The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros: A Seventeenth-Century African Biography of an Ethiopian Woman by Galawdewos

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros: A Seventeenth-Century African Biography of an Ethiopian Woman by Galawdewos Andrew Crislip (bio) Galawdewos. The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros: A Seventeenth-Century African Biography of an Ethiopian Woman. Translated and edited by Wendy Laura Belcher and Michael Kleiner, Princeton UP, 2015. xxxii + 500 pp. ISBN 978-0691164212, $39.95. Ethiopia is home to one of the most ancient forms of Christianity, the history of which can be traced to the fourth century. The classical language of Ethiopia, Ge'ez, preserves a large body of indigenous literature of religious and secular importance, as well as many early Jewish and Christian texts translated from Egyptian Copto-Arabic exemplars. Original composition in the classical language continued into the early modern period in a range of genres, among the most popular of which were saints' lives, developed in the distinctive Ethiopian genre of gädl, as reflected in the text translated here as The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros. The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros is an important witness to conflicts between Ethiopian Christians and proto-colonial Portuguese missions. In the 1520s and 1530s, the Habäša people became increasingly concerned with the advance of Islamic armies in Africa and, consequently, appealed to the Portuguese for help. After the Portuguese intervened, Jesuit missionaries set about attempting to convert the Habäša to Catholicism, hoping to rid them not only of their miaphysite (single nature) theology about the divine and human nature of Jesus Christ (which they share with Egyptian, Armenian, and Syrian churches), but also of their traditional customs that set them apart even from other miaphysite Christians, such as refusing pork and rabbit, keeping the Sabbath on Saturday and Sunday, and not baptizing children until the fortieth day. A new king, Susenyos, converted to Catholicism (he was from a non-Habäša people) and, with the Jesuits, tried to enforce conversion. The mission was culturally insensitive and met with widespread resistance from "among Habäša military ranks" (7) and among numerous Habäša noblewomen (7–10), foremost among whom was Walatta Petros (1592–1642 ce). The Catholic mission failed catastrophically, and no colonial attempt was made for another 250 years. Published by Princeton University Press, this deluxe edition of The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros is illustrated with 60 color images [End Page 366] from four Ethiopic manuscripts. It is also a technically demanding one (not least due to the complicated transliteration system and the Ethiopian Fidäl script), and the editors and press have produced it beautifully. Wendy Laura Belcher's introduction to the text covers the historical context and the distinctive features of the genre of gädl, which Belcher and Kleiner translate as "Life-Struggles" or, alternatively, "Life and Struggles." Belcher also discusses the manuscripts used for the translation based on painstaking collations of some dozen manuscripts (49–60). Belcher's description of the great efforts needed to produce this edition will be valuable to the many readers who do not come to this text familiar with the methods and complexities of manuscript editing and text criticism. The main audience for this thorough edition will likely be historians and students of ancient and medieval hagiography, as well as historians of early colonialism in Africa. For such readers, this edition offers rich resources for the study of Christian biography in Africa. On the other hand, the claim that this hagiography (which strikes me as typical in most ways of the genre) will aid "those seeking to problematize ideas of authorship, both supporting and challenging Saussurean ideas about language, not authors, speaking and Barthesian ideas about authors as facilitators not originators" seems rather unlikely (41). The edition itself is of a very high quality, although, since I do not read Ge'ez, I was unable to check or verify the translations. I will say, however, that the translation is exceptionally fluid throughout and heavily annotated. The translators identify biblical quotations, gloss names, traditions, and other matters that would not be clear to those unfamiliar with Ethiopia, and they note when they are translating more idiomatically, giving a...