Holy women in Ethiopia

¿Entre la tradición y la revolución? Alternativas africanas en un mundo global, 2022

Ethiopian women became during the first third of the 17th century one of the main topics of interest of the Jesuit missionaries that settled in the country between 1557 and 1634. Even though in some cases this interest could be considered close to anthropology, in most of them the approach was critical, as long as the Ethiopian society, mostly follower of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, was conceived as affected by heretic ideas and customs. In this paper we pretend to analyse the documents generated by the Jesuits (books and letters, mainly), to find out what the Jesuits thought of the Ethiopian women, considering that they wanted to bui]d a new Catholic society in the country, and how they intended to change them. This included many topics, from customs considered mere superstition to the key question of mdrriage, that will be amlys€d in depth here.

A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, 2020

The late Sylvia Pankhurst, as editor of the Ethiopia Observer, promoted awareness of Ethiopian women's history in the 1950s and it gained ground as an academic subject, alongside social history, starting in the 1970s. 1 Though much work has focused on the modern period, two recent full-length contributions concern the seventeenth century, with considerably more relevance for the medieval period. 2 It is nonetheless the case that scholarship on women in the Middle Ages proper remains scarce. Until very recently, the principal points of reference were the few pages devoted to the medieval era in surveys of women's history found in the general social history written by Richard Pankhurst. 3 In the last decade or so, however, a few scholars (including this author) have devoted studies exclusively to medieval Ethiopian women and/or undertaken gendered analyses of aspects of medieval Ethiopian society. 4 Medieval women's and gender history may therefore be said to have "launched," and to be a field with great potential for future growth. The aim of this essay is to introduce the available source materials and existing scholarship that have been or can be deployed to illuminate medieval Ethiopian women's lives, and to suggest some of the categories of analysis through which they can be approached. In keeping with my own expertise and existing studies, the emphasis is on medieval Christian

History in Africa, 1981

The hagiographic literature of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church may be divided into two major categories: the translated lives of the saints and martyrs of the early Christian church and the lives of local saints. The essentially foreign works, which constitute the first of these groups, will be of only peripheral concern in this paper. While books such as Barlaam and Joasaph, The Life of St. George, and The Conflict of Severus did serve as models for the traditions dealing with local saints, they are of little interest to the student of Ethiopian history.The most interesting of these local hagiographies are those about saints who lived between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. These traditions, which recount the lives of some kings and many monastic leaders, are of great importance for the reconstruction of the history of medieval Ethiopia. As Conti Rossini has written, The more I preoccupy myself with the history of Ethiopia, the more I realize the importance of the study of lo...

2003

Image on the front cover: Roof of the 12 th century rock-hewn church of Béta Giorgis in Lalibela, northern Ethiopia 2. Christian Texts, Manuscripts, Hagiographies 2.1 Sources, bibliographies, catalogues 2.2 General and comparative studies on Ethiopian religious literature 2.3 On saints 2.4 Hagiographies and related texts 2.5 Ethiopian editions and translations of the Bible 2.6 Editions and analyses of other religious texts 2.7 Ethiopian religious commentaries and exegeses 3. Ethiopian Christian Art and Architecture 3.1 General issues 3.2 Manuscript illumination 3.3 Paintings and icons 3.4 Religious material culture: crosses, textiles, carvings, jewelry 3.5 Church architecture and design 3.6 Biographical studies of painters and artists

There is virtually no controversy as to when and how Christianity was introduced into Aksum in the early decades of the fourth century; but here is very little research on the roles that women of power might have played in its introduction. Ethiopian and non Ethiopian sources attest clearly that Christianity was preached and accepted precisely at the time when a Queen was in power. Ethiopian sources identify her as Queen Ahyäwa Sofya (ruled from 306 to 313 Ethiopian Calendar that is equivalent to 313/4 to 320/21Gregorian calendar). It is difficult to establish with accuracy the duration of her reign; she might have ruled for a much longer time than she is usually allocated in Ethiopian chronology. This paper has three objectives. The first objective is to argue that the credit for the introduction of Christianity ought to go to Queen Ahyäwa Sofya and not to Ezana or the twin brothers Abreha and Atsbeha. Admittedly such an interpretation would require the gendered rewriting of ancient and medieval history-a task far beyond the scope of this introductory and exploratory paper. The second objective is to explore the terrain, in a very introductory manner, on how we can deconstruct the patriarchal dominance of the writing of history. The third objective is a brief outline of the circumstances (mostly coincidental) that favored the introduction of Christianity via the Red sea rather than via the Nile valley.

