Black Saints

Saint Benedict of Palermo, Rome.
The son of African slaves and raised in humble circum-

stances, the “Black Saint”—his soul illuminated by divine candidez, or brightness—was
one of the five such saints in the early modern period with officially recognized cults. His
elevation exemplified the new global reach of Catholicism and the clergy’s attempt to
bring non-European peoples within the fold of the Church. Hagiographers consequently
developed an archetype of the black saint, leading to new ways of talking about spirituality
and color difference that circulated widely throughout the Catholic world. Engraving by
Fray Tomas de S. Anna, 1786. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photo-
graphs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.
After Death, Her Face Turned White:
Blackness, Whiteness, and Sanctity in
the Early Modern Hispanic World
ERIN KATHLEEN ROWE
IN 1748, AN ELDERLY DOMINICAN TERTIARY named Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo

died in the Spanish city of Salamanca.1 Her death brought the distinctive marker of
sanctity: the incredibly sweet fragrance that accompanies the death of the most holy
Catholics filled the room. But another, more unusual miracle also took place, in
which the color of her face (“naturally black,” her biographer wrote) turned white
and remained so for “no short time” following her death.2 The miracles witnessed at
the holy woman’s deathbed prompted Father Juan Carlos Paniagua to compile an of-
ficial hagiography, or life, of Teresa Juliana, which was subsequently printed in two
editions. A canonization push by the Dominicans followed soon thereafter; a new
push is in fact underway today, as twenty-first-century Dominicans have renewed ef-
forts to have the Afro-Iberian tertiary recognized as a saint.3
Support for this research was provided by generous funding from the Council of American Overseas
Research Centers (CAORC)–Multi-Region Research Grant (2013–2014) and the American Philosophi-
cal Society’s Franklin Grant (2013). I am grateful to my colleague Gabriel Paquette and the graduate stu-
dent members of our Latin American–Iberian History Workshop for their insightful suggestions,

especially Matthew Franco, Marıa Lumbreras, and Alvaro Caso Bello. I thank Ricardo Padr on, Molly A.
Warsh, and Jorge Ca~ nizares-Esguerra for their suggestions on an early draft, as well as the AHR’s editors
and anonymous reviewers for their close, critical readings.
1 A tertiary is a lay person who takes simple vows; often associated with a specific religious order (in
this case the Dominicans), tertiaries do not necessarily live in monasteries, although Teresa Juliana did.
2 Juan Carlos Paniagua [Pan y Agua], Compendio de la vida exemplar de la venerable Madre Sor Te-
resa Juliana de Sto. Domingo, tercera professa en el convento de Santa Maria Magdalena, vulgo de la Peni-
tencia, orden de Santo Domingo de la Ciudad de Salamanca (Salamanca, 1752), 146–148. See also
Paniagua, Oraci on funebre en las exequias de la Madre Sor Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo, de feliz
memoria, celebradas el dıa nueve de enero en el Convento de Religiosas Dominicas, vulgo de la Penitencia
(Salamanca, 1749).
3 La Penitencia burned down in the nineteenth century, so Teresa Juliana’s body is now at the new
convent, Las Due~ nas. Teresa Juliana has been the subject of a burst of recent scholarly attention. Balta-
sar Fra Molinero and Sue Houchins are currently working on a critical edition of Paniagua’s work, forth-
coming from Vanderbilt University Press. See also Beatriz Ferr us Anton, “Sor Teresa Juliana de Santo
Domingo, Chicaba o escribir en la piel del otro,” Cuadernos dieciochistas 9 (2008): 181–192; Marıa Eu-
genia Maeso, Sor Teresa Chikaba: Princesa, esclava y monja (Salamanca, 2004); Elvira M. Melian,
“Chikaba, la primera monja negra en el sistema esclavista finisecular espa~ nol del siglo XVII,” Hispania
Sacra 64, no. 130 (2012): 565–581; and Valérie Benoist, “La doble identidad de Sor Chicaba/Teresa,” in

Noureddine Achiri, Alvaro Baraibar Etxeberria, and Felix K. E. Schmelzer, eds., Actas del III Congreso
Ibero-Africano de Hispanistas (Pamplona, 2015), 147–156.
C The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical
V
Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com.
727
728 Erin Kathleen Rowe
Teresa Juliana had traveled far from her birth in Guinea, West Africa, to her
death in Spain in the convent of Santa Marıa Magdalena, called La Penitencia. Kid-
napped as a child and sold into slavery, she was freed after her mistress died so that
she could pursue her religious vocation. She eventually moved to Salamanca because
she could not find a monastery in Madrid that would accept her. (One abbess huffed:
“A black woman in my convent! Not in my lifetime!”)4 Yet by the time of her death,
Teresa Juliana enjoyed a widespread reputation for holiness; her funeral drew hun-
dreds of attendees, including members of the local nobility.5
Teresa Juliana’s life story, while unusual, was not unique. Catholics in Europe
and the Americas had begun to venerate saints of sub-Saharan African origin or
descent—commonly referred to as “black” in the vernaculars of the day—around the
same time that the importation of sub-Saharan African slaves into Spain and Portu-
gal began to expand.6 The appearance of black saints in the era of transatlantic slav-
ery was not a coincidence, but rather a deliberate move on the part of the Catholic
clergy to help promote evangelization among enslaved populations throughout the
latter half of the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries. In addition, the
search for new converts outside Europe became one of the early modern Church’s
most fervent impulses. Missionaries fanned out from Europe across Asia, the Ameri-
cas, West and Central Africa, and Ethiopia.7 The new global reach of Catholicism in
turn transformed Catholic practice; the rapid spread of devotion to black saints was
one of the major changes. By the eighteenth century, cults to black saints and holy
people flourished, portrayed in sacred art, theater, sermons, hagiographies, and
printed engravings. Black saints served as patrons to confraternities organized by
enslaved and freed African people, and their images were often carried during im-
portant festivals. The presence of such saints in sacred images and sermons helped
to disseminate a vision of spiritual equality available to everyone who converted to
Christianity.8
4 Paniagua, Compendio de la vida exemplar de la venerable Madre Sor Teresa Juliana de Sto. Domingo,
57.
5 Paniagua, Oracion f
unebre . . . de la Madre Sor Teresa Juliana de Santa Domingo; Sue E. Houchins
and Baltasar Fra Molinero, “The Saint’s Life of Sister Chicaba, c. 1676–1748: An As-Told-To Slave
Narrative,” in Kathryn Joy McKnight and Leo J. Garofalo, eds., Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the
Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550–1812 (Indianapolis, 2009), 214–239, here 216.
6 Specific numbers, including graphs, can be found in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Database, http://www.
slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces, which shows the early modern Spanish-American slave trade peaking in
the late sixteenth century and almost completely dropping off in the eighteenth (followed by a significant
rise in the nineteenth). Preliminary figures for Seville (Spain’s main entrepôt for slaves during the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries) can be found in Antonio Domınguez Ortiz, “La esclavitud en Castilla
durante la edad moderna,” in Domınguez Ortiz, Estudios de historia social de Espa~ na, 2 vols. (Madrid,
1952), 2: 376–378. For recent research on slavery in Spain, see Aurelia Martın Casares, ed., Esclavitudes
hisp
anicas (siglos XV al XXI): Horizontes socioculturales (Granada, 2014).
7 The body of literature on early modern missionaries is vast. For an overview of Jesuit missions and
the Society’s perspective on its global missions, see Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early
Jesuit Missions (Cambridge, 2009); Andreu Martınez D’Al os-Moner, Envoys of a Human God: The Jesuit
Mission to Christian Ethiopia, 1557–1632 (Leiden, 2015); Liam Matthew Brockey, Journey to the East: The
Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724 (Cambridge, Mass., 2007). For responses, see Steven Kaplan, ed.,
Indigenous Responses to Western Christianity (New York, 1995).
8 The Church occasionally made efforts to reach out to indigenous converts in colonial Latin Amer-
ica by promoting brown-skinned Madonnas. See, for example, Luisa Elena Alcala, “Blanqueando la Lo-
reto mexicana: Prejuicios sociales y condicionantes materiales en la representaci on de vırgenes negras,”
in Marıa Cruz de Carlos, Pierre Civil, Felipe Pereda, and Cécile Vincent-Cassy, eds., La imagen religiosa
en la monarquıa hispanica: Usos y espacios (Madrid, 2008), 171–196. Jeanette Favrot Peterson discusses
AMERICAN HISTORICAL R EVIEW JUNE 2016

After Death, Her Face Turned White 729
The Church’s promotion of black saints was therefore part of an effort to con-
struct a new discourse of universal Christendom in the wake of European global ex-
pansion. Moving beyond the study of local devotional practices to the larger history
of black saints opens up new ways to think about Catholic missionary endeavors,
early modern ideas about race and color difference, and the role that a rapidly
changing religious culture played in the spiritual beliefs of early modern people.
Early modern hagiographies provide an unexpectedly rich source for exploring these
themes, as hagiographers writing about black holy people explicitly addressed the is-
sues of color difference and universal salvation in order to promote their subjects.
Three important holy people of color who were subjects of hagiography were
Benedict of Palermo (d. 1589), Martın de Porres (d. 1639), and Teresa Juliana de
Santo Domingo (d. 1743). The authors of these works tackled the blackness of their
subjects—physical and spiritual—in ways that both drew from contemporary ideas
about color difference and resisted its most common, and negative, iterations. While
hagiographers evoked theological categories of whiteness and blackness, good and
evil, light and dark, soul and body, self and other, they did so in novel ways that chal-
lenged the typical associations of blackness with evil, darkness, body, and otherness.9
Instead, many early modern clergy argued for unity, not difference; to do so, they
moved beyond blackness and whiteness to a third possibility—candidez, sometimes
translated as “whiteness” but meaning more accurately the dazzling brightness origi-
nating from the celestial kingdom, a unifying force that underscored the monogenetic
origins of humanity.10 Their connection of blackness to divine light affirmed the spiri-
tual potential of all souls. The genesis of a typology of black sanctity led not only to
the rise of holy people of color, but to the development of complicated and unex-
pected discourses about color difference and salvation that resisted the intensifica-
tion of racialized discourses in the eighteenth century.
THE CLERGY’S PROMOTION OF HOLY people of color required the development of a new
archetype: the black saint. This new archetype originated from the deep ambivalence
experienced by the clergy, and by white Europeans more broadly, about the theologi-
cal and social meanings of color difference as well as the potential roles of non-
European converts within Christianity. The clergy, like the institutional church they
represented, were not monolithic. They came from different places of birth, back-
grounds, and levels of education and training; belonged to different orders or
branches of service; and invested their service with different meanings. Moreover,
while some missionaries evangelized or ministered to enslaved populations in Europe
the Jeronymite friar Diego de Oca~ na’s deliberate whitening of the Virgin so she would be more appeal-
ing to the indigenous population: Peterson, Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the
Americas (Austin, Tex., 2014), chap. 2.
9 See the critiques of the self/other approach in Vanita Seth, Europe’s Indians: Producing Racial Dif-
ference, 1500–1900 (Durham, N.C., 2010).

10 The concept of monogenetic origins is discussed further below. On the heightened racism that ac-
companied the shift in Western thinking about polygenetic versus monogenetic origins, see Andrew Cur-
ran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore, 2011), 80–
130; and Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000
(Cambridge, 2006), chap. 5.

and Latin America, others engaged in mission work in parts of sub-Saharan Africa
that were under local sovereignty, some of which were ruled by Christian leaders.
Such experiences led to distinct modes of thinking about color difference and spiri-
tual potential in comparison to what was found in the colonial context.11
Many clergy exhibited hostility to Amerindian and African converts, expressing
doubts about their ability to ever become “true” Christians. While the Jesuits are of-
ten associated with work among enslaved populations, they were also major slave-
holders.12 The desire for universal conversion, then, slammed forcefully into the
equally powerful desire by Europeans, lay and clerical alike, to reinforce the rigid hi-
erarchies of power and inequality cemented in the slave system. Didier Lahon argues
that in the mid-sixteenth century, “the majority of owners had no interest in their
slaves having a close relationship with the Church, and even objected to it.”13 As part
of the skepticism about the depth of non-European conversion and the spiritual ca-
pacities of the newly baptized, most people of color were forbidden entry into the
priesthood and monasteries, let alone higher ecclesiastical offices.14
Because missionaries came from such varied social and cultural environments
and worked in such different contexts, the question arises of how it is possible to talk
broadly about the creation of an archetype of black saints and ideas about blackness,
as though these are easily identifiable, universal features of Catholic thought. No
such universality existed in the early modern period. Instead, specific members of the
clergy, including hagiographers, generated a series of discourses about blackness,
whiteness, salvation, and sanctity that in turn spread farther afield, ultimately having a
significant impact on early modern global Catholic devotion and practice. Evidence for
their circulation is found in their appearance in multiple sources, such as histories,
hagiographies, and sermons, even if the methods of transmission are not always clear.
While the hagiographies of Benedict of Palermo, Martın de Porres, and Teresa Juliana
11 Perhaps the most famous missionaries to work with slaves in the Americas were the Jesuits Alonso
de Sandoval and Pedro Claver. Margaret M. Olsen, Slavery and Salvation in Colonial Cartagena de Indias
(Gainesville, Fla., 2004). For conversation and missionary work in the Christian kingdom of Kongo, see
John K. Thornton, “Afro-Christian Syncretism in the Kingdom of Kongo,” Journal of African History 54,
no. 1 (2013): 53–77; and Cécile Fromont, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom
of Kongo (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2014). See also Roquinaldo Ferreira’s important study Cross-Cultural
Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade (Cambridge, 2012), es-
pecially chap. 5.
12 Some figures for slave ownership among the Jesuits are discussed in R. L. Green, “Africans in
Spanish Catholic Thought, 1568–1647: Beyond Jesuit Hagiography,” Black Theology 11, no. 1 (2013):
96–116, here 104–105. Capuchin missionaries complained bitterly to the Propaganda Fide that the Je-
suits’ role in the slave trade caused significant problems for efforts to evangelize to the local population
in Luanda. Archivio Storico di Propaganda Fide (ASPF), Vatican City, SC Series Africa-Angola II,
Giuseppe Maria da Busseto to Congregation, 92r.
13 Didier Lahon, “Black African Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal,” in T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe,
eds., Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, 2005), 261–279, here 274. Clerical indifference to
the baptism of newly arrived slaves in Seville is discussed in Aurelia Martın Casares and Christine
Delaigue, “The Evangelization of Freed and Slave Black Africans in Renaissance Spain: Baptism, Mar-
riage, and Ethnic Brotherhoods,” History of Religions 52, no. 3 (2013): 214–235.
14 See, for example, John Lynch, New Worlds: A Religious History of Latin America (New Haven,
Conn., 2012). The same reluctance was true in sixteenth-century Kongo: John K. Thornton, The Kongo-
lese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 (Cambridge, 1998),
55–63. One major exception was Henrique, the son of the Kongolese king Afonso, ordained a bishop in
the early sixteenth century. See also Nancy E. van Deusen, “Circuits of Knowledge among Women in
Early Seventeenth-Century Lima,” in Nora E. Jaffary, ed., Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization
of the Americas (Aldershot, 2007), 137–150.

de Santo Domingo arose from distinct circumstances, they connected to broader dis-
courses through the repetition of specific themes and ideas.
While different religious orders often operated in distinct mission fields with
varying missionary philosophies, they shared ideas. The latter was especially possible
after the creation of the Congregation of the Propaganda Fide in Rome in the early
seventeenth century. The Propaganda Fide’s purpose was to provide a centralized
authority for organizing overseas missionary activity and administering the Church in
non-Catholic regions.15 Moreover, members of the secular clergy, especially bishops,
often worked with the regular clergy to evangelize to non-Christian populations in
their midst, particularly sub-Saharan African slaves. An excellent example of this
process can be found in the early seventeenth century. The archbishop of Seville, Pe-
dro de Castro (d. 1623), worked with the Jesuit missionaries who lived in the College
of San Hermenegildo to evangelize to the large enslaved population in Seville. In the
process, he discovered that the sacrament of baptism had not been properly applied
to the recent converts. In concert with the Jesuit theologian Diego Ruiz de Montoya
(d. 1632), Castro developed a series of new regulations governing the catechism and
re-baptism of slaves who had received the sacrament improperly.16
Most of what we know about Castro’s activity, however, comes not from Sevillian
sources, but from Alonso de Sandoval (d. 1652), a Jesuit missionary in Cartagena de
Indias, who included several of Castro’s decrees in his famous treatise on how to in-
tegrate sub-Saharan Africans into the fold of Christianity. 17 Scholar Francisco de
Borja Medina argues that the Jesuits created a network that reached from Cabo
Verde and Angola to Lisbon and Seville and on to Brazil and Cartagena, which dis-
seminated ideas and news crucial to early modern Jesuit missions.18 Moreover,

15 Angel Santos Hernandez, “Orıgenes hist oricos de la Sagrada Congregaci on ‘De Propaganda
Fide,’” Revista espa~ nola de derecho can onico 28, no. 81 (1972): 509–543; and Luca Codignola, “Les
Amerindiens dans les archives de la Sacrée Congrégation ‘De Propaganda Fide’ a Rome (1610–1799),”
Canadian Folklore 17, no. 1 (1995): 139–148. See also Richard Gray’s important essay about an Afro-
Brazilian’s denunciation of the slave trade to the Propaganda Fide: “The Papacy and the Atlantic Slave
Trade: Lourenço da Silva, the Capuchins and the Decisions of the Holy Office,” Past and Present, no.
115 (May 1987): 52–68.
16 This document was printed, and can also be found in manuscript: “Instruccion para remediar, y
assegurar, quanto con la divina gracia fuere possible, que ninguno de los negros, que vienen de Guinea,
Angola, y otras provincias de aquella costa de Africa, carezca del sagrado Baptismo,” Biblioteca Arzobis-
pal de Sevilla, Seville, Sig. 34-315, no. 8. For a brief biography of Ruiz de Montoya, see Charles E.
O’Neill and Joaquın Marıa Domınguez, eds., Diccionario hist orico de la Compa~ nıa de Jes
us: Biogr
afico-
tematico, 4 vols. (Rome, 2001), 4: 3437.
17 Alonso de Sandoval, Naturaleza, policia sagrada i profana, costumbres i ritos, disciplina i catechismo
evangelico de todos los etiopes (Seville, 1627). For more on Sandoval’s career and beliefs, see Olsen, Slav-
ery and Salvation in Colonial Cartagena de Indias; and Ronald J. Morgan, “Postscript to His Brothers:
Reading Alonso de Sandoval’s De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute (1627) as a Jesuit Spiritual Text,” Atlan-
tic Studies: Global Currents 5, no. 1 (2008): 75–98. The original title was emended in a subsequent edi-
tion: Tomo Primero de Instauranda Aethiopum Salute: historia de Aethiopia, naturaleza, policia sagrada y
profana, costumbres, ritos y Cathecismo Evangelico, de todos los Aethiopes con que se restaura la salud de
sus almas (Madrid, 1647); it is often cited by scholars by this later title.
18 Francisco de Borja Medina, “La experiencia sevillana de la Compa~ nıa de Jes us en la evange-
lizaci
on de los esclavos negros y su representaci on en América,” in Aurelia Martın Casares and Marga-
rita Garcıa Barranco, eds., La esclavitud negroafricana en la historia de Espa~ na, siglos XVI y XVII
(Granada, 2010), 75–94, here 76–77. Documents regarding the question of implementing the “Jesuit”
method of baptizing (and re-baptizing) black slaves appear in the Jesuit archives from Peru: Archivum
Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI), Rome, Nuevo Reino y Quito, Litterae Annuae, nos. 13–14 and 19–20.

Castro’s decrees about the proper catechesis of baptized people reached farther into
colonial Spanish America, to cities such as Lima, Mexico City, and Puebla de los

Angeles. The movement of these baptismal decrees shows the larger diffusion of
ideas among individuals and groups within global Catholic networks.
Hagiographic texts constitute another important source of circulating ideas, since
they traveled widely throughout the early modern Catholic world. Benedict, Martın,
and Teresa Juliana lived in different centuries and in different geographic locations,
yet the official accounts of their lives share striking similarities in the ways the au-
thors discuss spiritual and physical blackness and whiteness. Such similarities consti-
tuted new topoi of spirituality and color difference that circulated widely throughout
the Catholic world.
Hagiography is well suited to comparative or transnational work. Because their
intended audience included the general public as well as the city or town in which
the holy person died, those who authored such works tended to draw on more widely
available discourses that they viewed as relevant and compelling to a larger reader-
ship. Above all else, hagiographies were written with the intention of persuasion—
specifically, to persuade the reader of the subject’s holiness and worthiness of being
the focus of a canonization process.19 They could also work to impart larger spiritual,
social, or even political visions of the world.20 The dual registers in which hagiogra-
phies were written—local and transnational—permitted them a suppleness that pre-
vented them from becoming static or repetitive, even when the writers were recount-
ing the same events as other hagiographers or borrowing heavily from each other.21
Hagiographies produced in Peru and in Italy could easily share topoi about blackness
and sanctity, even though beliefs about and the practice of slavery were quite differ-
ent in each place.22 Hagiographers drew widely from the various ideas about race,
color difference, and human origins being discussed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century Europe and the Americas. In the process, however, they transformed them
for their own purposes.23
19 One foundational work on hagiography and scholarship is Patrick J. Geary, “Saints, Scholars, and
Society: The Elusive Goal,” in Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), chap.
9. Geary contends: “The text stands at a threefold intersection of genre, total textual production, and his-
torical circumstance. Without any one of the three it is not fully comprehensible” (23).
20 Jamie Kreiner argues that Merovingian “hagiographers wrote not just to praise the life and virtues
of individuals, but also to posit a society based on the principles that those individuals represented, to
shape how the kingdom saw itself.” Kreiner, The Social Life of Hagiography in the Merovingian Kingdom
(Cambridge, 2014), 7. Canonization processes in the post-Tridentine Church were overseen by the Con-
gregation of Sacred Rites. For an overview of procedural changes to the process of canonization, see Si-
mon Ditchfield, “Tridentine Worship and the Cult of Saints,” in R. Po-chia Hsia, ed., The Cambridge
History of Christianity, vol. 6: Reform and Expansion, 1500–1600 (Cambridge, 2007), 201–224.
21 Kathleen Ann Myers astutely observes: “The interplay between official models and individual in-
terpretation illustrates how the narrow parameters of the ideal religious woman were variously followed
or reformulated as new experiences led to new interpretations of the standard models for a holy life.”
Myers, Neither Saints nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America (Oxford, 2003), 7.
22 José Ramon Jouve Martın reminds us that colonial sanctity was a communal but conflicted pro-
cess: “En olor de santidad: Hagiografıa, cultos locales y escritura religiosa en Lima, siglo XVII,” Colonial
Latin American Review 13, no. 2 (2004): 181–198, here 182.
23 There was, of course, wide disagreement among members of the clergy about the origin and na-
ture of blackness both in Europe and in the Americas. See April G. Shelford, “Race and Scripture in the
Eighteenth-Century French Caribbean,” Atlantic Studies 10, no. 1 (2013): 69–87.

