A portabilidade da Bíblia a uma nova escala: a Sociedade Bíblica e o projeto de universalização das Escrituras (séc. XIX)

The institutionalization of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) in the 19th century in Great Britain has (re)placed the problem of the portability of the Bible on a new scale, envisaging the implementation of a plan for the universalization of the biblical texts. The activity BFBS developed in Portugal along that century was an intrinsic part of that project and it also made clear how that institutionalization of the religious was structured on two levels: proselytism and its economical dimension, successively operated in a context of ambiguous and floating boundaries. This paper focuses on the action of the BFBS in Portugal has a promoter of the portability and materiality of the Scriptures, namely through colportage, as a mean of disseminating a Text that was defined as sacred.