Aethiopica, 2016

The paper is an attempt to show how uniformity and regularity characterize the childhood of different Ethiopian saints as it is sketched in the Ethiopic hagiographic tradition. Presenting ample evidences from different hagiographies of Ethiopian saints, it tries to show how the saints’ early life follows a set of standardized patterns which are seen nearly as universal convention that is almost interchangeable between one saint and another. The discussion is focused on three patterns (infertility, prophecy/vision and old-child) of childhood where uniformity and regularity in the tradition are evident.

In D. Nosnitsin, ed., Varia Aethiopica. In Memory of Sevir B. Chernetsov (1943- 2005) , Scrinium. Revue de patrologie, d’hagiographie critique et d’histoire ecclésiastique, 1 (St Petersburg: Société des études byzantines et slaves, Byzantinorossica, 2005), 197– 247., 2005

Digital philology, 2019

Value in the Medieval Ethiopian Marian Miracle Tale of "The Cannibal of Qəmər" 4 An important trend in scholarship is attending to the metamorphoses of particular folktales across regions, periods, and religions, tracking what such changes reveal about the direction of cultural transmission. Part of this trend is looking beyond circulation in Europe to circulation across south-south boundaries, or even from south to north, the latter of which I have done much to try to forward. In this essay, however, I consider an instance of ostensible Europe-to-Africa textual transfer: the body of folktales that circulated around the medieval world about miracles performed by Saint Mary, the mother of Jesus. The Ethiopian Marian tales, which appear in a compilation text titled Täˀammərä Maryam (Miracles of Mary), are sometimes mistakenly said to have arisen solely in Europe. To explore the issue of influence, I examine a Marian tale innovated in Ethiopia titled "The Cannibal of Qəmər" (or "The Miracle of the Man-Eater" or "The Story of Belai"). Reading the cannibal tale diachronically, relationally, allegorically, and intertextually reveals much. The Marian tale template first devised in the Levant persists across multiple boundaries yet was radically adapted in Ethiopia, underscoring why care is required when discussing African narrative adaptation of outside texts. M any humanities scholars are now examining the ancient, medieval, and early modern transmission of ideas across the permeable boundaries of language and geography, revealing how our world and its ideas have always been imbricated. 1 Some of the most interesting work has been on the genre of hagiography, as saints' lives have been among the most ubiquitous texts across time (from antiquity through modernity), place (from east to west), and religious traditions (from Christianity and Islam to Hinduism and Buddhism). Scholars have demonstrated that such texts repeatedly metamorphosed as they

African Christian Biography: Narratives, Beliefs, and Boundaries, ed. Dana Robert, 2018

Three thousand years of writing in Africa has yielded perhaps ten known biographies of African women written by Africans before the nineteenth century. Autobiographies by premodern African women are even rarer; an early hagiography about an Ethiopian woman, however, may constitute such a text. Gädlä Krəstos Śämra (The Life-Struggles of Krəstos Śämra [Christ Delights in Her]), written in an Ethiopian monastery sometime between 1450 and 1508, is about a saintly woman who lived in the fifteenth century (no exact dates of her birth or death appear in her hagiography). The text gives a short overview of Krəstos Śämra’s life in the third person, but then proceeds in the first person as Krəstos Śämra describes a series of her religious visions, including one in which she attempts to reconcile Christ and Satan. Although the text contains a few biographical details about her, it is more of an intellectual autobiography, the narrative of one woman’s philosophy and her belief in the possibilities for healing a broken world. As such, this text expands our understanding of the global female visionary tradition, which tends to be oriented more toward reconciliation than damnation. Krəstos Śämra must be placed alongside such visionary medieval women saints as the English Christians Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, the Muslims Rabia of Basri and Lalla Aziza, and the Hindu Mirabai. Despite its value, her hagiography has been translated only into Amharic and Italian; in this chapter portions appear in English for the first time.

Religion, 1985