Abstract
Drawing on the work of Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent, this essay proposes utilizing hagiographies from the The Book of the Saints of the Ethiopian Church, a fifteenth-century Ethiopian collection of saints’ lives, to explore various aspects of conversion. Other scholars employ a similar approach when analyzing hagiographical literature found in medieval Europe. While acknowledging that these texts do not provide details about the historical experience of conversion, they can assist scholars in understanding the conception of conversion in the imagination of the culture that created them. This essay specifically focuses on the role of women in conversion throughout the text and argues that, although men and women were almost equally represented as agents of conversion, a closer examination reveals that their participation remained gendered. Women more frequently converted someone with whom they had a prior relationship, especially a member of their familial network. Significantly, these observations mirror the patterns uncovered by contemporary scholars such as Dana Robert, who notes how women contributed to the spread of Christianity primarily through human relationships. By integrating these representations of conversion from late medieval Ethiopia, scholarship will gain a more robust picture of conversion in Africa more broadly and widen its understanding of world Christianity.
Highlights
If the entry for “conversion” in the Encyclopedia of Religion serves as any indication, it is difficult for scholars to agree on what exactly constitutes conversion (Rambo and Farhadian 2005)
Religious adherence and conversion often depended on who controlled a particular region, which changed frequently in the medieval period as both Christianity and Islam expanded in Ethiopia
By analyzing the conversion narratives contained within the text, this paper argues that The Book of the Saints portrayed both men and women as agents of conversion, yet their representation remained gendered (Sterk 2010a, 2010b)
Summary
If the entry for “conversion” in the Encyclopedia of Religion serves as any indication, it is difficult for scholars to agree on what exactly constitutes conversion (Rambo and Farhadian 2005). Religious adherence and conversion often depended on who controlled a particular region, which changed frequently in the medieval period as both Christianity and Islam expanded in Ethiopia. Both Christianity and Islam integrated local religious elements, making the historical reality of conversion less clear-cut than it sometimes appears (Fauvelle 2020). Hagiography can be a difficult source to use for historical research, it can be a fruitful one While these accounts do not necessarily align with the historical experience of conversion in Ethiopia, they do help scholars understand the conception of ideal conversion in the imagination of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. This study hopes to contribute to the broader understanding of the ways in which women contributed to the movement of Christianity outside of traditional missionary sources
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