학술논문
After Death, Her Face Turned White: Blackness, Whiteness, and Sanctity in the Early Modern Hispanic World.
Document Type
Article
Author
Source
Subject
Language
ISSN
00028762
Abstract
In the early modern period, devotion to black saints began to spread throughout the Catholic World. First envisioned as a tool for the conversion of newly baptized black slaves, the cults of black saints spread rapidly throughout Iberia and the Americas. This article examines hagiographies written by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century clergy about three important holy people of color: Benedict of Palermo, Martín de Porres, and Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo; it focuses on this genre to explore the circulation of ideas that hagiographies could both reflect and create. 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. 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 unexpected discourses about color difference and salvation that resisted the increasingly racialized discourses of the late early modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]