Previous scholarship has generally centered on the ways in which hagiography

worked to reinforce colonial and racial hierarchies.24 It is certainly the case that if
one investigates the trope of the black man with a white soul found so commonly in
hagiographies and plays, the white soul clearly represents not only Christianity, but
Eurocentric values and modes of behavior that Europeans believed should be im-
posed on all people. Early modern hagiography tended to be a conservative genre;
hagiographers did not generally contest social hierarchies. Hence it is not surprising
to find a tacit acceptance of the status quo, including slavery and the disparagement
of people of color, in these texts alongside a vigorous condemnation of the indiffer-
ence, ill-treatment, and hostility that some felt toward the idea of Africans as true
members of the Catholic Church. The existence of the former does not cancel out
the significance of the latter, for Catholic practice or for the devotional lives of peo-
ple of color in particular; rather, it presents a paradox that demands explanation.
Spiritual inclusion was not considered a call for terrestrial justice or something
that modern readers would recognize as equality; female saints had been celebrated
extravagantly for a millennium without the advancement of the legal status of
women. Yet hagiographers of black saints argued powerfully for the inclusion of all
human beings in God’s kingdom at a time when not all people—not even all clergy—
believed that Africans were capable of true conversion. The question of capacity is
critical here, because in early modern thought, conversion to Christianity was inextri-
cably linked to participation in civic society and opportunities for sociability.25 Hagi-
ographers’ understandings of color difference, human salvation, and the relationship
between body and soul were not crafted in order to reinforce existing social and ra-
cial hierarchies; rather, they presented sophisticated theological arguments about an
inclusive universal Christendom that resisted many contemporary ideas about the or-
igins and meaning of color difference, implicitly arguing for Afro-Christian participa-
tion in Spanish public religious life.
Theories of color difference have been critical to the scholarly search for the ori-
gins of modern racist ideologies, which developed slowly and unevenly, transforming
older, medieval models of difference.26 In the Middle Ages, the most common such
theories relied on ancient Greek beliefs about the climate.27 Those espousing this
idea argued that variations in skin color resulted from the relative strength and
24 For example, Joan Cameron Bristol argues that the Afro-Mexican holy woman Juana Esperanza
de San Alberto’s Life “reconciled her role as an exceptionally pious woman and her identity as a black
slave in such a way as to reify and reproduce colonial hierarchies.” Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and
Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 2007), 61. See
also Larissa Brewer-Garcıa’s analysis of the deep ambivalence expressed by Martın de Porres’s hagiogra-
pher: “Negro, pero blanco de alma: La ambivalencia de la negrura en la Vida prodigiosa de Fray Martın
de Porras (1663),” Cuadernos del CILHA 13, no. 2 (2012): 113–146.
25 Jennifer D. Selwyn discusses the connection between civility and Catholicism in the context of the
Jesuits, and José de Acosta’s work in particular, in “‘Procur[ing] in the Common People These Better
Behaviors’: The Jesuits’ Civilizing Mission in Early Modern Naples, 1550–1620,” Radical History Review,
no. 67 (1997): 5–34, here 8–10.
26 Francisco Bethencourt, Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.,
2014); and James H. Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” William and Mary Quar-
terly 54, no. 1 (1997): 143–166.
27 Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler, eds., The Origins of Racism in the West
(Cambridge, 2009).

weakness of the sun’s rays; sub-Saharan Africans were often described as having
been “burned black” by the sun.28 Proponents of this so-called “climate theory” often
described blackness and whiteness as “accidents” (superficial physical traits, follow-
ing Aristotle), and they often viewed color difference as fluid rather than fixed.29
This theory was increasingly questioned by natural philosophers and intellectuals
from the seventeenth century on, as they began to notice that lighter-skinned people
transplanted to the tropics did not become darker even after generations in the new
climate.30
Nevertheless, in Portugal and Spain, where the large-scale importation of sub-
Saharan African slaves developed first, slavery began to be linked to skin color as
early as the sixteenth century. The theory of natural slavery—that some groups of
people were born to slaves because of their inherent inferiority—quickly became tied
to color prejudice. One common way to link skin color and natural slavery in the sev-
enteenth and eighteenth centuries was through the evolving idea of the so-called
Curse of Ham, the belief that God cursed Noah’s son for laughing at his father in his
drunken nakedness. Early modern authors often insisted that the divine punishment
included both perpetual servitude and blackness. Hence skin color and slavery could
be linked with each other (black ¼ enslaved), and each could be linked with inherent
sinfulness, providing a biblical justification for transatlantic slavery.31 Belief in slavery
as divine punishment was often tied to the widespread view that blackness was inher-
ently ugly. The Franciscan author Juan de Torquemada (d. 1624), for example, de-
scribed black skin color as originating in God’s curse. He finished by deriding black-
ness as a deformity, so ugly that it was clearly a punishment from God.32 From this
view, blackness became an outer sign of inner defects. Yet it is important that climate
theory and racialized slavery not be seen as ideas that emerged consecutively; rather,
they participated in an intense and ongoing conversation throughout the early mod-
ern period. Older theories about color difference did not dissipate quickly; in fact,
some Enlightenment thinkers were still positing climate theory as a potential (if im-
perfect) explanation for color difference as late as the 1750s and 1760s.33
28 Curran discusses the frequency with which Enlightenment philosophers and natural scientists ex-
pressed belief in climate theory. He argues that climate theory needed to be abandoned before fully ra-
cialized theories of color difference could be articulated. The Anatomy of Blackness, 83–84, 171. On
climate and color difference, see also Joseph Ziegler, “Physiognomy, Science, and Proto-Racism, 1200–
1500,” in Eliav-Feldon, Isaac, and Ziegler, The Origins of Racism in the West, 181–199.
29 Ruth Hill, “Entering and Exiting Blackness: A Color Controversy in Eighteenth-Century Spain,”
Categories and Crossings—Critical Race Studies and the Spanish World, Special Issue, Journal of Spanish
Cultural Studies 10, no. 1 (2009): 43–58. In her introduction to the issue, Hill argues: “Paradoxically,
Spanish opinions about the origins of blackness manifest a pre-racial whiteness that is irreducible to the
race, class, or ethnic-based formulations of whiteness that anchor critical whiteness studies in Great Brit-
ain and the USA.” Hill, “Categories and Crossings: Critical Race Studies and the Spanish World,”
ibid., 3.
30 Early modern people’s confusion over the failure of climate theory is addressed in many places.
See, for example, Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness, 83–90; and Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of
Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven, Conn., 2004), 46–49.
31 On the evolution of the biblical story of Ham in the early modern period, see David M. Whitford,
The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era: The Bible and the Justifications for Slavery (Burlington, Vt.,
2009).
32 Juan de Torquemada, Primera parte de los veinte i un libros rituales i monarchia indiana (Seville,
1615), 2: 611. This section follows several pages (609–611) discussing slavery, including “natural slavery.”
33 In “Race and Scripture in the Eighteenth-Century French Caribbean,” Shelford provides a case
study of three French Enlightenment clergymen and their diverse views on color difference. Jorge

The “accidents” that emerged out of distinct climate zones were believed to affect
the body through the humors, which influenced a person’s height, weight, bone struc-
ture, and skin and hair color. Hence, when accidents appeared in the body, they re-
flected external, and some argued superficial, difference. As in the monogenetic the-
ory of human origins, climate theory posited a shared body; though human beings
might appear different, they were ultimately the same on the inside. Yet as Jorge
Can ~izares-Esguerra has argued persuasively, ideas about bodily difference were chal-
lenged by the colonial experience, particularly for creole populations, who were in-
creasingly confronted with a disparagement of their own bodies, which peninsular
Spaniards viewed as subject to climatic degeneration from birth in the colonies. As a
result, Can~izares-Esguerra shows, creole authors were the first to develop arguments
that we associate now with biological racism—such as that the bodies of Europeans
and the bodies of indigenous people were fundamentally different inside as well as
outside, created from distinct “matter.”34 This idea spread throughout seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century Europe as polygenetic views of human origins also began to
spread, precisely for the purpose of creating a biological hierarchy of human bodies.
Hagiographers, on the other hand, had a vested interest in rejecting differences
in matter. They agreed with the many theologians and natural philosophers who per-
sisted in a monogenetic theory of human origins.35 The search for similitude among
all people was a common feature of Renaissance thought.36 Yet espousal of mono-
genesis did not imply a belief in the inherent equality or even “sameness” of all peo-
ple. For example, if all humans derived from a common ancestor, then one skin color
had to be the “original.” Unsurprisingly, European thinkers decided that the original
humans had been white, and that whiteness was therefore the “natural state” of hu-
manity.
And yet not all clergy agreed that blackness was inferior or problematic, or that
everyone would return to the state of primordial whiteness upon being purged of
physical blemishes in heaven. The Jesuit sacred historian Martın de Roa (d. 1637)
wrote a treatise on the state of the body following resurrection.37 While he agreed
that whiteness was the primordial state, he argued that blackness had been brought
into existence through differences in climate, then evolved into an inheritable trait.
Ca~ nizares-Esguerra points out that by the end of the eighteenth century, the older fluidity had given way
to “immutability.” Ca~ nizares-Esguerra, “Demons, Stars, and the Imagination: The Early Modern Body
in the Tropics,” in Eliav-Feldon, Isaac, and Ziegler, The Origins of Racism in the West, 313–325.
34 This argument is laid out fully in Jorge Ca~ nizares-Esguerra, “New World, New Stars: Patriotic
Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600–1650,”
American Historical Review 104, no. 1 (February 1999): 33–68.
35 Curran argues: “This monogenetic temporalization of humankind’s history would become the
most important explicative paradigm for blackness and black Africans during the next four decades”; The
Anatomy of Blackness, 87. He discusses the debates over the origins of human beings and color difference
at length ibid., 80–130.
36 Seth asserts: “it was not otherness but similitude that underwrote Renaissance epistemology”; Eu-
rope’s Indians, 5.
37 Martın de Roa, Estados de los bienauenturados en el Cielo, de los ni~ nos en el Limbo, de las almas
en el Purgatorio . . . y de todo este Vniuerso, despues de la resurreccion y Iuyzio vniuersal: Con diuersos exem-
plos è historias (Huesca, 1628). A native of Andalusia, Roa wrote sacred histories for a number of Anda-
lusian towns, individual hagiographies, and flos sanctorum. For the last, see Flos sanctorum, fiestas i
santos naturales de la ciudad de Cordoua . . . i otras ciudades i lugares de Andaluzia, Castilla i Portugal (Se-
ville, 1615).

He raised the question explicitly: Would the bodies of dark-skinned people be resur-
rected in their blackness? He answered this question with a resounding “yes,” an an-
swer that evolved into a defense of black skin: “This color is not corrupt, but
natural,” he insisted; in heaven “it would be no less admirable, but a pleasing varia-
tion.”38 Here we see the application of an idea widely circulating in treatises of natu-
ral philosophy—that the diversity of nature originated from and greatly pleased
God.39
Roa’s text raises crucial points about the relationship of the black body to the
white soul, as it was frequently described in hagiographic texts. If we think of this re-
lationship in terms of a simple binary (black/flesh/sin/corrupt versus white/soul/saved/
pure), we fail to understand early modern hagiographers’ view of the relationship be-
tween body and soul. While the two can play a binary role in Catholic thought—the
body as the problematic gateway to sin, the soul as remnant of eternity and divine
likeness—Christian theology also preaches bodily resurrection. Hence the body as
well as the soul has an eternal dimension, and many believed that the body played an
important role in salvation. This belief was particularly strong among mystics, whose
bodily experiences led to a spiritual fusion with God.40 The body is also a crucial
component of sanctity, since holy bodies often do not decompose; maintaining their
elasticity and infused with a strong floral scent, they remain as monuments to the
bodily resurrection promised all Christians.41 Body and soul, therefore, were deeply
intertwined in ways that resist their separation into oppositional categories.
Hagiographers like Roa expressed non-binary understandings of body and soul,
color difference and spiritual potential, as they crafted works that espoused the new
archetype of the black saint. Such archetypes were standard features of hagiography,
which wove together recognizable tropes along with the unique characteristics of in-
dividual saints. The saints had always been organized into typologies. These types
corresponded both to a belief in vertical access to the divine and to liturgical organi-
zation. That is, saints in different categories were celebrated liturgically in different
ways, with differing levels of solemnity and offices. The official categories are the Vir-
gin Mary, angels, apostles, martyrs, confessors, doctors of the church, and virgins.42
38 Roa, Estados de los bienauenturados en el Cielo, de los ni~
nos en el Limbo, de las almas en el Purga-
torio, 7–8.
39 Franciscan Juan de Torquemada expressed a similar idea in his Primera parte de los veinte i un
libros rituales i monarchia indiana (Seville, 1615): “no ay mas razon, de que queriendo Dios mostrar sus
marauillas en la variedad de colores, como en las flores del campo, quiere que se queden con aquel
color, siguiendo el natural; porque desta manera, assi como en la variedad de colores, en las flores se
alaba Dios, assi tambien en las diferencias de los hombres, y colores varios, en ellos sea alabada, y bend-
ita su omnipotencia, que assi se quiso mostrar infinitamente sabio en sus artificios, y pinturas” (2: 610–
611). This work is divided into three volumes in the 1615 edition; volumes 1 and 2 shared continuous
pagination, while volume 3 begins at folio 1. It is worth noting that the following section includes denun-
ciations of blackness as ugly and a punishment from God.
40 Nancy E. van Deusen provides an excellent discussion of mystical views of the body, soul, and sal-
vation in “Reading the Body: Mystical Theology and Spiritual Actualisation in Early Seventeenth-
Century Lima,” Journal of Religious History 33, no. 1 (2009): 1–27. She argues: “Thus the body was the lo-
cus through which one could potentially access God’s divine imprint” (4).
41 For an excellent discussion of holy bodies, see Carlos M. N. Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The
Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge, 1995), 377–378.

