jerome und of course Luther himself: Daniel Weissbort and Astradur
Eysteinsson, eds., Translation – Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 8–11, 57–68.
99 Cf. Johannes Wallmann, “Was ist Pietismus?,” Pietismus und Neuzeit 20 (1994): 24–6.

wider understanding of translation, catechisms are the more fitting source.

Catechisms were also regularly translated, as they were required in all pastoral
contexts after the 16th century, and, because they were not considered holy
texts like the Bible, the translation could be far more flexible; the question of
faithfulness was – in addition to the included translation of central prayers
and the creed – not only connected to the sentence structure, but also to the
content. Therefore, the translation was freer and much intralingual transla-
tion, as Jacobson defined the explanation of terms or phenomena,100 occurred
in this genre. Moreover, the catechism in itself can be understood as a cultural
translation: A translated catechism is not only a translated text, it was also
translated in the sense of explaining central Catholic practices, such as the ad-
ministration of sacraments, or other rituals and practices of veneration, which
had to be explained and adapted into the respective cultural surroundings.
Dimensions of Translating Catechism
This conception of cultural translation helps us to form a multi-layered matrix

in order to analyse the missionary (translation) work, a model for entangle-
ment and processes of transculturalisation. Translation in the missionary
context occurred on different levels and had different dimensions. In the fol-
lowing, we will focus on the actual translated text and the different meanings
for its audience.
The Catechism: Translated, Adapted or Written

The analysis of the catechisms produced for the missionary context is clos-
est to actual translation theory. We must distinguish between catechisms that
were translated, and as such were written, specifically for a missionary context.
Catechisms that were written in and for Catholic Europe were often translated
for a non-European environment. At first sight this appears to be a ‘simple’
text-to-text translation. However, as it was previously discussed, there was
not one canonical catechism in early modern post-Tridentine Europe, but a
numerous amount, even a fair number that were written by Jesuits. Therefore,
a Jesuit could, at least in theory, choose one catechism as the original for his
translation. Therefore, we can ask: Why was one catechism chosen for one
translation and not for another? Were some catechisms more popular for the
missionary context than others? If so, why? As it has already been mentioned,
100 Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” On Translation 3 (1959): 30–9.

30 Flüchter
the catechisms that were most important in Europe did not have the same
popularity in the missionary context.
The simple translation of a given catechism was only one possibility out of
several. Such European catechisms were often only a model, and were not con-
sidered to be an original in the traditional sense of translation theory.101 The
catechism genre gave the translator a wide range of flexibility to change the
original text, and this flexibility increased if we consider the catechisms that
were specifically written for a missionary context.102 These were translations
without a given source text. There appears to be a certain connection between
the chosen missionary strategy and the degree of possible and practiced ac-
commodation and the method by which a catechism was translated: It seems
that writing a catechism was explicitly more common in Asia than in other
parts of the world.103 Fairly free translation, with lots of fleshing out of the
original texts, can be found in Japan,104 but also among the First Nations in
New France, where the Jesuits were quite alone, without colonial European
support.105 A translation that maintained most of the given structure can be
interpreted as a mistrust or disinterest with regard to too much adaptation or
accommodation.106
Adaptation during the process of translation could start with the form. The
question-answer form had become almost canonical; however, it could be
changed, or at least the roles could be switched. For example, the student asks
the question and the teacher answers the student in the Japanese Dochirina
kirishitan. Thus, the genre of Catholic catechisms blurs, and the form is adapted
101 Jean de Brébeuf for example did not just translate Ledesma but adjusted him more to the
cultural environment of the Iroquois than other translations, cf. Steckley in this volume.
Such changing interventions can be found in even more degree in the translation Marcos
Jorge‘s Doctrina Christã for the Japanese contexts, for example the explanation concern-
ing the Eucharist and marriage were more detailed than in the original, cf. Wirbser in this
volume.
102 It is certainly difficult to draw a clear cut line between a ‘simple’ translation and a trans-
lation that modified part of the model catechism, even more if we consider that every
translation changes the original as was elaborated above.
103 For example de Nobili’s work, the Ñāna Upadēsam, was explicitly written for the South
Indian context, cf. Nardini and Amaladass in this volume; other examples are the cat-
echisms written by Matteo Ricci for China, Alexander de Rhodes for Vietnam, and
Alessandro Valignano for Japan, cf. Meynard, “Overlooked Connection,”; Phan, Mission
and Catechesis.
104 Cf. Wirbser and Abé in this volume.
105 Cf. Steckley in this volume.
106 This is at least the argument in Ricard, Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, 102.

