Reworking The Sacred through Music and Poetry: De/Sacralisation of Texts

The volume focuses on the changes which texts undergo with respect to their sacred status when they are reworked and recontextualized through music and poetry. In a series of case studies, the chapters explore processes of selection, canonization, and transformation, which are triggered, for example, by musical settings, translations into poetry, and literary renderings. These processes endow texts with a special aura, authority, or normative value, which may influence the way in which they are perceived. Among the examples treated in this volume are the insertion of songs and music into seventeenth- and eighteenth-century funeral sermons, the verbal strategies of poeticizing English Psalm translations, and nasheed covers, i.e. Muslim versions of pop songs, loosely based on the Qur'an and Islamic teachings. The editors are all members of the Research Unit "De/Sacralization of Texts" / Forschungsgruppe 2828 "De/Sakralisierung von Texten," funded by the German National Research Foundation (DFG) at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen.