Reformation and Modernity: Catholic Printing in Kerala in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In examining the religious implications of printing, there is a scholarly consensus that Protestant Christianity, rather than Catholicism, played a central role in popularising print technology by disseminating religious materials in vernacular languages. This article builds upon this widely accepted hypothesis and seeks to explore the religious aspects of print modernity in Kerala, a southern state in India. The focus of this study is on the Catholic Church’s engagement with printing and the development of Catholic print capitalism in Kerala, with a special emphasis on the nineteenth century until the 1870s. This paper investigates how the Catholic Church interacted with and mediated with the printing press as an agent of modernity, particularly in response to the flourishing Protestant missionary engagements in the region.