In the early modern Iberian empires, on whose lands and seas the sun proverbially never went down, people of African descent converted to, were born into, grew up immersed in, and made Catholicism central to their lives, finding Black saints with whom they could identify and transforming Catholic praxis through confraternal action. While Black confraternities in the Iberian world have received some attention in English-language scholarship (e.g., Elizabeth W. Kiddy, Blacks of the Rosary: Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil [Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005]; Nicole von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans [University Press of Florida, 2006]), the Black saints these corporate groups venerated have received less attention on their own in English. Likewise, hardly any attention has been paid to the artistic and architectural practices Black sodalities developed around these saints. Rowe's book, therefore, was a much-needed study of Black Catholicism, hagiography, art, and artistic patronage. The book's global scope underscores the expansive geographic reach of these practices, as well as the vast cultural network facilitated by these saintly devotions. Rowe underscores how Afro-Iberians were not only transformed by Catholicism but also how they transformed it in lasting ways.
The book consists of an introduction, two parts of three chapters each, and an epilogue. Part 1, “Devotion,” focuses on the emergence of Black saints and Afro-Catholic communities in the Iberian world. Part 2, “Illumination,” shifts to textual and visual representations of both Black and white holiness.
Chapter 1 studies the rise of Black saints, identifying SS. Efigenia, Esleban, Benedict of Palermo, and Anthony of Noto as the four to become the most popular among Afro-Iberians. While SS. Efigenia (Abyssinia, first century AD) and Esleban (Axum, sixth century AD) were legendary African figures that emerged in late medieval hagiography, Benedict (Sicily, 1526–1589) and Anthony (b. Libya, date unknown; d. Sicily, 1550) were contemporary holy figures—both died as lay Franciscan friars—for early modern Afro-Iberians. As Rowe notes, Afro-Iberian brotherhoods combined devotion to these saints with Marian devotion. Chapter 2 studies the rise of Black confraternities in the early modern Iberian world. While it was clerics who first promoted Black saints, it was Black sodalities that kept their cult alive. Black brotherhoods, moreover, commissioned images (in both painted and statue form, though mostly statues) of these saints for their altars or their own churches in the case of Brazil. While debates around Black confraternities have focused on whether they were instruments of imperial domination, Rowe shows that Afro-Iberians made these institutions their own in remarkable ways. Chapter 3 discusses “the complex ways African diasporic people engaged with and transformed Christianity” (88). A central way Afro-Iberians transformed Catholicism was through the contributions they made to public celebrations. More crucially, however, Afro-Iberians perceived Catholic traditions through an African lens. The chapter also touches on the hostility fellow white subjects and authorities often manifested toward Black confraternities. These animosities sometimes arose from competition over limited resources and precedence in religious processions but were generally motivated by anti-Black animus. Rowe takes up this contradiction between Black sanctity and early modern Iberian anti-Blackness in the book's second part.
Chapter 4 analyzes the representation of Black saints in baroque sculpture. This chapter thus explores the long-overlooked subject of Black artistic patronage. As Rowe argues, the presence of these images in the churches of the Iberian empires “offered black Catholics the ability to see themselves reflected in sacred art and history” (169). Most significantly, they had put those images there. Also important was the messages these images communicated about Blackness to white Catholics. Chapter 5 turns to the dialectics of light and darkness in Iberian hagiographic discourse. Like most Iberians, hagiographers saw corporeal Blackness as a sign of the Hamitic curse that condemned Africans to slavery. Yet, the soul could be whitened through God's grace. As Rowe so succinctly points out, “color prejudice no doubt limited the imaginations of the hagiographers themselves, but they were also faced with the challenge of neutralizing the prejudice of their white audience in order to promote their saints more effectively” (204). The fact that Black saints remained attractive mainly to Black Catholics underscores how that played out. The book's last chapter discusses writing about and, in the case of Úrsula de Jesús (1604–1608), by several Black female “living saints,” notably Úrsula in Lima, Peru and Juana Esperanza de San Alberto (d. 1679) in Puebla, Mexico. Many of these women were enslaved Afro-Iberians “donated” to local convents by their former owners. Therefore, they were known as donadas. As Rowe notes: “The creation by the early modern clergy of the typology of black sanctity and its illuminated brilliance helped to shape a new archetype that blended enslavement, racism, humility, divine gifts and heroic virtue” (206). These living Black female saints fulfilled these expectations of saintly Black humility, real and spiritual slavery, divine gifts, and heroic virtue through their pious, charitable, and, most of all, penitent practices and miracle-working.
As she notes in the acknowledgements and the book makes evident, Rowe traveled far and wide for her research. While Romance-language studies of Black saints and both Romance- and English-language scholarship on Afro-Iberian confraternities have mostly focused on urban centers, Rowe brings us images of Black saints from remote villages in Portugal and Spain. (In the epilogue, we find out that St. Benedict is still popular in some Galician villages.) Besides her visits to the sites where these images are housed, Rowe draws on a plethora of printed and archival sources from the Mediterranean and Latin America. The book's fluid prose and many illustrations make it a great read for both academic and nonacademic audiences. I wish the book had covered or at the very least addressed the long-overlooked Afro-Iberian presence in Asia. That being said, thanks to Rowe's more-than-well-researched and beautifully written book, English-language audiences can now learn about the origins and centrality of Black saints to early modern Afro-Iberians’ Catholic praxis and how these latter transformed early modern Catholicism through saintly devotion, confraternal action, and artistic and architectural practices.
