In the Middle Ages, apocryphal literature was wildly popular because it answered questions raised (but unanswered) by canonical scriptures, especially questions about the nature of hell and who would find themselves there. In translating apocryphal visions of hell, vernacular writers customised the inferno to speak to local concerns about identity and belonging in locally significant ways. Because hell is only obliquely described in the Bible, there is a paradox: it is barely mapped out, and yet it is central to understanding how salvation works, how the world ends, and how God metes out divine justice.
Translating hell argues that this crucial but under-defined literary space invited extra-canonical embellishment by vernacular translators. Drawing upon a robust corpus of texts in Latin, Old Irish, Old English, Middle Welsh, and Old Norse, the book invites readers to consider the creative energies generated by the tensions between orthodox understandings of hell and localised versions, as translators sought to harness the power of vernacular words and genres to reinvent the inferno.
The book analyses a wide range of poetic and prose literary texts to argue that the sheer variety found in medieval vernacular descriptions of hell represents not confusion or ignorance but creativity. Thanks to the power of vernacular apocrypha, hell was translated and localised to solve regional problems of identity, belonging, and justice, delineating forms of belonging by reinterpreting and transmuting the boundaries of salvation and damnation across time, space, and theology.