42 This list is something of an oversimplification. For more on categories of saints, see Robert Bart-
lett, How Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reforma-
tion (Princeton, N.J., 2013), 150–205. See also Cynthia Hahn, Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative Effect in

Hagiographic tropes led to a greater variety of archetypes of saints, including desert

ascetics, bishops, royal saints, and mystics. Certain informal archetypes—royal saints,
for example, or female mystics—required explanation and defense, a process in
which hagiographers engaged both implicitly and explicitly.43 With the increased
skepticism among Europeans about the abilities of non-European people to convert
to Christianity, and the rise in racialized discourses of color difference (and defenses
of slavery), hagiographers were required to explain and defend the ability of a black
person to become a saint in the same way they might launch a defense of a queen
saint or a holy person with mystical experiences. In the process, they developed an
archetype for the black saint—the core qualities and features of black sanctity that
became central to hagiographies of holy people of color.44
Devotion to black saints in Europe was not new. Black Madonnas had long been
some of the most popular images of the Virgin Mary throughout medieval Europe.45
In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Europeans began to view increas-
ing numbers of black saints. The cult of St. Maurice as a black saint had been pro-
moted in medieval north-central Europe, and by 1500, depicting one of the magi as
black was a standard feature of Adoration iconography.46 By the late sixteenth cen-
tury, the Ethiopian princess-saint Efigenia, purportedly converted by the apostle St.
Matthew, was also promoted.47 Ethiopia was a land of European imagination, but it
was also a concrete historical place that had converted to Christianity in late antiq-
uity, and hence a source of an ancient African Christianity.48 The sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries marked the high point of papal investment in missions to Ethi-
opia, with the intent of bringing it into the Catholic fold. Moreover, with the rapid
expansion of the transatlantic slave trade, the promotion of black saints was viewed
Pictorial Lives of Saints from the Tenth through the Thirteenth Century (Berkeley, Calif., 2001), which dis-
cusses specific topoi associated with specific categories of saints.
43 See, for example, the extended defense of Teresa’s holiness and femininity in her first hagiogra-
phy: Francisco de Ribera, Vida de Santa Teresa de Jes us [1590], new edition with an introduction, notes,
and appendixes by Jaime Pons (Barcelona, 1908), 88–90.
44 It is important to add that the Catholic clergy’s understanding and presentation of black holiness
did not necessarily correspond to the self-understanding of black holy people. See, for example, Bristol,
Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches, 51–58; Nora E. Jaffary, False Mystics: Deviant Orthodoxy in Colonial
Mexico (Omaha, Nebr., 2008), 133–135; Nancy E. van Deusen, trans. and ed., The Souls of Purgatory: The
Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Ursula de Jes us (Albuquerque, N.Mex.,
2004), 52–53; and Rupe Simms, “Catholicism as an Instrument of Counterhegemony: The Religiopoliti-
cal Ingenuity of Afro-Mexican People,” Western Journal of Black Studies 35, no. 3 (2011): 163–175, here
169.
45 Peterson, Visualizing Guadalupe, chap. 1.
46 Paul H. D. Kaplan, The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1985). For the
rise of representations of black Africans in Europe generally, see David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates
Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, vols. 2 and 3 (Cambridge, Mass., 2010–2011).
47 For an expanded discussion of the history of the cults of some key black saints, including Efigenia
and Benedict of Palermo, see Didier Lahon, “Le berger, le cuisinier, la princesse et l’empereur: Noirs et
africains sur les autels du Portugal et du Brésil esclavagistes,” in Giovanna Fiume, ed., Schiavit
u, religione
e liberta nel Mediterraneo tra medioevo ed et
a moderna (Rome, 2008), 215–239.
48 Mart os-Moner, Envoys of a Human God. For Ethiopian diplomatic contacts with Europe
ınez D’Al
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, see Kate Lowe, “‘Representing’ Africa: Ambassadors and Princes
from Christian Africa to Renaissance Italy and Portugal, 1402–1608,” Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, 6th series, 17 (2007): 101–128.

as aiding the conversion of the newly enslaved population.49 The apogee of black
sanctity was the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by which time African
populations had been well-established in both Spain and the Spanish Americas for
more than a century.50 Yet the slowing of the slave trade during this period did not
end slavery; nor did it end the fierce debates about race or African Christianity.
The history of black saints can therefore be given a specific chronology in the Eu-
ropean Catholic tradition, beginning in the mid- to late fifteenth century. Their over-
all numbers were not high: in the early modern period, there were five black saints
with officially recognized cults. The vast majority of saints recognized by the Catholic
Church continued to be white male clergy, with white women far behind and people
of color a distant third.51 The fact that these saints were few in number, however, did
not diminish their impact in Catholic devotion, since devotion to one person could
take root in hundreds of different places throughout the world. The cults of black
saints covered a huge global swath: from Sicily to Kongo to the Iberian Americas, im-
ages of black saints adorned churches, and their feast days were celebrated. Hun-
dreds, if not thousands, of their images can be found in the Americas and Europe;
printed engravings, sculpture, and hagiographic sources survive, while churches, con-
fraternities, chapels, and places bear their names. Their presence has left an endur-
ing legacy in global Catholicism.
The five official early modern black saints were Benedict of Palermo, Antonio
da Noto (d. 1550), and the ancient Ethiopian saints Elesban (d. ca. 520), Efigenia,
and Moses (d. 405).52 Images of the black magus Balthazar proliferated as well,
49 Europe’s efforts to evangelize its enslaved population have not been well-studied. For one recent
exception, see Martın Casares and Delaigue, “The Evangelization of Freed and Slave Black Africans in
Renaissance Spain.”
50 This is true only in Spanish America; Brazil, in contrast, saw a rapid increase in the slave trade
throughout the eighteenth century in concert with the rise of devotion to black saints. See Anderson José
Machado de Oliveira, Devoç~ ao negra: Santos pretos e catequese no Brasil colonial (Rio de Janeiro, 2008).
51 The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Religion includes an easy table for determining the
number of total beatifications and canonization numbers by pope, which demonstrates how low the rates
of official beatification and canonization were in the post-Tridentine period—forty beatifications and
twenty-five canonizations between 1592 and 1699. Robert J. Barro, Rachel M. McCleary, and Alexander
McQuoid, “The Economics of Sainthood (A Preliminary Investigation),” in Rachel M. McCleary, ed.,
The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Religion (Oxford, 2011), 191–215, here 200, Table 10.1. The
Vatican keeps a complete index of those official beatified and canonized: Index ac status causarum beati-
ficationis servorum Dei et canonizationis beatorum (Vatican City, 1962). Such numbers do not, of course,
reflect the larger numbers of locally venerated holy people who never attained official cults.
52 Benedict is the most well-studied of all the black saints, thanks in large part to the pioneering
work of Giovanna Fiume. See Fiume, “Saint Benedict the Moor: From Sicily to the New World,” in Mar-
garet Cormack, ed., Saints and Their Cults in the Atlantic World (Columbia, S.C., 2006), 16–51; Fiume,
ed., Il santo patrono e la citt
a: San Benedetto il Moro; Culti, devozioni, e strategie di et
a moderna (Venice,
2000); Alessando Dell’Aira, Da San Fratello a Bahia: La rotta di San Benedetto il Moro (Trent, 1999);
and Bernard Vincent, “Saint Benoı̂t de Palerme et l’Espagne,” in Fiume, Schiavit u, religione, e liberta nel
Mediterraneo tra medioevo ed et a moderna, 201–214. Benedict was beatified in 1734 and canonized in
1807, though his cult circulated widely from the late sixteenth century on. Antonio da Noto was a Sicilian
Franciscan and contemporary of Benedict of Palermo. He has not been well studied, but see Giovanna
Fiume, “Il pantheon african: Il caso di Antonio Etiope,” in Martın Casares, Esclavitudes hisp anicas, 59–
88. St. Moses has been the most difficult of these five saints to track. Andrew M. Berensford noted the
presence of this desert ascetic in late medieval Castilian hagiographies: “Sanctity and Prejudice in Medie-
val Castilian Hagiography: The Legend of St. Moses the Ethiopian,” Medieval Hispanic Studies in Mem-
ory of Alan Deyermond 315 (2013): 11–37. We have evidence for devotion to him in early modern Brazil:
Catherine Whistler, ed., Opulence and Devotion: Brazilian Baroque Art (Oxford, 2001), 83.

though he did not have a cult independent of the Adoration.53 In contrast to

other prominent early modern saints canonized in the seventeenth century (such as
Teresa of Avila, Ignatius of Loyola, and Carlo Borromeo), Benedict, alongside
Rose of Lima, represented the elevation of another kind of saint—one that appealed
to the new global reach of Catholicism and the inclusion of non-European peo-
ples within the fold of the Church, which R. Po-Chia Hsia has identified as a central
feature of eighteenth-century canonizations.54 The numbers of holy people of color
venerated locally are unknown, but surviving evidence suggests that there were
many.55
Black saints were especially popular in Afro-Catholic communities, where they
played an important role as patrons to black confraternities and brotherhoods.56 Af-
rican Catholics were not merely subjects of early modern Catholicism, involuntarily
converted and forced into European religious forms; they created new forms of Cath-
olic devotion and practice.57 The question of what black saints might have meant
theologically or spiritually to local African populations is difficult to answer; more-
over, the answer varies greatly across micro-contexts. West and Central Africans
would have understood the cult of the saints in distinct ways, in comparison both to
white Europeans and to each other. While orthodox devotion as understood by the
official Church was of course possible for black Christians, it must not be assumed.58
53 Balthazar, sometimes called Gaspar, was one of the three magi who reportedly visited the infant
Jesus in Bethlehem and brought him gifts; their visit to Christ, called the Adoration, was celebrated on
the Feast of Epiphany.
54 R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2005), chap. 8.
55 Mart ın de Porres, for example, did not have a cult beyond local devotion in Lima until his beatifi-
cation in 1837 (canonized 1962), so he is an example of a local holy person of color in the early modern
era. Van Deusen found a life of an Afro-Peruvian nun languishing forgotten in a Franciscan convent in
Lima; see The Souls of Purgatory. I have found a published funerary sermon for an Afro-Iberian nun in
Seville, Magdalena de la Cruz, about whom little is known: Pedro de Contreras, Serm on f
unebre en las
honras de la venerable Magdalena de la Cruz, negra de naci on, que se celebraron en el Real Convento, Casa
Grande, de el Real, y Militar Orden de nuestra Se~ nora de la Merced, Redempcion de Cautivos (Seville,
1735).
56 For just a few examples, see Nicole von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social
Mobility for Afro-Mexicans (Gainesville, Fla., 2006); Karen B. Graubart, “‘So color de una cofradıa’:
Catholic Confraternities and the Development of Afro-Peruvian Ethnicities in Early Colonial Peru,”
Slavery and Abolition 33, no. 1 (2012): 43–64; and Patricia A. Mulvey and Barry A. Crouch, “Black Soli-
darity: A Comparative Perspective on Slave Sodalities in Latin America,” in Albert Meyers and Diana
Elizabeth Hopkins, eds., Manipulating the Saints: Religious Brotherhoods in Postconquest Latin America
(Hamburg, 1988), 51–65.
57 It is important to remember that there had been Catholic missionaries and small Catholic regions
in parts of West and Central Africa since the early sixteenth century. For an example of a woman who
was raised Catholic in Africa and then brought to the Caribbean as a slave, see Ray A. Kea, “From Ca-
tholicism to Moravian Pietism: The World of Marotta/Magdalena, a Woman of Popo and St. Thomas,”
in Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas, eds., The Creation of the British Atlantic World (Baltimore,
2005), 115–136.
58 For an introduction to the study of religion in the African Atlantic, see Sylvia R. Frey, “The Visi-
ble Church: Historiography of African American Religion since Raboteau,” Slavery and Abolition 29, no.
1 (2008): 83–110. See also John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World,
1400–1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1998); James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion
in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003); Joseph C. Miller, “Central Africa
during the Era of the Slave Trade, c. 1490s–1850s,” in Linda M. Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cul-
tural Transformations in the American Diaspora (Cambridge, 2002), 21–69; and Jane Landers, Black Soci-
ety in Spanish Florida (Urbana, Ill., 1999), chap. 5.

