Wendy Belcher (Princeton University), Ladders of Heaven: The Miracles of the Virgin Mary in Medieval African Literature and Art
Abstract: The Virgin Mary is the world’s most storied person. That is, she is the human being about whom the most stories have ever been told, over more centuries, in more countries, and in more languages than any other person ever. In this sense, folktales about her are the only truly global body of texts, representing how humanity has thought across time and space about the human in the context of precarity. One of the most important bodies of such texts are those from Africa, in Geʿez (classical Ethiopic), the liturgical and scholarly language of highland Ethiopia for two thousand years, as well as in Coptic, Arabic, and Old Nubian. Over a thousand African stories about the Virgin Mary, dating from the second century to the present, are still extant and now available in translation through a new digital humanities project. In these stories—full of slippery characters up to no good and wide-eyed innocents ensnared in their shenanigans, all of whom stumble through startling plot turns to arrive in the arms of the all-forgiving mother—no sin is too great for her power and no plea too late for her mediation. Indeed, Our Lady Mary often leaves behind the role of mere intercessor and is herself the loving redeemer, without any male divinity in sight.
About the speaker: Wendy Laura Belcher is professor in Princeton University’s departments of Comparative Literature and African American Studies, where she is a specialist in early written African literature, particularly that in African languages. Her research focuses on how non-Western literatures have participated in a global traffic in invention, pairing texts across national and continental boundaries to debunk stereotypes of Africans as peoples without history, texts, or influence until the 1950s, as in her book Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson: Ethiopian Thought in the Making of an English Author (Oxford, 2012). She also works as a co-translator to provide access to medieval and early modern African texts in Gəˁəz (classical Ethiopic), including a biography, works of philosophy, short stories, and a medieval novel. She is the translator of The Hatata Inquiries: Two Texts of Seventeenth-Century African Philosophy from Ethiopia about Reason, the Creator, and Our Ethical Responsibilities, and (with Michael Kleiner) of The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros: A Seventeenth-Century African Biography of an Ethiopian Woman (Princeton, 2015), perhaps the first African biography of an African woman and winner of two international awards. Her books in progress are Ladder of Heaven: The Miracles of the Virgin Mary in Medieval African Literature and Art (supported by her NEH-funded digital humanities project Princeton Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Egyptian Miracles of Mary (PEMM) project) and The Black Queen of Sheba: A Global History of an African Idea.