{"id":26672,"date":"2012-11-25T00:19:22","date_gmt":"2012-11-25T00:19:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=26672"},"modified":"2016-05-13T01:51:55","modified_gmt":"2016-05-13T01:51:55","slug":"black-faces-white-deeds-the-miracles-of-ancient-ethiopian-saints-in-the-early-modern-catholic-atlantic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=26672","title":{"rendered":"Black Faces, White Deeds: The Miracles of Ancient Ethiopian Saints in the Early Modern Catholic Atlantic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black Faces, White Deeds: The Miracles of Ancient Ethiopian Saints in the Early Modern Catholic Atlantic<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association<\/a>
\nNew Orleans, Louisiana
\n2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06<\/p>\n

Thursday, 2013-01-03: 16:10 CST (Local Time)
\nPreservation Hall, Studio 3 (New Orleans Marriott)<\/p>\n

From Session AHA Session 31: Saintly Translations: Stories about Saints across Time and Space<\/a>, 2013-01-03: 15:30-17:30 CST (Local Time)<\/p>\n

Erin Kathleen Rowe<\/a><\/strong>, Assistant Professor of History
\nJohns Hopkins University<\/em><\/p>\n

In the mid-seventeenth century, a woman stood before the Inquisitiorial<\/a> tribunal in Mexico City, accused of Judaizing practices and speaking disrespectfully of the saints.\u00a0 One witness claimed that the defendant had harsh words for one saint in particular, Benedict of Palermo<\/a>: \u201cHow can a black man be a saint?\u201d This striking question reveals the spiritual, cultural, and racial anxieties that could be provoked by black sanctity in the early modern Catholic world.\u00a0 While the Catholic Church actively promoted the cults of several saints purportedly of sub-Saharan African origin or descent in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, their reception and veneration created a kind of spiritual ambiguity during a period of history when rapid globalization of Catholicism paralleled rapid intensification of racialization.\u00a0 My paper looks at the circulation of black saints throughout the early modern Catholic Atlantic; focusing on two case studies, the Ethiopian saints Ifigenia and Elesban, I examine the movement of devotion, miracles, and images throughout the larger Catholic world.\u00a0 Miracles attributed to these saints were very likely to be associated with a holy image, since there were no extant relics.\u00a0 Thus, the visible representation of their blackness stood as an ever-present aspect of their cults.\u00a0 Ifigenia and Elesban stood as patron saints of confraternities for black and mulatto<\/a> populations throughout Latin America, while back in Europe their images appeared in Carmelite churches throughout Spain and Portugal for predominantly white audiences.\u00a0 Through close study of miracle stories, we can arrive at a fuller understanding of devotion to the saints throughout the Catholic world and the significance of their ethnicity and sanctity as they shifted locations and audiences, context and meaning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Black Faces, White Deeds: The Miracles of Ancient Ethiopian Saints in the Early Modern Catholic Atlantic 127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association New Orleans, Louisiana 2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06 Thursday, 2013-01-03: 16:10 CST (Local Time) Preservation Hall, Studio 3 (New Orleans Marriott) From Session AHA Session 31: Saintly Translations: Stories about Saints across Time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[459,13,8,14,820],"tags":[12814,1730,12870,12868,12869],"class_list":["post-26672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-liveevents","category-media-archive","category-papers","category-religion","tag-127th-annual-meeting-of-the-american-historical-association","tag-american-historical-association","tag-erin-k-rowe","tag-erin-kathleen-rowe","tag-erin-rowe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26672"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46965,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26672\/revisions\/46965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}