03/07/2026 09:00 - 11:10

HALL: Parenzo - A8

Contact: Manfrinetti B.

Chair: Wilke C.

The purpose of this panel is to explore how sacred texts are activated through practices of translation, vernacularization, and narrative mediation across different religious and historical contexts. Rather than approaching translation as a merely linguistic operation, the contributions gathered here investigate how textual strategies, material arrangements, and audience-oriented choices enable sacred texts to become meaningful, efficacious, and experientially potent beyond their original linguistic settings. In doing so, the authors contribute to broader discussions on religious experience, textual authority, and the material and intellectual practices through which sacred texts are made present, intelligible, and effective within specific communities. Moving from the late medieval period to the present, and across Jewish, Christian, Islamic and other religious traditions, the panel aims to question the relationship between sacred language and vernacular expression, questioning the assumption that sacrality is intrinsically tied to a specific language and literary genre. It asks instead if the sacred may be mobilised through storytelling, compilation, layout, paratexts, and modes of address that shape readers' engagement with the text. Translation and vulgarization emerge not only as tools of access, but as practices that negotiate authority, legitimacy, and the boundaries between ritual use, personal devotion, and cognitive understanding. By foregrounding concrete textual artefacts, the panel investigates how different forms of textual mediation "activate" the sacred in distinct ways: through narrative immersion, pedagogical framing, hermeneutical guidance, or polemical positioning. Particular attention is paid to the intended audiences of these texts and to the ways in which linguistic choices reflect assumptions about who is entitled to interpret, internalise, or experience the sacred.