What we do know, however, is that slaves and free people of color played key roles
in the dissemination of devotion to black saints.59
Benedict, Martın de Porres, and Teresa Juliana shared backgrounds similar to
those of the people of color who were devoted to them. All three lived in humble cir-
cumstances; Teresa Juliana was a slave, while Benedict and Martın were the children
of slaves. The Sicilian saint Benedict of Palermo was born of African parents, one if
not both of whom were slaves. He was raised as a free man in humble circumstances.
After living for many years as a hermit, he joined a Franciscan convent in Palermo,
where he quickly gained a reputation for great holiness, humility, and miraculous
curing. His cult spread rapidly and soon spanned four continents (Europe, Africa,
North America, and South America). As a result, he was the subject of numerous
hagiographies from the early seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth century,
some of which were written as part of the upsurge in devotion following his 1734 be-
atification. While Franciscans—and Sicilian Franciscans most prominently—had
been writing about Benedict since the late sixteenth century, in print and manuscript,
the most influential texts were sections from Antonio Daza’s 1611 Franciscan chroni-
cle and Pietro Tognoletto’s 1667 work on sacred Sicily, both of which included ac-
counts of Benedict’s life. Tognoletto’s work was quickly picked up by a Spanish-
descended canon in Palermo, Pedro de Mataplanes, who used it as the basis for an
official hagiography of Benedict in Spanish, which appeared in Madrid in 1702.60 In
the post-beatification period, the increased production of hagiographies, particularly
by Spanish Franciscans, can be seen as part of the effort to promote Benedict’s can-
onization. One of those influential works was penned by a Franciscan in Madrid, An-
tonio Vicente de Madrid (originally published in 1744; reprinted with corrections in
1758); another was written in 1752 by a Franciscan in Murcia, Francisco Antonio
Castellano.61
Martın de Porres was born in Lima, Peru, the illegitimate son of a Spanish noble-
man and a black freedwoman. He eventually found refuge with the Dominicans,
working tirelessly in the order’s hospital, and becoming particularly famous for his
miraculous cures and his tender care of the powerless—animal as well as human. A
fellow lime~no Dominican, Bernardo de Medina, wrote the first official life of Martın,
basing it on the witness testimonies being taken in the early part of the canonization
process. Celia Cussen discusses the method that Medina used to select his evidence
and compose his hagiography, shaping Martın into a saint.62 Medina’s work, like
Mataplanes’s, was not printed where it was written; it was published in Madrid in
59 The necessity of centering the experiences of Africans in Atlantic history has been urged by many
scholars. For example, see Herman L. Bennett, Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (Blooming-
ton, Ind., 2010). The role of sub-Saharan Africans in the spread of devotion to black saints is a topic I
take up elsewhere.
60 For detailed information on the circulation of early texts about Benedict, see Giovanna Fiume
and Marilena Modica, eds., San Benedetto il Moro: Santit a, agiografia e primi processi di canonizzazione
(Palermo, 1998); and Rosalia Claudia Giordano, ed., San Benedetto il Moro: Il Memoriale del Rubbiano e
l’Ordinaria inquisitio del 1594 (Palermo, 2002).
61 Antonio Vicente de Madrid, El negro mas prodigioso: Vida portentosa del beato Benito del S. Phila-
de Palermo, llamado comunmente el Santo Negro (Madrid, 1744); Francisco Antonio Caste-
delphio, o
llano, Compendio de la heroyca, y maravillosa vida, virtudes excelentes, y prodigiosos milagros del mejor
negro por naturaleza (Murcia, 1752).
62 Celia L. Cussen, Black Saint of the Americas: The Life and Afterlife of Mart
ın de Porres (Cambridge,
2014), chap. 5.

1675, signaling the author’s desire for his subject’s sanctity to be recognized in the
metropole. After all, the Spanish king was perhaps the most important supporter a
holy person could have in a canonization effort.
After being kidnapped from her home in West Africa, Teresa Juliana de Santo
Domingo lived in Madrid as a slave. Having achieved a reputation in her household
for piety, she was freed upon the death of her mistress in order to fulfill her calling
to become a nun. Teresa faced great difficulty in finding an order that would accept
her, but she eventually joined the Dominican nuns in the nearby city of Salamanca,
where she spent the remaining years of her long life. In contrast to the previous two
examples, Teresa’s hagiography was written by someone who knew her, Juan Carlos
Paniagua, a Theatine who visited the holy woman in the Dominican convent. His ha-
giography was printed less than five years after her death; in it, he unconventionally
included passages written (or dictated) by Teresa Juliana herself, which describe her
autobiographical and spiritual experiences in her own words.63
Unlike Benedict, neither Martın nor Teresa Juliana achieved official cult status
during the early modern period. Devotion to them remained highly localized, though
their hagiographers made concerted efforts to promote them universally.
Comparing hagiographies written about these three individuals, we can discern a
clear typology developed by the authors, who based their work on earlier texts that
had been circulating since the late sixteenth century. All three hagiographers dis-
cussed the nature and meaning of blackness, the relationship between bodily black-
ness and spiritual whiteness, and the role of martyrdom and suffering as integral
parts of a larger argument about the role of black Christians in human salvation. In
doing so, they both engaged and subverted current thinking on color difference in or-
der to focus on new ideas about virtue grounded not in an individual’s external fea-
tures, but in his or her candidez.
BECAUSE THE CATEGORY OF “BLACK SAINT” fell outside the normative margins of Cath-
olic devotions, the first task for hagiographers was to address the issue of color differ-
ence. Hagiographies generally open with a chronological narrative, beginning with a
brief discussion of the holy person’s family and childhood, so the issue of color differ-
ence generally appears early in the text. Hagiographers had a few choices available
to them when deciding how to address their subjects’ blackness: they could celebrate
it (as did Martın de Roa); they could denigrate it but explain how exceptional virtue
enabled their subject to overcome this deficiency; or they could dismiss it as irrele-
vant. Most chose the third option. While this approach still required explanation and
defense, hagiographers almost uniformly explained to their readers that skin color
had no spiritual or moral meaning. Many authors who, like Roa, espoused monoge-
netic views of human origin persisted in the belief that non-white skin was a corrup-
tion, degeneration, or variation from the primordial whiteness.
Many hagiographers drew on climate theory in order to describe the blackness of
their subjects. Juan Carlos Paniagua, for example, referred to the “accidental color
63 For this reason, Houchins and Fra Molinero have likened this hagiography to a nineteenth-
century slave narrative; “The Saint’s Life of Sister Chicaba.”

of [Teresa Juliana’s] skin.”64 Paniagua believed that color difference had significance
primarily as an expression of God’s power made visible in the diversity of creation.65
Antonio Vicente de Madrid repeated a similar idea in his discussion of Benedict’s
blackness, asserting that variation derived from the humors alone, and that skin color
was not a reflection of one’s proximity to God.66 Bernardo de Medina agreed, claim-
ing that Martın’s skin color (pardo here rather than negro because his father was
white and his mother black) was also an “accident.” Moreover, Medina argued that
God did not recognize these accidents of color, but only an individual’s merits, be-
cause He cared for all people equally, “and we are all one in God, as the Apostle [St.
Paul] says.”67 Medina further engaged in a little play on color when he pointed out
that by giving him a white father and a black mother, God had foretold Martın’s fu-
ture with the Dominican order, whose signature colors were black and white.68 The
analogy is of tremendous importance to hagiographic discourses of blackness—the
white of the Dominican habit symbolized the purity of Christ, while the black signi-
fied penance and suffering. Medina and other hagiographers emphasized the suffer-
ing endured by their subjects resulting from their blackness, turning their counte-
nances into a visible rendering of the suffering they embraced with penitential
humility.
Paniagua’s explanation of the origins of Teresa Juliana’s blackness was different
from Medina’s: he informed his audience that everyone from Guinea was born with
skin “a color darkened and black.” While viewing color difference in Teresa’s case as
accidental, he also connected blackness to an interior state, the darkness within that
resulted from being denied the light of Christian salvation.69 A poem written by Luis
Soler y Las Balsas of Valencia, which was based on Paniagua’s text, concurred that
everyone in Guinea was born with black skin, and added, “even the white people are
born very black,” emphasizing the idea that blackness as an interior state was distinct
from exterior pigmentation.70
64 Paniagua, Compendio de la vida exemplar de la venerable Madre Sor Teresa Juliana de Sto. Do-
mingo, 57–58.
65 Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York,
1998). On the role of the stars and climate in the production of accidents, see Ca~ nizares-Esguerra, “New
World, New Stars,” especially his discussion of the influence of Aristotelian metaphysics (60–61).
66 Antonio Vicente de Madrid, El negro mas prodigioso, 2: “Acaso es, el color, o tez del rostro, pues
su variedad consiste en los humores que dominan: y aun en la mayor distancia no encontrara el mas
lynce otra mas grave diferencia, que la mayor, o menor inmediacion a el Padre de las luces, para ser
blancos, o negros los colores.”
67 Bernardo de Medina, Vida del prodigiosa del venerable siervo de Dios Fr. Martin de Porras (Madrid,
1675), 4r: “Fue pardo, como dizen vulgarmente, no blanco en el color, quando lo era de la admiracion
de todos. Pero aquel Se~ nor, que no mira accidentes del color, sino meritos de el sugeto, en quien no
cabe excepcion de personas, pues cuida igualmente de todos, y en quien todos son unos, como dixo el
Apostol.”
68 Ibid., 5r.
mingo, 2.
70 Luis Soler y Las Balsas, Vida de la venerable negra la madre sor Theresa Juliana de Santo Domingo,
de feliz memoria, 1757, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library,
Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Ms. Sc Rare 81-6, 1v. The only known copies of this
work exist in manuscript at the Schomburg Center. The Schomburg catalogue lists the work as existing in
two volumes, but they really hold two copies of the same work, in different volumes and in different
hands.

The two authors of the preface to Francisco Antonio Castellano’s hagiography of

Benedict also elaborated on the relationship between the saint’s black exterior and
white interior.71 They argued that there were two ways of being black: one was
through nature, how one was born; the other derived from disgrace, “which leaves
on the face the ugly mark of sin.” It is ambiguous here whether they were speaking
of a metaphorical mark of sin or a literal one (i.e., pigmentation). They went on to
clarify that those in the first category could seem “very white” (muy blancos) in the
divine presence, whereas the second group needed to wash themselves in “the font
of penitence in order to recover the whiteness that they had lost.”72 Benedict, they
concluded, had no black stain of sinfulness; his soul was whiter than snow (compite
su alma en la blancura con la nieve). Soler also affirmed the purity of Teresa Juliana’s
soul, calling her “a pearl.” Pearls are precious jewels found hidden inside unpromis-
ing and unsuspecting packaging, prized for their milky whiteness. The authors agreed
that the true state of being white or black was a condition of the soul deriving from
one’s proximity to salvation. In making this argument, they turned the traditional bi-
nary of whiteness and blackness on its head; rather than acknowledging the superior-
ity of white skin over black, they moved the focus away from the body to the condi-
tion of the soul, suggesting that outward appearance was a superficial quality that did
not speak to the inner reality. In these examples, blackness did not confer a degraded
moral or spiritual state that must be overcome; rather, black and white were meta-
phors for body and soul, the temporary and the eternal. Rather than being viewed
negatively, skin color was seen as irrelevant.
Not every hagiographer conveyed the same understanding of blackness and
whiteness. Pedro de Mataplanes discussed Benedict’s blackness in a way that re-
flected beliefs about embodied difference. Rather than neutralizing blackness as an
accident or as irrelevant to the quality of one’s soul, Mataplanes turned to a botani-
cal metaphor. Citing the “Book of Plants” by Gerolamo Cardano (d. 1576) (part of
his larger 1552 volume De subtilitate), he claimed that in nature plants displaying the
true color black grew out of thick and coarse material, and yet the flowers that
emerged from this material were the most delicate and subtle.73 Here we can see a
different defense of blackness—from the most unlikely material, God created beauty
and delicacy. God’s ability to create objects of wonder and awe out of the lowliest of
materials was an old argument in Christian thinking; it explained in part why God
had chosen to be born a humble carpenter’s son rather than a rich and powerful
king. And yet at the same time, Mataplanes reflected society’s clear belief that black
bodies constituted lowly, coarse material—inferior matter. The celebration of the
71 Hagiographies, like most early modern books, included a variety of front matter before the main
work, including approvals granting the printing licenses, which could be brief or extensive.
72 Castellano, Compendio de la heroyca, y maravillosa vida, n.f.: “Unos, en quienes dispuso la natural-
eza, se descubriesse en el semblante o obscuro de su origen; y otros, que por su desgracia, les sale al ros-
tro el borron feo de la culpa. Los primeros son Negros sin culpa, por lo que pueden ser muy blancos en
la Divina presencia; pero los que son negros por la obscuridad de sus pecados, necessitan lavarse en la
fuente de la penitencia, para recuperar la blancura que perdieron con la gracia.”
73 Pedro de Mataplanes, Vida de Fray Benito de S. Fradelo, religioso recoleto de la orden de S. Fran-
cisco, comunmente nobmrado El Santo Negro de Palermo (Madrid, 1702), n.p.: “segun la solida, y fundada
razon, que nos da en su florido Libro de las Plantas el erudito Cardano; diziendo, que la color verdader-
amente negra se engendra de materia muy espesa, y crasa: y siendo que las Flores se producen del sumo
mas delicado, y sutil de las Plantas.”

