Of all the keywords explored by this lecture series, “appropriation” is undoubtedly the one most in need of rehabilitation. In a bid to create an explanatory framework for religious change which is fully alive to dynamics of reciprocity within inequality, Simon Ditchfield draws on art historian Michael Baxandall’s “excursus against influence” as well as the observation made by William B. Taylor, a historian of colonial Mexico, that change is not typically imposed or resisted by a single person or group. The cult of saints, their relics, and their representation in both art and hagiography will form the point of departure for this lecture, which explores how Tridentine Catholicism came to be translated globally.