to traditional Buddhist didactical structures.107 The choice of the form should

not be underestimated. Here, André Lefevere’s considerations of the relevance
of the textual and the conceptual grids are very helpful. Lefevere stressed the
relevance of the textual grid for the understanding of the text by the target
audience, and also regarding the question, if the translator decided to adapt to
the target or to the original culture.108 The form gained even more relevance, if
illustrations were added109 or if images were not so much illustrations, but, like
a phonetic spelling, were the translation itself.110
Changes and adaptations were of course not limited to the form of cat-
echetic texts. During the process of translation and composition some parts
were omitted or shortened, whereas others were fleshed out. These sometimes
only slight, and sometimes rather thorough, changes and adaptations are cru-
cial for the analysis of transcultural dimension because they are a most sig-
nificant indicator of how the individual translator drew the line between the
orthodox core of the Catholic message and the aspects that were estimated as
adiaphora. The difference between essence and adiaphora is known regarding
the interconfessional religious discussions in Europe. However, in the form of
the differentiation between the religious and social spheres, it is also in the
centre of the accommodation strategy. Although this differentiation is theo-
retically widely accepted, the line is drawn quite differently in the respective
contexts. The degree and extent to which dogmata or practices had to be ex-
plained and adapted differed depending on the regional and cultural charac-
teristics of the respective contact zones. The translation of catechisms appears
to be most promising in obtaining further insight into the factors that defined
these boundaries.
Translation Strategies
Adaptations, or rather strategies, to address the general problem of transla-
tion arose in all translations on a much more fundamental level, that is, how
to translate individual terms and phrases, most of all those regarding central
Catholic concepts, such as God, Sin and Eucharist. Concluding the articles
in this volume, as well as building on numerous case studies concerning
107 Cf. Wirbser in this volume. However, this reversed structure is not totally unknown.
Bellarmine chose in his Dichiarazione pui copiosa della dottrina Chrstiana, published in
1558, also this form, cf. Marthaler, Catechism, 51.
108 André Lefevere, “Composing the Other,” in Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice,
ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), 75–7.
109 Cf. Hosne in this volume.
110 Cf. Ødemark in this volume.

32 Flüchter
evangelisation processes in many world regions, we can trace three main solu-
tions, or translational strategies, regarding this problem:
(1) The author chose an emic term; the most well-known is the translation of
God as ‘Dainichi’ in Japanese, supervised by Francis Xavier (1506–52). The
advantage was that the reader or listener could easily make the connec-
tion to a concept he already knew. However, there was also sometimes
the disadvantage that the chosen emic concept did not really fit with the
Catholic content, or led the new believer in the wrong direction. This
soon became clear with regard to the aforementioned translation of God
as Dainichi.111
(2) These problems meant that the missionary often chose a loan word from
Latin or a contemporary European language, for example, Dios for God.
This solved the problem of possible misunderstanding, and the ortho-
doxy of the message was guaranteed. However, the concept had to be
explained in greater detail because the term had no meaning at all for
the audience, which could mean that Christianity remained a foreign
element in the respective environment.
(3) Although the two first strategies have often been discussed in
historiography,112 there was a third possibility, rarely discussed in the lit-
erature regarding translating religious texts so far. Instead of choosing
an emic or an etic term, some missionaries formed a new one; a term
that appeared familiar to the audience because it was formed from their
language but was still a new word without an already stabilised meaning.
This strategy can be found in such different missionary contexts as New
France or South India.113
111 Cf. Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia; Oxford: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2011), 16; to Xavier but also many other examples from Peru, India etc.: Sangkeun
Kim, Strange Names of God: The Missionary Translation of the Divine Name and the Chinese
Responses to Matteo Ricci’s “Shangti” in Late Ming China, 1583–1644 (New York: Peter Lang,
2004). Against the majority of studies which sees Xavier’s translation of ‘God’ through
‘Dainichi’ as a misunderstanding due to a lack in Japanese language skills Hisashi Kishino
argues that Xavier was well aware that the use of ‘Dainichi’ was prone to misunderstand-
ings but took this risk in order to facilitate the first introduction of Christianity in Japan,
Hisashi Kishino, “From Dainichi to Deus: The Early Christian Missionaries’ Discovery and
Understanding of Buddhism,” in Christianity and Cultures: Japan & China in Comparison,
1543–1644, ed. M. Antoni J. Üçerler (Rome: Institutum historicum Societatis Iesu, 2009),
45–60.
112 Cf. for example quite early and very detailed: Ricard, Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, 55–8.
113 Cf. Steckley, Nardini, Amaladass in this volume.

