Mission and Translation

The present issue of Historical Interactions of Religious Cultures investigates the manifold ramifications of Christian missions across the early modern world, emphasizing intellectual exchange and cultural transfer. The collected case studies regarding diverse missionary sites in Asia, the Americas, and Europe open a vista onto the mutual creativity and cultural productivity of the missionary encounter between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The exploration of textual, material, and cultural translation turns the spotlight on the complex negotiations of the missionaries' message and the strategies, re-appropriation, and responses it entailed. This editorial introduction connects the diverse translation practices in the varying contexts of early modern evangelizing attempts, both colonial and internal-European, to the power relations between the missionaries and the missionized. It proposes using translation as an analytical tool to retrieve the Other's voice by studying missionary translations of a wide variety of texts, images, and religious practices that were produced as part of the quest to make Christianity accessible to the local population, the intended target of the mission.