exceptional beauty that emerged from coarse material rhetorically enhanced Bene-
dict’s elevated grace while it denigrated his blackness.74
The discussions of the skin color of black holy people in hagiographies tended to
unfold along similar lines: blackness had no relevance to one’s spiritual state. The
temporary body opened up, burned away, or otherwise masked the true self—the
soul. Mataplanes’s take on Benedict’s blackness combined a celebration of the spiri-
tual gifts of black saints with a critique of the black body, suggesting a diversity of
views about black bodies among early modern hagiographers.
IF MOST HAGIOGRAPHERS ACCEPTED THE idea that bodily blackness, unlike spiritual
blackness, was an irrelevant marker of spiritual grace, it does not necessarily follow
that embodied experience played no role in hagiographies of black saints. On the
contrary, exterior blackness was of fundamental importance to the archetype.75 That
these saints were black was central not because of its inherent importance to their
spiritual development, but because of its social meaning and the specific experiences
they underwent as a result of this degraded social position.
Teresa Juliana was the only one of the three who had been a slave. She was born
in the late seventeenth century, most likely into a polytheistic Ewe family who were
local rulers, and given the name Chikaba.76 After her kidnapping at the age of nine
or ten, Chikaba was transported by ship to Cadiz, and then to Madrid; she was bap-
tized en route and renamed Teresa. Once in Madrid, she was brought before the
king, who immediately recognized her worth. (The ambivalence of that “worth”—her
material value as a commodity and her interior spiritual value—is obvious.) She
joined the household of the marquis of Mancera, Antonio Sebastian de Toledo (d.
1715), the former viceroy of New Spain and a well-known patron of poets, including
the renowned mystical poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.77 This was clearly a household
74 An echo of this take on blackness can also be found in Soler’s poem when he invokes the idea of
the black saint as a phoenix, a common Christian metaphor for salvation and spiritual rebirth; Vida de la
venerable negra, 4r. Margaret Olsen points out that Alonso de Sandoval discussed black Africans as coals
from which the fire of Christianity could be stoked, a clear parallel to the phoenix myth; Slavery and Sal-
vation in Colonial Cartagena de Indias, 87–88.
75 I make this distinction because the model followed by the hagiographies of Sts. Elesban and Efige-
nia is different from those developed for the three holy people discussed in this essay. While their hagi-
ographers espouse similar understandings of blackness, these two saints were royalty, and enjoyed an
elevated, rather than degraded, social position.
76 For theories on the meaning(s) of “Chikaba,” see Yvette Jiménez de Baéz, “Sor Teresa Juliana de
Santo Domingo: Chikaba una vida en frontera,” in José Barrado and Oscar Mayorga, eds., La Orden de
Predicadores en Iberoamérica en el siglo XVII: Actas del IX Congreso Internacional de Historiadores (Sala-
manca, 2010), 265–310, here 266. On Chikaba’s possible ethnicity, see Houchins and Fra Molinero, “The
Saint’s Life of Sister Chicaba,” 215.
77 Sor Juana’s relationship with the viceroys, especially the vicereine, is well-documented; see, for ex-
ample, Octavio Paz, Sor Juana; or, The Traps of Faith, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (Cambridge, Mass.,
1990), 88–89. For a good summary of the marquis de Mancera’s life as Teresa Juliana’s owner, see
Melian, “Chikaba, la primera monja negra en el sistema esclavista finisecular espa~ nol del siglo XVII,”
571–573. Joan Bristol points out that the marquis’s first wife was also devoted to an Afro-Mexican holy
woman, Juana Esperanza de San Alberto; Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches, 59.

in which female spirituality was recognized, even fostered. Paniagua emphasizes the
marquis’s role in assisting Teresa’s vocation.78
Paniagua described Teresa’s owners as generous and Christian but nevertheless
emphasized the great hardship she suffered at the hands of the household servants
and slaves. As a child as well as African, Teresa found herself in a position of partic-
ular vulnerability and was subjected to repeated physical and emotional violence.
Paniagua explained the theological meaning of the cruelty with which she was
treated: “Heaven permits this . . . to purify, to train Teresa.” He further emphasized
the perfection of her response: “She remained quiet, suffering with patience and si-
lence.”79 The ability to endure great suffering in the proper spirit of patient accep-
tance was critical for holy people, since it demonstrated the Counter-Reformation
quality of heroic virtue, which Michael Carroll describes as “an individual’s ability
and willingness to act virtuously in a manner far beyond what is expected of ordinary
people.”80
While most holy women’s hagiographies emphasized their suffering as a result of
acute illnesses and chronic health conditions, Teresa Juliana’s sufferings were at the
hands of others. Both the punishments to which she was subjected and her silent ac-
ceptance of them elevated her to the heights of heroic virtue. The physical suffering
she experienced was crucial to Paniagua’s account of redemption and spiritual gifts,
so he made no effort to obscure or minimize the brutalities of her life as a slave; on
the contrary, he employed vivid and condemnatory language in order to be clear that
this was not suffering she deserved. Some of the significant virtues of the saints came
from their willingness to accept unmerited suffering and judgment, just as Christ had
done.
The suffering that resulted from slavery and color difference is a key component
of the archetype of the black saint, as hagiographers worked to correlate the black-
ness of the saints’ skin with the symbolic meaning of blackness as representing suffer-
ing or penance. Hagiographers frequently implied that their saints wore or inhabited
their penance through their color difference. The hagiographers of Benedict of Pa-
lermo and Martın de Porres emphasized that their subjects also faced cruelty and
mistreatment; while neither had been a slave, their suffering at the hands of others
was clearly motivated by their skin color and lowly status. Pedro de Mataplanes re-
counted a story in which the convent’s gatekeeper unleashed his rage on Benedict
because the holy man arrived a few minutes late. Getting into Benedict’s face, the
mingo, 56–61; Melian, “Chikaba, la primera monja negra en el sistema esclavista finisecular espa~ nol del
siglo XVII,” 573–574.
mingo, 27.
80 Michael P. Carroll, Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy (Baltimore, 1996),
217–218. Heroic virtue was a quality required of holy people for successful canonization bids in the post-
Tridentine era; Ditchfield, “Tridentine Worship and the Cult of Saints.” The historiography on early
modern holy women and hagiography is vast. See, for example, John W. Coakley, Women, Men, and Spi-
ritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York, 2006); Gabriella Zarri, “Living
Saints: A Typology of Female Sanctity in the Early Sixteenth Century,” in Daniel Bornstein and Roberto
Rusconi, eds., Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, trans. Margery J. Schneider (Chi-
cago, 1996), 219–303; and Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450–1750
(Ithaca, N.Y., 2005).

gatekeeper called him “black and a dog.”81 Mataplanes underscored the intensity
(and irrationality) of the gatekeeper’s anger for the reader. Calling someone a “dog”
was a common—and serious—insult throughout early modern Europe.82 Adding the
adjective “black” was clearly intended to deepen it. In fact, most of the stories Mata-
planes recounted of people insulting Benedict included epithets like “slave” and
“black man.”83
Martın de Porres was also called a “dog,” though in his case the exact phrase was
“mulato dog,” a reference to his mixed-race heritage. Like Mataplanes, Medina
made it clear that the torrent of insults directed at his subject resulted from the
slightest of incidents. Martın’s tormenter continued his verbal abuse, proclaiming
that Martın deserved to be a galley slave—one of the most grueling forms of slavery
in the early modern world. Medina added that these insults were “an affront to [Mar-
tın’s] calidad.”84 Calidad was a key component of colonial life; it referred to a per-
son’s social rank, but also held a deeper meaning of honor, even worthiness.85 More
than just being called an unpleasant name, then, Martın experienced a direct verbal
assault. Moreover, Medina distinguished between Martın’s calidad—presumably his
interior state of virtue—and the perceptions that others had of his calidad that were
based on his appearance or outer self.
This was far from an isolated incident. Medina noted that God tried Martın’s pa-
tience many times by subjecting him to verbal abuse from his fellow brothers, one of
whom “unleashed his tongue” with vehement insults and slanders.86 When a superior
arrived and, shocked by the brother’s behavior, attempted to intervene on Martın’s
behalf, Martın insisted that his treatment was a deserved punishment for his sins. He
proclaimed: “Today I am taking ashes even though it is not Wednesday,” a reference
to the penitential rite that Catholics participate in on Ash Wednesday, the day that
marks the beginning of the traditional season of penance, Lent. The act of enduring
verbal abuse with humility and patience transformed his suffering into a penitential
rite. Note here as well the potential play on the word “ash,” which was frequently
used as a metonym for black skin in early modern Spanish texts. The lives of Martın
and Benedict differed from Teresa Juliana’s in that they did not suffer the horrors of
slavery, yet their hagiographers make clear that their blackness acted as a penitential
rite that they endured constantly.
One of Benedict’s hagiographers, Antonio Vicente de Madrid, described the
deep resistance that Benedict faced from the other brothers in his efforts to enter
the Franciscan convent, specifically on the grounds of his blackness. The author be-
gan with an Old Testament story about Moses, whose desire to marry an Ethiopian
81 Mataplanes, Vida de Fray Benito de S. Fradelo, 36. Mataplanes (Pietro Mataplana in Italian) was a
native of Palermo and a canon. This text is a Spanish translation of the popular and widely read Italian
hagiography of Benedict, which drew heavily from a mid-seventeenth-century Sicilian hagiography by
Pietro Tognoletto.
82 Scott K. Taylor, Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain (New Haven, Conn., 2008), 38. This
page includes a list of common insults in early modern Spain.

83 Mataplanes, Vida de Fray Benito de S. Fradelo, 36–39.
84 Bernardo de Medina, Vida del prodigiosa del venerable siervo de Dios Fr. Martin de Porras, 11v–13r.
85 The concept of calidad had greater use and significance in colonial Latin America than in peninsu-
lar Spain. For a discussion of the meanings of calidad, see Magali M. Carrera, Imagining Identity in New
Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (Austin, Tex., 2003), 6–21;
and Katzew, Casta Painting, 45–46.
86 Bernardo de Medina, Vida del prodigiosa del venerable siervo de Dios Fr. Martin de Porras, 14v–15r.

woman resulted in “murmurings” from his relatives, who thought the match un-
seemly. He then offered a parallel: like Moses’s relatives, the Franciscan brothers
murmured against the inclusion of an Ethiopian among them, and for the same
reason—his blackness.87 Indeed, all three holy people faced difficulties in being ac-
cepted into their spiritual communities; Benedict and Teresa Juliana belonged to the
lower level of their respective religious orders, called the tertiary, or “lay” orders,
while as a donado, Martın occupied an even lower status. They were systematically
marked as different and lesser by the communities in which they lived.88 Similarly,
Paniagua made no effort to disguise the racially based motivations for the difficulties
Teresa encountered in gaining entry into a convent, nor the anguish it caused her.
He commented that she had never really cared about her “accidental” skin color un-
til the moment when “it caused a great martyrdom, because it wrecked her most
cherished desires.”89 Here Paniagua introduced a crucial component of the typology
of black saints: that the poor treatment they faced as a result of their color difference
constituted a form of martyrdom, a visible hair shirt causing continual mortification.
It therefore was a form of suffering that derived from persecution based on a percep-
tion of inferiority.
Hagiographers registered the prejudice that holy people of color encountered,
from everyone ranging from fellow servants to the senior ranks in the ecclesiastical
hierarchy. Friars and nuns were themselves steeped in class and racial discrimination,
and could cruelly mistreat slaves and servants of color.90 Yet while hagiographers
presented the harsh realities of the saints’ situations, they did not critique them.
Through the hagiographic lens—which seeks to create a universalized and static
vision—those realities read partly as the expected struggles encountered by early
modern saints, who were often subjected to ill-treatment by those in authority. Hagi-
ographers understood the corruption and hardship faced by the saints as forces to be
overcome or to be borne patiently, not overturned or transformed.91 At the same
time, however, the undercurrents of these lives did challenge the status quo. By de-
lineating color prejudice as a form of martyrdom and asserting the capabilities of
sub-Saharan Africans to achieve the highest ranks of Christian virtue, the authors re-
jected denigrating and racialized views of blackness while arguing for the spiritual
participation of black Christians.
The suffering these saints endured was a test and a trial; its purifying functions
often appeared in the text shortly after descriptions of their patience and humility. In
87 Antonio Vicente de Madrid, El negro mas prodigioso, 19.
88 Teresa Juliana experienced a vision after the bishop refused to allow her to become a nun, and
permitted her to enter the convent in Salamanca only as a tertiary. In the vision, St. Dominic handed her
the veil: “This was the profession invisible to mortal eyes, but very apparent to the angels, saints, and the
blessed.” Paniagua, Compendio de la vida exemplar de la venerable Madre Sor Teresa Juliana de Sto. Do-
mingo, 77–78.
89 Ibid., 57. Paniagua emphasized the great efforts made by the Manceras to convince resisting con-
vents to take Teresa by offering them large sums of money. He also frequently called attention to Teresa
Juliana’s blackness by referring to her as esta Negra. Each use of esta Negra served to remind the reader
of the lowliness and suffering Teresa endured in her life.
90 Ursula de Jes us recounted the disrespect with which she was treated by the nuns in her convent,
even though she was a freedwoman; van Deusen, The Souls of Purgatory, 54–55.
91 Catherine Sanok argues that beneath the seemingly static exterior, hagiographers developed nu-
anced historical and social arguments. Sanok, Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in
Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, 2007).