In historiography, the method of translation and the interpretation of the cho-

sen method have been discussed in detail. However, the problems surrounding
translation of central Christian terms have not only been discussed in modern
historiography, but also by contemporary missionaries and church officials.
The example of José de Acosta (1540–1600) is the most well-known.114 That is,
in the missionary context a translation theory was developed and its recep-
tion has not been sufficiently studied so far. This may be a relevant starting
point regarding the transfer between different peripheries. For example, we
can ask whether Roberto de Nobili (1577–1656) in South India was influenced
by Acosta, or even whether there were transfers between different Christian
orders, for example, between Franciscans and Jesuits.115 Moreover, it can serve
as an opening to the examination of flows from the missionary periphery to
the European centres. To date, the development of early modern translation
theory has primarily only been explained in an inner-European context.116
The Diverse Audiences

All translation strategies had their advantages and disadvantages, and whether
a pattern can be found remains to be found. The translation always depends on
the audience in one way or the other, with all their internal differences, that is,
a shared knowledge in translation theory. The question of the aim and the func-
tion of a translation is also associated with the audience – this dependence was
deeply discussed in the skopos theory.117 The translator has to decide, if he/she
wants to maintain the foreigness of the source text or prefers that it is fluent
and feels familiar for the target culture. This decision influences the transla-
tion strategy. This problem is discussed in translation studies as the problem
of domestication and foreignisation.118 Although translations generally have
numerous functions, the scope of functions regarding translations in the mis-
sionary context, as well as writing a catechism, is more limited. Nevertheless,
114 Cf. Dürr in this volume.

115 Phan for example discussed the transfer of catechetical texts regarding the catechism
written by A. de Rhodes. However, it is not very plausible, why he focused so much on
Ricci and other East Asian Jesuits but neglects India, cf. Phan, Mission and Catechesis.
116 Weissbort and Eysteinsson, Translation, 195–7.
117 For the skopos theory the aim of the translations justifies the strategies employed, cf.
Katharina Reiß and Hans J. Vermeer, Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 1984); Vermeer, “Skopos and Commission in Translational Action,”
in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (Abingdon, Oxon; New York:
Routledge, 2012), 227–38.
118 Cf. Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd ed.
(Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2008).

34 Flüchter
with regard to the catechisms genre, we must always consider that there were
different forms of catechisms, as was mentioned at the beginning – most of
all those that were purely pastoral, the small catechisms, addressing common
people and children, and those that were large, addressing the priests and
sometimes also a more theological and academic audience. This difference
is also relevant if we compare the results of this volume: Whereas Brébeuf’s
catechism was translated for pastoral work amongst the Iroquois, de Nobili’s
text appears far more to address a more academic audience.119 However, in the
following, the introduction focuses on the first option, as it was more common
than the latter.
a) The Local Audiences

As a translator, the missionary wanted to translate Christian theology for the
prospective neophytes in such a way that they could understand it. Therefore,
he required knowledge of their culture, their social differentiation and, not
least, their religious belief systems. Was the latter polytheistic (e.g. India),
spiritualistic (e.g. Northern America) or was it even without such systems or
Gods, as in some types of Buddhism (e.g. Japan)? The type of belief system
that the missionary met was most relevant regarding the chosen translation
method because it determined whether central Christian concepts had to be
introduced or whether the audience already knew something comparable. For
example, whether or not the prospective neophytes had a concept of sin was
fairly relevant.120 Specific problems arose if the audience was already Christian
but not of the Catholic denomination. This was of course the ‘normal’ problem
in wide parts of Europe,121 but also in parts of the world with older and indig-
enous forms of Christianity, as was the case in Ethiopia.122
Not so much a problem of literary translation, but of implementing the
Catholic belief, was the particular social setting. The criteria of social distinc-
tion primarily had to be considered because Jesuits often started with the so-
cial elites. Therefore, they had to take care that these elites did not associate
them with the ‘lower classes’. Moreover, if the local social distinction formed
cultural boundaries that were difficult, even impossible, to cross, such as the
differences of the caste system in Southern India, the translation strategy
119 Cf. Steckley, Amaladass and Nardini in this volume.

