Popular print, translation and religious identity

ABSTRACT

This article examines the circulation of popular religious translations in the 19th century, illustrating how the intersection of religion, print and popular culture fostered greater orthodoxy in religious practices and greater devotion in personal piety. Using a case study of the Marian tradition in Ireland in the mid-19th century, the article questions how the wide circulation of translated religious texts could serve to create a sense of national uniqueness, but also to establish links to a global religious community, particularly in the context of the sectarian dispute. Informed by book history, the article considers the diffusion of ideas and practices through textual trails, the mechanisms of this diffusion, and the societal agency involved in the circulation of texts. It argues that the intersection between translation, reading, and religion furthered a sense of identification within a religious community and contributed to understandings of both textual and spiritual faithfulness.

KEYWORDS:

• Devotional literature
• translation
• Catholic identity
• Ireland
• reading

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr. Anne O’Connor is a Senior Lecturer in Italian in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She has published widely in the areas of translation history, 19th-century literature and culture, transnationalism and religious history. She is the author of Translation and Language in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A European Perspective (Palgrave, 2017); Florence: City and Memory in the Nineteenth Century (Città di Vita, 2008), and has also edited Nation/Nazione: Irish Nationalism and the Italian Risorgimento (UCD Press, 2013).

ORCID

Anne O’Connor http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2458-2223

Notes

1 Almost all scholarly works on religious translation focus on the translation of core religious texts such as the Bible and the Qur’an, see for example Long (2005) and Haynes (2006). The neglect of ancillary religious publications is equally true for Catholicism and Protestantism.

2 This emergence of a close nexus between Irish identity and Catholicism has variously been attributed to colonialism, polarisation of Catholic-Protestant relationships and British political oppression (Ó hAnnracháin 2008; Whelan 2005; White 2010). However, the complexity of the evolution of Irish Catholicism, nationalism and identity is too broad a topic to be adequately discussed in this article, especially given the wide variations in the relationships between nationalist movements and the Catholic Church ranging from O’Connellism to Young Ireland to Parnell over the course of the 19th century. For further discussions on the emergence of a strong identification between Irishness and Catholicism and its historical contextualisation see for example Rafferty (2008, 2013), Corish (1985), Corish and Comerford (1990), Larkin (1980, 1987, 1996), Comerford (2015), White (2010).

3 Quoted in Milan (2013, 99).

4 Starting with the arrival of the Ursulines in the late 18th century, Ireland witnessed a continuous stream of continental orders including the Sisters of the Sacred Heart (1842), the Faithful Companions of Jesus (1844), the Sisters of the Good Shepherd (1848), the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of the Refuge (1853), The Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul (1855), the Sisters of St. Louis (1859), the Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny (1860), the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary (1870), La Sainte Union des Sacrés Coeurs (1862), the Sisters of Bon Secours (1865), the Marist Sisters (1873) and The Little Sisters of the Assumption (1891). Out of a total of 62 convent boarding-schools in 19th-century Ireland, only six were run by Irish religious orders (O'Connor 1987, 38).

5 Cullen to James Duffy, Vol. 3, 3 November 1859 (MacSuibhne 1961, 271).

6 Originally quoted in Milan (2013, 113–114).

7 When Russell and Kelly translated Schmid’s Tales, we are told that they devoted some of their ‘intervals of leisure from more laborious study’ (The Nation, 12 July 1845).

8 Cullen to James Duffy, Vol. 2, 8 December 1857. Original letter in Latin (MacSuibhne 1961, 239).

9 Russell was also aware of the French translations of the work and he said that

the French translators, who never fail to exercise their own judgement in some shape or other on the book they undertake to translate have divided [the tales] into series, according to the ages for which they appear to be best adapted. Russell (1844, 396)