Vite Santi

Translating Faith

Samantha Kelly tells the story of Ethiopian Orthodox pilgrims in sixteenth-century Rome. The only African community in premodern Europe to leave extensive documentation in their own language, they negotiated religious pluralism amid rising Catholic conformity and collaborated with Latin Christians on scholarly projects of enduring interest.

British Museum Catalogue of printed Books

Law, Medicine and Engineering in the Cult of the Saints in Counter-Reformation Rome: The Hagiographical Works of Antonio Gallonio, 1556-1605

The Oratorian priest Antonio Gallonio (1556-1605) devoted his life to writing about saints. The thread running through his hagiographical oeuvre was renunciation of this world: humility, subservience and endurance. Yet he engaged with the expertise of lay people, jurists, physicians and engineers, so as to appeal to their interests and convert them. In order to emphasize how saints endured torture, healed disease and exercised piety rather than ingenuity, Gallonio ventured into those secular disciplines, even if he did not endorse them. This book surveys Gallonio’s published and unpublished works and his position in Roman society, to expose the tensions between a theocratic clergy and the self-assertion of skilled and scholarly professionals in the Italian Counter-Reformation.