120 Confer to this problem regarding sin: Steckley in this volume; about trinity: Amaladass in
this volume.
121 Cf. the article about England by Walsham in this volume.
122 Cf. Cohen in this volume.

had to be differentiated according to the different social groups.123 Another

social pattern that required adaptation was the local marriage rules and gen-
der relationships: Marriage, building on gender relationships, was and is a
fundamental social institution that was difficult to change; however, Catholic,
monogamous and indissoluble marriage as a sacrament was more difficult to
adapt than other aspects of Christian doctrine.124
Moreover, it was not only the missionaries that were translating, their audi-
ences and the local and indigenous actors were also doing the same. Following
the history of reading, any text is produced by the reader – or at least co-
produced by the reader.125 More specifically, Christianisation did not function
as a simple sender-receiver model of communication but had to be conceptu-
alised as a type of dialogue. The agency of the target audience should also be
part of the analysis. This perspective is often very difficult to grasp, not least
because of language problems. In this volume, only the article by Takao Abé
really analysed this topic. We believe that a comparison of different catechisms
might be a starting point for further research in this direction.126
b) The Centres of Orthodoxy as the Other Audience

Catechisms were first and foremost written for evangelisation or the pastoral
supervision of a community. However, the neophytes and the other mission-
aries were not the only readers. As with the famous litterae annuae, at least
one exemplar of each catechism had to be sent to the centres of orthodoxy,
to the responsible regional clerical head centre and also to the Propaganda
fide in Rome. A translation could become dangerous, easily suspected as
being heretic, syncretistic or heterodox.127 Therefore, we can understand the
123 Cf. Flüchter, “Pater Pierre Martin.”

124 Cf. Wirbser and Nardini in this volume.
125 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, California: University of
California Press, 2003); Robert Darnton, “First Steps toward a History of Reading,” in
Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies, ed. James L. Machor and Philipp
Goldstein (New York; London: Routledge, 2001), 160–79.
126 Besides texts by critics of the Jesuit strategies or other (ethno)historical work, maybe
models like the intended reader can be helpful here; Wolfgang Iser, Der implizite
Leser: Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett, 3rd ed. (München:
Wilhelm Fink, 1994); Hans Robert Jauß, “Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der
Literaturwissenschaft,” in Rezeptionsästhetik, ed. Rainer Warning (München Wilhelm
Fink, 1994), 126–62.
127 Peter Burke claimed for example, that the counter reformation had kind of a translation
policy, Burke, “Cultures of Translation,” 16; Willi Henkel, “The Polyglot Printing Office of
the Congregation,” in Sacrae congregationis de propaganda fide memoria rerum: 350 anni

36 Flüchter
missionaries’ translation work as a double translation because they were trans-

lating not only for the local audience but also for the centres of Catholic ortho-
doxy that controlled their work and their orthodoxy. These readers must also
be kept in mind if we explore the boundaries of the sayable and translatable.
The criterion of faithfulness to the orthodox core of Catholic belief was cru-
cial for each translator; however, the line where this essential core began was
certainly drawn differently in Rome, Goa and Lima compared to in the actual
missionary interaction at the Great Lakes in New France, Madurai or the
Chinese court.
However, we can ask whether catechisms that were translated in rather
exotic local languages, such as Wendat or Tamil, could even be read in these
centres of orthodoxy. Maybe this difference stretched the boundaries of the
translatable for the missionaries. John Steckley thus pointed out that there was
a difference ‘between what the Jesuits reported they communicated to
Aboriginal people and what they actually said’.128 Thus far the reports by mis-
sionaries written for a European audience, and in Latin or another European
language, have prevailed in the discourse of accommodation. For a more dif-
ferentiated picture of Jesuit evangelisation strategy, as well as the method of
accommodation, we must include a far greater number of such catechisms in
non-European languages.129
The Articles of This Volume
The aim of this volume is to learn more about the transcultural dimensions of
Christianity. The transcultural approach relies heavily on cooperation, because
such a diverse regional and historic expertise is required. Therefore, the vol-
ume will bring together scholars from different world regions who worked on
Christianity in different world regions (India, China, Japan, South America and
Ethiopia). Moreover, we will include Europe in this comparison, as the history
of mission and the history of European Christianity have been separated for
too long. With this approach, we hope to produce a more differentiated insight
a servizio delle missioni; 350 Jahre im Dienste der Weltmission (1622–1972), ed. Josef Metzler
(Rom: Herder, 1972), 335–50.
128 Steckley, De Religione.
129 This preponderance of the Latin work is most obvious in the evaluation of the work of
Roberto de Nobili. The analysis of his texts that were written in Sanskrit or Tamil is only
just beginning and gives us quite a different impression of his evangelisation strategy, cf.
Nardini in this volume.

