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The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402-1555
From the 14th century onward, political and religious motives led Ethiopian travelers to Mediterranean Europe. For two centuries, their ancient Christian heritage and the myth of a fabled eastern king named Prester John allowed the Ethiopians to engage the continent's secular and religious elites as peers. Meanwhile, back home the Ethiopian nobility came to welcome European visitors and at times even co-opted them by arranging mixed marriages and bestowing land rights. The protagonists of this encounter sought and discovered each other in royal palaces, monasteries, and markets throughout the Mediterranean basin, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean littoral, from Lisbon to Jerusalem and from Venice to Goa. Matteo Salvadore's narrative takes the reader on a voyage of reciprocal discovery that climaxed with the Portuguese intervention on the side of the Christian monarchy in the Ethiopian-Adali War. Thereafter, the arrival of the Jesuits at the Horn of Africa turned the mutually beneficial Ethiopian-European encounter into a bitter confrontation over the souls of Ethiopian Christians.
A Companion to Religious Minorities in Early Modern Rome
A Companion to Religious Minorities in Early Modern Rome investigates the lives and stories of the many groups and individuals in Rome, between 1500 and approximately 1750, who were not Roman (Latin) Catholic. It shows how early modern Catholic people and institutions in Rome were directly influenced by their interactions with other religious traditions. This collection reveals the significant impact of Protestants, Muslims, Jews, and Eastern Rite Christians; the influence of the many transient groups and individual travelers who passed through the city; the unique contributions of converts to Catholicism, who drew on the religion of their birth; and the importance of intermediaries, fluent in more than one culture and religion. Contributors include: Olivia Adankpo-Labadie, Robert John Clines, Matthew Coneys Wainwright, Serena Di Nepi, Irene Fosi, Mayu Fujikawa, Sam Kennerley, Emily Michelson, James Nelson Novoa, Cesare Santus, Piet van Boxel, and Justine A. Walden.
Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe
This book explores why Ethiopian kings pursued long-distance diplomatic contacts with Latin Europe in the late Middle Ages. It traces the history of more than a dozen embassies dispatched to the Latin West by the kings of Solomonic Ethiopia, a powerful Christian kingdom in the medieval Horn of Africa. Drawing on sources from Europe, Ethiopia, and Egypt, it examines the Ethiopian kings’ motivations for sending out their missions in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries – and argues that a desire to acquire religious treasures and foreign artisans drove this early intercontinental diplomacy. Moreover, the Ethiopian initiation of contacts with the distant Christian sphere of Latin Eur...
Christianity and the Detective Story
Christianity and the Detective Story is the first book to gather together academic criticism on this particular connection between religion and popular culture. The articles cover the origin of this relationship in the works of G. K. Chesterton, examine its development through the “Golden Age” of mystery writers such as Dorothy L. Sayers, and include discussions of recent and contemporary television crime dramas. The volume makes a strong case for viewing mystery writing as a valid means of providing both entertainment and religious insight.
Hiob Ludolf and Johann Michael Wansleben
Hiob Ludolf (1624-1704) and Johann Michael Wansleben (1635-1679), the master and his erstwhile student could not be more different. Ludolf was a celebrated member of the Republic of Letters and the towering authority on Ethiopian studies. Wansleben, himself a brilliant scholar and, unlike Ludolf, a seasoned traveller in the Middle East, converted to Catholicism and eventually died impoverished and marginalized. Both stood at the centre of the burgeoning study of Ethiopia and spent a formative part of their career in middle sized Duchy of Saxe-Gotha which for several years played a pivotal role in Ethiopian-European encounters. This volume offers in-depth studies of the remarkable life and work of these two scholars in a broader intellectual, political, and confessional context.
The Mineral and the Visual
Opulent jeweled objects ranked among the most highly valued works of art in the European Middle Ages. At the same time, precious stones prompted sophisticated reflections on the power of nature and the experience of mineralized beings. Beyond a visual regime that put a premium on brilliant materiality, how can we account for the ubiquity of gems in medieval thought? In The Mineral and the Visual, art historian Brigitte Buettner examines the social roles, cultural meanings, and active agency of precious stones in secular medieval art. Exploring the layered roles played by gems in aesthetic, ideological, intellectual, and economic practices, Buettner focuses on three significant categories of ...
Decoding Debate in the Venetian Senate
This book uncovers a long-lost classification mechanism for analysing the Deliberazioni, secretive records of the medieval Venetian Senate. Using Albanian cities as a case study, the book helps identify unspoken state priorities during a transformative decade for Venice.
Afonso I Mvemba a Nzinga, King of Kongo
"John K. Thornton’s new book is another must-read. It contains both translations of the extant letters of the most significant king of Kongo’s history, Afonso I (r. 1506–1542), and a powerful, learned, and highly readable analysis of what these letters tell us about the life and times of one of the most important rulers anywhere in the world during the sixteenth century. This book will be essential reading for scholars, teachers, and students engaged with the history of the Kingdom of Kongo." —Toby Green, King’s College London
Prisoners of Prester John
During the 16th century, Portugal endeavored to locate the mythical kingdom of Prester John--a Christian nation rumored to be somewhere in the Orient, amidst the pagans and Muslims. This study chronicles Portugal's final attempt, a six-year odyssey in Ethiopia that resulted in a tragicomic collision with a proud but isolated Christian kingdom. After summarizing the Prester John myth and the many efforts it spawned, the work focuses on the Ethiopian mission's chronicler, Father Francisco Alvares, who fell in love with the country and its people, became a friend of its king, hid the Abyssinians' heresies from his superiors, and set in motion events that saved Ethiopia from imminent destruction. Unique in the annals of Europeans' initial contacts with African peoples, the Portuguese mission is a portrait of hopeful preconceptions buffeted and eventually transformed by encounters with a fascinating, utterly unexpected reality.
