United in Song: Creating Multilingual Religious Communities through Psalm Translations in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries

The confessional shifts in the sixteenth-century Low Countries created new religious communities that shared ideas on how to interpret and use the sacred texts of Christianity. Within the newly formed Calvinist communities, great importance was attached to the vernacular languages as possible media for religious works and liturgical practices. However, this focus on the vernaculars had its repercussions on the sense of unity that existed within the religious communities of the Low Countries, where both French and Dutch were used as local languages. The multilingualism created misunderstandings and might thus cause further disintegration of the Calvinist Church. In this talk, I will discuss how several prominent Netherlandish Calvinists used translations of the Book of Psalms in order to enhance the confessional unity and solidarity despite the linguistic differences.