Interpretatio Christiana

Reformatting traditional religious and cultural activities and beliefs into a Christianized form was officially sanctioned; preserved in the Venerable Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum is a letter from Pope Gregory I to Mellitus, arguing that conversions were easier if people were allowed to retain the outward forms of their traditions while changing the object of their veneration to God, "to the end that, whilst some gratifications are outwardly permitted them, they may the more easily consent to the inward consolations of the grace of God".

For example, Sulpicius Severus, in his Vita of Martin of Tours, a dedicated destroyer of temples and sacred trees, remarks "wherever he destroyed heathen temples, there he used immediately to build either churches or monasteries" (Vita, ch xiii Archived 2006-09-09 at the Wayback Machine), and when Benedict took possession of the site at Monte Cassino, he began by smashing the sculpture of Apollo and the altar that crowned the height.

In the context of Christianization of Germanic tribes, Herbert Schutz notes that eventually old local gods were still "celebrated on their feast days, on their former sacred sites", replaced with some particular saints.

In the context of art, interpretatio christiana amounted to renaming (e.g., by added or changed inscription) or unnaming objects, as well as Christian allegorization of them.

Unnaming could include deliberate omission of traditional pagan interpretations of the imagery in descriptions of artifacts, leading to their oblivion, whether intentionally or by ignorance.

[18] A thorough analysis of Christian reinterpretation of ancient learning was carried out by Hervé Inglebert, with special attention to cosmography, geography, ethnography, and historiography.

Isaac Casaubon, De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticus exercitationes (1614) makes a third familiar example, where sound scholarship was somewhat compromised by sectarian pleading.

The 20th century saw more purely historical inquiries, free of sectarian bias; an early historicist classic in this field of study was Jean Seznec's The Survival of the Pagan Gods: the mythological tradition and its place in Renaissance humanism and the arts..[20]