into local specifics, as well as comprehensive problems and mechanisms of

translation processes, in addition to insight regarding the relevance of actors
and power structures, and thus start the development of a morphology of
transcultural dimensions of Christianity.
The edited volume is divided into four parts. The first part encompasses
three articles that provide basic information on the major topics tackled in the
edited volume: cultural translation, missionary linguistics and the early mod-
ern European conception of catechisms.
The first article by Renate Dürr (University of Tübingen) links new method-
ological insights gained by the cultural turn in translation studies, to reflections
on language and translation in Early Modern Europe. Dürr analysed the dis-
cussion that occurred inside the Jesuit order on questions of how to translate
the Christian message in non-European languages in the context of the chang-
ing perception of language in the European intellectual discourse of the 16th
and 17th century. By examining the writings of the Jesuit missionaries José de
Acosta and Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (1585–1652), who proselytised in South
America, she exemplified the Jesuit discussion on language in the missionary
context that circled around the questions of whether the Jesuit missionaries
should preach the Christian message in the respective native languages and
how they could learn these languages.
The article that follows, by Alexandra Walsham (University of Cambridge),
provides basic information on the use of catechisms in 16th century Europe.
Furthermore, Walsham addressed the translations of the famous catechisms
prepared by Peter Canisius, which circulated in early modern Britain. By ana-
lysing the vernacular editions of Canisius’ catechism, Walsham demonstrated
how the histories of the overseas evangelical mission and confessionalisation
were intertwined in Britain. She argued that the process by which Canisius was
harnessed for, and by, English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish readers provides a les-
son in the reception and domestication of the European Counter Reformation
and in how catechisms coloured and shaped the outlook of Catholics in a
region under the yoke of ‘heretical’ rule.
The case studies in the second part focus on the problems that Catholic
missionaries encountered when they attempted to find equivalents to cen-
tral Christian terms in non-European languages in order to write Catholic
catechisms in these languages. This proved to be especially difficult when the
target culture not only used a language based on a completely different gram-
mar, but also had no analogous concepts that could be linked to key Christian
terms, such as ‘faith’ or ‘guilt’, as was shown by John Steckley (Humber College,
Toronto). In his contribution, Steckley examined the specific case of the French
Jesuit Jean de Brébeuf and the catechism he wrote for the mission among the