early modern Catholicism, suffering bore spiritual fruit. For this reason, hagiogra-
phers often immediately segued from accounts of suffering to examples of the mirac-
ulous consolations offered to their subjects by God, often in the form of visions or
miracles. Paniagua recounted a story in which Teresa Juliana received comfort from
an Ecce Homo that hung in the private chapel in which she lived.92 “Ecce homo”
(“Behold the man” in Latin) were the words spoken by Pilate when he presented
Christ to the angry crowd, bleeding from his whipping and the crown of thorns. The
image in Teresa’s household inspired her desire to suffer “infinitely” for His sake
while simultaneously being filled with consolation for her own suffering.93 The com-
parison of Teresa’s suffering to that of Christ cast her as a martyr. Paniagua linked
Teresa’s suffering, consolation, and redemption to Christ’s example and life, empha-
sizing the significant ways in which she followed in Christ’s footsteps.
The authors also compared their subjects to Christ by pointing out their Christ-
like natures. According to Mataplanes, for example, Benedict, like Teresa Juliana,
reacted to the cruel words of those tormenting him with silence; the author claimed
that Benedict acted “in imitation of the Redeemer of the World”—that is, Christ.94
Bernardo de Medina likened Martın’s response to ill-treatment to that of the mar-
tyrs: “but the Man of God [was] wearing the expression of an Angel, [on his knees]
like the Protomartyr Stephen.”95 Here the author evoked the position of passive and
peaceful acceptance of suffering so integral to the representation of the martyrs. It
was precisely this perfect humility in the face of the mortifications they endured that
opened them up to receive transcendent spiritual gifts from God.96
Belief in redemptive suffering meant that those who suffered most terribly could
achieve the highest levels of spiritual potency; their suffering was transformed into
their salvation as well as the salvation of others. Mataplanes evoked this idea explic-
itly when he connected Benedict to Christ in His capacity as redeemer of the world.
The belief that blackness and slavery could generate redemptive suffering echoed
throughout the colonial world. The famed Luso-Brazilian Jesuit priest Antonio
Vieira (d. 1697) declared during a fiery sermon preached to a congregation of
enslaved and freed black people in seventeenth-century Brazil that patient suffering
of the injustices and miseries of enslavement would result in an “easy” salvation, be-
cause the punishments from masters “are a martyrdom.” He continued: “because in
this condition into which God placed you it is your vocation to be similar to the Son,
who suffered for us, leaving us an example that you should imitate.”97 In this sermon,
we see an early articulation of themes later to be adopted and disseminated by hagi-
92 Dominique Deslandres, “In the Shadow of the Cloister: Representations of Female Holiness in
New France,” in Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff, Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas,
1500–1800 (New York, 2003), 129–152, here 135.
mingo, 28.
94 Mataplanes, Vida de Fray Benito de S. Fradelo, 36.
95 Bernardo de Medina, Vida del prodigiosa del venerable siervo de Dios Fr. Martin de Porras, 12r.
96 As Celia Cussen has argued, “In the cult to Mart ın de Porres, lime~ nos braided together their un-
derstandings of the integration of Africans and their descendants in local society, the evident suffering of
slaves, and the value of prayer and self-mortification to fortify humility in the human soul and even share
in the redemptive suffering of Christ”; Black Saint of the Americas, 206.
97 Antonio Vieira, “Two Slaveries—The Sermons of Padre Antônio Vieira, Salvador, Bahia (ca.
1633), and S~ao Luis do Maranh~ao,” in Kenneth Mills, William B. Taylor, and Sandra Lauderdale Gra-
ham, eds., Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History (London, 2002), 218–233, here 225.

ographers, who agreed with Vieira that blackness was a vehicle to holiness uniquely
available to members of the African diaspora, not in spite of their lowly status but be-
cause of it. While we do not know if these authors read each other’s texts, the recur-
rence of similar themes in hagiographies and sermons from Lima and Bahia to Sala-
manca and Seville is indicative of how widely such ideas circulated among Catholic
clergy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Hagiographers and missionaries
joined a conversation that insisted on the inclusion of African converts in universal
Christendom and special access to redemption offered as consolation for their im-
mense suffering. The blackness of the body, as a living penitential rite, provided the
opportunity for a unique gift of divine grace.
ONCE THE GROUNDWORK HAD BEEN LAID in these hagiographies for understanding the
divine gifts that resulted from their subjects’ humble endurance of the suffering
meted out to them on the basis of their color difference and social status, the authors
explored the gifts of holiness and grace that manifested themselves in the latter part
of these holy people’s lives. To articulate these gifts, they again turned to the spiritual
language of Christianity that permeated ecclesiastical culture: blackness and white-
ness. Because they did not wish to place spiritual whiteness in contrast to blackness,
hagiographers subverted the traditional binary of black-white by instead emphasizing
a distinct category of light-infused grace: candidez.
Discussions of candidez often appeared in the sections of hagiographies that dis-
cussed the deaths of the saints. Those sections were crucial, as the moment of death
could provide the clearest evidence for a holy person’s new status as a saint.98 Stand-
ard accounts of Benedict of Palermo’s death almost always included the following an-
ecdote: Benedict’s niece, while praying for her uncle’s soul in a room across town, re-
ported seeing a dove of dazzling whiteness (candida Paloma) rising to heaven and
speaking to her in his voice.99 She understood this miracle to mean that her uncle
had died and his soul was rising to heaven. Here it was not Benedict’s physical body
that manifested whiteness, but a dove, representing his soul and signaling his en-
trance into heaven.
The adjective used to describe the dove, candida, was one that clerics commonly
used to describe the souls of black saints. Another early modern friar described Ben-
edict as having an alma candidisimo: a soul of the most dazzling brilliance.100 The
Spanish adjective candido/a derives from the Latin adjective candidus, which did not
mean simple whiteness. The whiteness of appearance or physical description in Latin
is albus. Candidus, on the other hand, had a meaning distinct from a neutral
98 For an extended and important discussion of the death of a saint, see Eire’s account of the death
of St. Teresa of Avila, From Madrid to Purgatory, 371–501.

99 Castellano, Compendio de la heroyca, y maravillosa vida, 80r: “En el mismo instante que espir o,
o una Negrita, sobrina suya, volar su dichosissima Alma a la Celestial Patria, como candida Paloma.”
vi
100 As quoted in Rafael Ortega Sagrista, “La cofrad ıa de los negros en el Jaén del siglo XVII,”
Boletın del Instituto de Estudios Giennenses 4, no. 12 (1957): 125–134, here 131. The citation comes from
a petition to found a new confraternity with Benedict of Palermo as its patron, instigated by the Afro-
Iberian Crist obal de Porras in 1627: “para que fundase en el dicho lugar la Cofradıa de Sn. Benito de Pa-
lermo de nuestra sagrada Religi on que por haber sido el santo de color morena, (aunque de costumbres
y alma candidısimo), los morenos tienen con él gran devoci on y alma candidısimo” (ibid.).

description of a physical object; it transcended color. The word connects color and
light—a shining, dazzling brightness that throughout classical antiquity was associ-
ated with moral worth and the divine.101 It is related to the word “candidate,” candi-
datus in Latin, since Roman senators wore white togas. The root origin of candidus
in the word candidatus underscores the ways in which the term could designate
someone chosen, either for the senate or for a seat in heaven. The adjective candidus
was picked up and Christianized by medieval and early modern authors, who often
connected it with the divine. It is a term that appears, for example, in Dante’s Para-
diso, most famously in his description of the candida rosa.102 It also permeates St.
Bernard of Clairvaux’s (d. 1153) sermons on the Old Testament Song of Songs,
which contains the famous line “I am black, but beautiful.”103 Circulating back to
Benedict’s death, it is not a coincidence that the adjective candida is employed to de-
scribe the miraculous transformation at the moment of death, as death represents
the liminal moment when the chosen soul of a saint slips out of the body and reunites
with God in heaven.
Teresa Juliana’s death was accompanied by a miraculous portent: “Several prodi-
gious events were noted at the time of her death, and after her death, because her
life having been, as it was, so oppressed, her departure was greatly celebrated in
Heaven: the color of her face, naturally black, turned white before her death and re-
mained so after her death for no short amount of time.”104 Paniagua elaborated that
those caring for Teresa in her final illness noted the change before her death, proving
that the event was not merely a natural effect of death on the human body. He fur-
ther directly connected the miracle to the great suffering that Teresa endured during
her lifetime. Her acute suffering in life was transformed into celebratory joy in
heaven.
Teresa was not the only woman of color who manifested this particular miracle.
Upon the death of Catherine Tekakwitha (d. 1680), a holy Mohawk woman in New
France, Jesuit witness Father Cholenac recorded seeing her corpse immediately
transformed into whiteness. He remarked: “I admit openly that the first thought that
came to me was that Catherine at that moment might have entered into heaven, re-
flecting in her chaste body a small ray of the glory of which her soul had taken
101 Charlton Lewis, An Elementary Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1998), 106. (This includes the entries
for candidus, as well as the noun candor, defined here as “a dazzling whiteness, lustre, clearness, radi-
ance, brilliance.”) For a discussion of albus and candidus specifically in terms of the evolution of Euro-
pean racial thought, see Mervyn C. Alleyne, The Construction and Representation of Race and Ethnicity in
the Caribbean and the World (Kingston, Jamaica, 2002), 44–54.
102 Dante, Paradiso, Canto XXXII. In this canto, St. Bernardo describes the rose of brilliant light
surrounding the Virgin Mary, made up of dazzlingly bright souls. It was also picked up in medieval love
poetry. See Peter Dronke, The Medieval Poet and His World (Rome, 1984), chap. 8. Eudes of Ch^ateau-
roux (d. 1254) described the pope in terms of white light: “Because the image of God should shine forth
in the pope more than in any other man, his clothes must be white as snow. His face should shine like
the sun . . . It is by their faces that we recognize their wills.” As quoted by Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani,
The Pope’s Body, trans. David S. Peterson (Chicago, 1994), 239.
103 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons sur le cantique, ed. and trans. Paul Verdeyen and Raffaele Fas-
setta, 5 vols. (Paris, 1998), 2: 266–269.

mingo, 146: “Algunos prodigios se notaron al tiempo de fallecer, y despues de muerta Teresa; porque
aviendo sido, como fue, su vida tan ajustada, era forzoso festejasse el Cielo su partida: el color del rostro,
por su naturaleza negro, antes de espirar se le puso blanco, y aun despues de muerta persever o assi no
poco tiempo.”

possession.”105 Cholenac understood Catherine’s whitening as an infusion of divine

light (“ray of the glory”) that marked her soul’s passage into God’s presence. His de-
scription is astonishingly similar to Paniagua’s half a century later and an ocean
away. Though the hagiographers here use the less evocative term “white” to describe
the miraculous deathbed changes, they clearly connected the new whiteness to the
dazzling brightness of heaven.106
Moreover, while it was not unusual for saints to take on a different appearance in
death—to become more beautiful, serene, youthful—the miracle of whitening in the
cases of Teresa Juliana and Catherine Tekakwitha was temporary, not permanent.
Paniagua implied in his temporal framing of the miracle that Teresa Juliana’s visage
returned to its habitual black. In death, the bodies of black saints maintained their
blackness while exhibiting the same types of miracles associated with white saints—
they died a good death; their bodies filled the room with a powerfully sweet odor;
and most importantly, they remained incorrupt long after death.107 It was in that in-
corruption where the faithful could find evidence to dispute ideas of bodily differ-
ence, since the bodies of black saints reacted (or failed to react) to death in the same
way that white bodies did. Embedded in hagiographies of black saints, then, were
multiple ways of contesting theories of bodily difference.
The language of light recurs throughout the lives of holy people of color, particu-
larly in descriptions of their faces, which often include adjectives like “brilliant,” “re-
splendent,” and “bright.” Words that fused concepts of light with whiteness were par-
ticularly common. Antonio Vicente de Madrid’s hagiography of Benedict described
his soul as muy candida and “purer and whiter than snow.”108 A Portuguese Carmel-
ite used the adverb candidez when describing the Ethiopian saint Elesban and his in-
ner whiteness, wiped free of sin: “so very pure, and of clear conscience that he had
already been wiped clean of every grave sin to cleanse his interior to candidez.”109 A
funeral sermon for Magdalena de la Cruz, an Afro-Iberian nun in eighteenth-century
Seville who died in the odor of sanctity, echoed similar ideas: “It is an impossibly
great triumph, in which an Ethiopian lightens and a black person takes on the color
white . . . This Ethiopian pilgrim, seen by the world as black, was for Heaven the most
radiant white [albada candidez].”110 Here the preacher, Pedro Contreras, used the
105 As quoted and translated by Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits
(Oxford, 2006), 17. Catherine (Kateri) Tekakwitha was canonized in 2012.

