A PRIN FUNDED PROJECT 2022-2025
PoWoR is 3-year Italian PRIN (Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale) funded project (2023-2025) that aims to study the politics of worship in Italy and the British Isles in the Early Modern period. This developed through the vernacularization and dissemination of devotional texts, both within the Bible and issuing from religious and lay. These text-types will be investigated as forms of textual traces produced to shape individual and collective, local and national identities. In combination with the Bible, parts of which are considered as the first prayer books used by religious communities, mostly within a context of Reformation, a proliferation of devotional texts contributed to the development of a religious unity, on a public and private level, connecting lay piety to civic identity.
Considering this context, the intellectual exchange and the clash between Catholicism, Anglicanism and Protestantism, the research group will examine the political role played by the process of vernacularization and diffusion of devotional discourse from a comparative, literary and historical-linguistic perspective: a network of case studies will be investigated, examining translation, adaptation and re-creation as forms of approach to and manipulation of the biblical text in Italy and in the British Isles, and migrations of such forms from one country to another. PoWoR researchers belong to four main Italian universities: Sapienza University of Rome, Insubria University, Padua University, Perugia University. Each research unit will explore a specific strand that will compose the overall mosaic of the project's fields, authors and texts.