38 Flüchter
North American tribe of the Wendat (Huron). Steckley elaborated on the vari-
ous problems Brébeuf had encountered in translating the Christian message
into the language of the Wendat: Brébeuf not only had to invent a literal form
for the, until then, non-written language but also had to create new words for
expressing key Christian terms, as these concepts were unknown in the Wendat
society and, accordingly, no words for these concepts existed. Steckley pointed
out that this proved to be an even more challenging task because Brébeuf also
had to remove all doubts that he might ‘distort’ the Christian message in the
act of translation, vis-á-vis the Roman authorities.
In some mission areas, similar problems in transferring the Christian
message to another language and culture resulted in quite different transla-
tion strategies, such as those presented by Anand Amaladass (Sacred Heart
College, Chennai). In his case study, Amaladass analysed the Jesuit Madurai
mission in the South Indian region of Tamilnadu by comparing the quite dif-
ferent translation strategies of three prominent exponents of this mission:
Henrique Henriques (1520–1600), Roberto de Nobili and Joseph Beschi (1680–
1747). Amaladass pointed out that while Henriques translated Latin texts into
Tamil using transliterated Portuguese terms to name Christian core concepts,
de Nobili and Beschi went further and attempted to establish a Christian lan-
guage using Tamil and Sanskrit. De Nobili particularly immersed himself in
Tamil and Sanskrit literature to refute traditional indigenous beliefs and to
expound the Catholic faith from a Tamil perspective. Amadalass researched
the different strategies that de Nobili pursued to counter indigenous beliefs
in karma or rebirth and to find appropriate terms for the Christian god or the
Christian concept of Trinity that could be understood, and ultimately, ac-
cepted by his Tamil audience. Although the three missionaries used different
strategies, Amaladass argued that they all built on each other, thereby creating
a Christian form of the Tamil language and creating a new genre called Tamil
Christian literature.
The case studies used in the third part analysed the cultural translation
of Christian practices in Catholic missionary writings. In the first article,
Leonardo Cohen (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) examined the short-
lived Jesuit mission to the empire of Ethiopia, the only mission area outside of
Europe where the Jesuits encountered a completely Christianised population.
Therefore, as Cohen showed, the objective of the European missionaries was
not the evangelisation of the people, but rather the union of the Ethiopian
Coptic church with Roman Catholicism through her submission under the
Papal primacy. Accordingly, the problems the Jesuits encountered in Ethiopia
were also different, as their Coptic adversaries denounced them as bad
Christians and called them ‘enemies of the Virgin’ because, in their opinion,

the Jesuits did not properly revere the Holy Mother. In examining the writ-
ings of Jesuit missionaries in Ethiopia Cohen elaborated on how the Jesuits
attempted to counter these accusations by placing a special emphasis on their
reverence towards Maria.
Among the different Catholic practices, the sacrament of matrimony proved
to be especially difficult to translate into non-European cultures, because the
missionaries had to navigate between two poles that often contradicted each
other; the sacramental and indissoluble character of Catholic matrimony
made this practice virtually impossible to accommodate from an orthodox
viewpoint, but, in every mission area, the missionaries encountered specific,
often centuries-old, marital traditions that were socioeconomical practices
deeply rooted in the particular culture. The missionaries’ strategies to address
this dilemma and the transcultural dimensions that arose were analysed in two
case studies examining two different mission areas. Giulia Nardini (University
of Heidelberg) examined the Vivāha Dharma, or ‘Wedding dharma’, a consid-
erable part of Roberto de Nobili’s Tamil catechism Ñāna Upadēsam, which at-
tempted to relate the Christian concept of matrimony to a Tamil audience.
Nardini compared de Nobili’s description of matrimony with the ones of-
fered by central European catechisms but also with the traditional Tamil and
Sanskrit concepts of marriage that were relevant at the time. Nardini thereby
unfolded de Nobili’s unique cultural translation of Catholic matrimony that
resulted in a transcultural form of Christian marriage described in his Tamil
catechism.
Similarly, the introduction to Japan of Catholic post-Tridentine matrimo-
ny was analysed in a case-study by Rouven Wirbser (Bielefeld University), in
which he traced the different translations of Japanese marriages that the Jesuit
missionaries provided for their superiors in Europe, as well as the debate on
the supposedly common Japanese custom of divorce that ensued from these
translations between the missionaries and their superiors. Wirbser argued
that this debate on how to treat Japanese marriages ultimately influenced the
compilation of the Japanese catechism Dochirina kirishitan and the catecheti-
cal manual for clerics working in the pastoral care, which were both written
around 1600.
The Japanese mission context was also addressed by Takao Abé (Yamagata
Prefectural College) in the last article of this part. Abé examined the local
modifications that Japanese Christians made in the practice of Christianity. He
stated that although native Christian practices were mostly perceived as her-
etic from a strictly orthodox Catholic perspective, they were transcultural phe-
nomena produced in an intercultural communication between the European
missionaries and the Japanese neophytes. By focusing on the perception of