106 Paravicini-Bagliani has pointed out the contrast between nudity and whiteness in the bodies of
late medieval popes: “The dressing of his corpse had to make visible the signs of his former majesty. The
pope refused the nudity of the corpse: the golden borders transformed the whiteness (and therefore the
nudity) into glory.” The Pope’s Body, 128.
107 For more on holy autopsy and the medical scrutiny to which the bodies of the holy were subject,
see Katharine Park’s important article “The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in
Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 47, no. 1 (1994): 1–33.
108 Antonio Vicente de Madrid, El negro mas prodigioso, 92. He repeated the description of Bene-
dict’s soul on the next page, asserting: “Este, y otros efectos maravillosos, en prueba de su pura inocen-
cia, y de la candidez de su Alma, se vieron claramente en este Siervo de Dios experimentados, por donde
se llega a conocer lo que resplandeci o en esta hermosa Virtud” (93).
109 José Pereira Santana, Os dous atlantes da Ethiopia Santo Elesba~ o, emperador XLVII. da Abessina,
. . . e Santa Ifigenia, princeza da Nubia . . . ambos Carmelitas, 2 vols. in 1 (Lisbon, 1735), 1: 21: “mas t~ao
limpo, e claro de consciencia, que ja mais se atreveo culpa grave a mancharlhe a candidez do interior.”
110 It might be more correct, though awkward, to translate this phrase as “white brilliance” rather
than “brilliant white.” Contreras, Serm on f unebre en las honras de la venerable Magdalena de la Cruz, 1:
“En lo natural es impossible . . . ; pore esto, que es impossible a la naturaleza, lo facilitan los primores de

term candidez in order to emphasize the disparity between what the world saw and
Magdalena’s hidden but true and holy nature. All of these quotes tied candidez to pu-
rity and holiness, inward states inaccessible to the human eye but perfectly visible to
God, as manifestations of His grace.
Although evidence of direct transmission of specific vocabulary used in hagio-
graphic texts can be difficult to trace, it is possible to uncover a few examples. In one
case, a Franciscan friar living in Madrid in the middle of the eighteenth century,
Francisco de Hoyo, composed a hagiography of Benedict of Palermo in celebration
of his beatification in 1734. Hoyo had read widely among earlier Franciscan authors
before composing his hagiography, including Pedro de Mataplanes and Antonio
Daza. When describing Benedict’s parentage, he remarked that Benedict inherited
their blackness (negro color), then cited yet another Franciscan historian, Luke Wad-
ding (d. 1657), whose work described Benedict as “most black in body and most
white [blanco] in soul.” Hoyo added Wadding’s Latin original: “negro nigerrimus, an-
ima candidissimus.”111 Thus, the word that Hoyo translated as “most white” had orig-
inally been candidus. Wadding was an Irish Franciscan, transplanted to Rome, who
compiled the lives of hundreds of notable Franciscans in his eight-volume Annales
minorum.112 The choice to cite Wadding’s use of this particular phrase highlights
Hoyo’s view of its importance, as well as its continued use into the eighteenth cen-
tury.
The candidez exhibited by saints of color transcended whiteness. Hagiographers
who used this term did not posit a return to the whiteness exhibited in the flesh by
white Europeans, but rather the return to a genuinely primeval purity, as distinct
from fleshly whiteness as it was from earthly blackness. The term’s double meaning
of white and bright differentiated it from skin color or pigmentation, and instead em-
phasized its otherworldly origin. The brilliance of divine light shone more dazzlingly
in some human beings than others according to divine grace, privileging those whose
spiritual sufferings were great and whose penance was extraordinary. Hagiographers,
therefore, argued that spiritual chosenness transcended human flesh or pigmenta-
tion. The divine was the source of true unity, accessible to people of color as well as
white Europeans.113 The language of light and brightness enabled hagiographers to
rhetorically separate virtue from whiteness; this separation in turn allowed them to
subvert the binaries of black-white/evil-good/sin-virtue that were frequently employed
by secular society—and some clerics—to demean the spiritual and moral potential of
black Christians.
la gracia . . . ; una continua amada candidez en la amistad y gracia de le Se~nor: esta vence esse impossible
grande, de que se pueda un Ethiope de albar, y que un Negro tenga blanco color. Creo, que este exordio
nos lleva de la mano a aquella Ethiopisa peregrine, que siendo para el Mundo de negro color, fue para
el Cielo de albada candidez.” Contreras spent more time on Magdalena’s blackness than Paniagua. He
explained climate theory for his listeners and further expounded on the beauty of blackness.
111 Francisco del Hoyo, Doctrinas m ısticas y morales, fundadas y deducidas de la vida del Santo negro
San Benedicto de San Fratelo (n.p., 1744), Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid (BNM), MS 3418.
112 Luke Wadding, Annales minorum, in quibus res omnes trium Ordinum a S. Francisco institutorum
ex fide ponderosius asseruntur, calumniae refelluntur, praeclara quaeque monumenta ab obliuione vendican-
tur, 8 vols. (Rome, 1625–1654).
113 It is worth noting that I am talking only about these authors and their views in the context of hag-
iographies of holy people of color. As mentioned earlier, other early modern European authors took
bleaker and more prejudiced views of blackness, innate abilities, and spiritual capability.

THE PROMOTION OF SPECIFIC HOLY PEOPLE of color by hagiographers, and the wider au-
diences who read their work, fed into larger currents of early modern European en-
counter. In unexpected ways, such promotion can be seen as part of the larger im-
pulse of collecting that swept early modern Europe. As Daniela Bleichmar and Peter
Mancall have remarked, “Early modern collecting was closely related to the cross-
cultural travel of people and things.” Moreover, collecting could be imbued with spir-
itual meaning, since the diversity of nature originated from God.114 Maria Zytaruk
has argued that cabinets of curiosity represented an effort “to recover lost Adamic
knowledge. Cabinet collections register, then, the longing of a fallen humankind and
perhaps, like elegy, functioned as a mechanism for consolation.”115 This way of think-
ing about cabinets of curiosity echoes the ways in which the seventeenth-century Je-
suit Martın de Roa viewed color difference and the resurrected body.
The restoration of humanity’s unity through the recognition of the spiritual po-
tential of individuals drawn from the diversity of the world’s population presaged the
eventual reunion of humanity after its postlapsarian fragmentation. The language of
loss and the redemption achieved through the restoration of diversity in heaven pro-
vides a new way of thinking about the promotion of black saints, its role in Catholic
eschatology, and its significance to the theory of monogenesis. Such an eschatological
motivation might help to explain the seemingly heightened interest evinced by early
modern Franciscans in the promotion of saints of color, since Franciscan spirituality
encouraged millenarian thinking, particularly in the imperative of baptizing as many
souls as possible.
In this understanding, the blackness of black saints was central, since their very
difference reflected the divinely ordained diversity of nature, which was pleasing to
God and a requirement of the apocalypse. In viewing color difference through this
register, hagiographers argued that people of color merited seats at the heavenly ta-
ble. Their dark skin provided hagiographers with a rhetoric grounded in established
Christian theology—that of blackness and whiteness—which they could subvert in or-
der to make a persuasive case for the holiness of their subjects. In the process, they
rejected the idea that skin color was an impediment to virtue or a reflection of one’s
interior state; its main function was as a means through which holy people suffered,
practiced humility, and achieved grace. Such divine grace in turn was revealed by the
presence of divine light. Evoking candidez rather than blancura was a method that
hagiographers could use to transcend the black-white binary that had caused their
subjects so much grief in life.
While large-scale conversions of sub-Saharan Africans had started as early as the
mid-fifteenth century, the persistence, brutality, and expansion of the transatlantic
slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries meant that issues of color dif-
ference and racialism were debated with increasing ferocity throughout late early
114 Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall, “Introduction,” in Bleichmar and Mancall, eds., Collect-
ing across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia, 2011), 1–11,
quotation from 2. For more on early modern collecting, see Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums,
Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, Calif., 1994); and Oliver Impey and Ar-
thur MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-
Century Europe (Oxford, 1985).
115 Maria Zytaruk, “Cabinets of Curiosities and the Organization of Knowledge,” University of To-
ronto Quarterly 80, no. 1 (2011): 1–23, here 5.

modern Europe. Members of the Catholic clergy who promoted black saints pushed
back against fixed ideas of race and natural slavery, perpetuating older, more mallea-
ble ideas about color difference and human origins while simultaneously developing
new ways to understand virtue, spirituality, and blackness. While the hagiographic
presentation of blackness and suffering could be (and was) used by slave owners as a
strategy for encouraging submission and the general reinforcement of social hierar-
chies, hagiographers writing about black saints remained focused on similitude, not
difference, unity, not dispersal, precisely because they viewed the conversion of the
world to Christianity as the essential task required of the militant Church.
The construction of the black saint therefore played a crucial role in the clergy’s
missionary activities on multiple continents and in the development of a new, global
Church. In the process, some members of the clergy insisted on spiritual equality, re-
jected blackness as a reflection of sinfulness or evil, and suggested that slaves had the
potential to become saints. Beyond the more esoteric and theological ramifications
of such hagiographic topoi, clerical insistence on the role of black Christians in uni-
versal salvation helped to preserve black participation in the public religious life of
Spain and Spanish America at a time when such participation could have significant
impacts on the civic and social lives of African-descended people.
Erin Kathleen Rowe is Assistant Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity, where she has taught since 2012. She is the author of Saint and Nation:
Santiago, Teresa of Avila, and Plural Identities in Early Modern Spain (Penn State
University Press, 2011). She is currently working on a history of devotion to black
saints in early modern global Catholicism, which is being supported by a grant
from the ACLS (2015–2016).

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Saint Benedict of Palermo, Rome.

The son of African slaves and raised in humble circum-

ERIN KATHLEEN ROWE

IN 1748, AN ELDERLY DOMINICAN TERTIARY named Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo

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ference, 1500–1900 (Durham, N.C., 2010).

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Previous scholarship has generally centered on the ways in which hagiography

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Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge, 1995), 377–378.

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Hagiographic tropes led to a greater variety of archetypes of saints, including desert

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though he did not have a cult independent of the Adoration.53 In contrast to

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century slave narrative; “The Saint’s Life of Sister Chicaba.”

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The two authors of the preface to Francisco Antonio Castellano’s hagiography of

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page includes a list of common insults in early modern Spain.

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of St. Teresa of Avila, From Madrid to Purgatory, 371–501.

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setta, 5 vols. (Paris, 1998), 2: 266–269.

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possession.”105 Cholenac understood Catherine’s whitening as an infusion of divine

(Oxford, 2006), 17. Catherine (Kateri) Tekakwitha was canonized in 2012.

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ronto Quarterly 80, no. 1 (2011): 1–23, here 5.

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