40 Flüchter
Christian beliefs and practices by Japanese converts Abé examined three as-
pects of cross-cultural discussions, namely, the Jesuit observation of Japanese
spiritual culture, the views on the conduct of early neophytes and the Japanese
translations of Christian doctrine (e.g. testaments, catechisms, prayers and
hagiographies).
The fourth part analyses intersemiotic translations of the Catholic faith in
catechetical works, that is, the preaching of the Christian message through
pictures. Ana Hosne (University of Heidelberg) stated that the use of images
was one of the dividing points of Protestants and Catholics, therefore pictures
were of considerable importance in the Catholic reform. By examining the
case of the China Mission, Hosne analysed whether and how the use of images
changed in the mission areas where the Protestant antagonists were not pres-
ent, but where forms of worship involving images and statues were considered
‘idolatry’ by the missionaries. Hosne examined the refutation of such ‘idola-
trous’ practices in Matteo Ricci’s (1552–1610) Chinese catechism by labelling
them as ‘heterodox’ veneration of images. She stated that this refutation was
a necessary first step in order to be able to introduce ‘orthodox’ Catholic holy
images, which were primarily translations and appropriations of the Jesuit
Jerome Nadal’s (1507–80) book Evangelicae Historiae Imagines into Chinese,
in a later phase of the mission. The Christian imagery introduced through ad-
aptations of Nadal’s book was disseminated with great success in the Jesuit
mission to China and appropriated by the Chinese. However, Hosne concluded
that such a ‘conversion through images’ would not have been possible without
the first missionaries framing Christian imagery within Chinese concepts of
‘heterodox’ and ‘orthodox’ veneration of images.
In the second article of this part, John Ødemark (Oslo University) addressed
the so-called Testerian Catechisms that appeared in the evangelisation of New
Spain. These catechisms rendered the Christian doctrine in a Mesoamerican
pictorial script, which emulated the pronunciation of the original Latin text
via the pictures. They were named after the Franciscan Jacobo de Testera
(1470–1543), who is reported to have accommodated to this Mesoamerican
pictorial tradition by preaching the gospel through images. Thus some schol-
ars attributed the Testerian Catechisms to Franciscan authors who supposedly
accommodated to Mesoamerican culture by rendering the Christian message
in pictorial writing. However, in his contribution, Ødemark underlined the fact
that these catechisms were actually written by native authors. Furthermore,
he showed that theymust be differentiated from Franciscan attempts to evan-
gelise through pictures because the actual use of images was quite different
in both instances, and originated from different conceptions of memory and
methods of conversion. Therefore, contrary to their misguided naming, the

Testerian Catechisms cannot be conceived as a concrete result of Franciscan

preaching through pictures supposedly introduced by Jacobo de Testera.
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Translating Catechisms, Translating Cultures

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004353060_00�

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Global Catholicism – Between Uniformity and Diversity

Being a proselytising religion, Christianity was from the beginning exposed to

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of religious division into several denominations, each claiming to be the true

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has been doubted whether the Tridentine decrees could be implemented on

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15 Cf. André Holenstein, “Empowering Interactions: Looking at Statebuilding from Below,”

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18 Ditchfield, “Decentering,” 187.

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barely been tested in empirical studies.23 Such a global, or glocal, perspective

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countries.27 Moreover, the repercussions of the explained global diversity of

The Jesuits and Transcultural Dimensions of a Religion

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Jahrhundert,” Zeitenblicke 11, no. 1 (2012) [http://www.zeitenblicke.de/2012/1/Fluechter/

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been described in Ignatius’s instructions.41 Thus, it was not restricted to some

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modern phenomena is fairly anachronistic. Interestingly, the same anachro-

Maneesha Taneja, “Translation as a Dialogue between Cultures: The Jesuit Experiences,”

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context of everyday interaction and more so in the missionary and pastoral

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and it is always changing, that is, transculturality itself is dynamic.54 We want

Catechism – A Global Genre?

To explore the scope of transculturation and the morphology of the transcul-

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compare different denominations in the 16th century. Of course, the details,

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In some way, Luther’s catechisms established a paradigm, and thus exerted

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formulations of the European models.80 Moreover, in the European context,

Translation as an Analytical Tool

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no neutral knowledge production.89 With regard to our case studies, we must

89 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” in Outside in the Teaching

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cannot successfully evangelise. However, the degree of translation was always

sozialer und politischer Ordnungen in Empfangszeremonien (Frankfurt am Main; New

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and appropriation. For example, from the perspective of Western supremacy, it

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wider understanding of translation, catechisms are the more fitting source.

Dimensions of Translating Catechism

This conception of cultural translation helps us to form a multi-layered matrix

The Catechism: Translated, Adapted or Written

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi ��.��63/9789004353060_00