@article{203086,
  author = {Pamela A. Patton},
  title = {{\textquotedblleft}Entangled Threads: Ethiopia and Image-Making in the Cantigas de Santa Mar{\'\i}a"},
  abstract = {<p>Assessing the presence of Black Africa in Iberia through medieval visual culture is complicated by the multiple identities and meaning that medieval artists and viewers assigned to the dark-skinned figures that are often read by modern viewers as unproblematically "African." This article examines a rare medieval attempt to represent African identity within a historical frame: the depiction of a black man among pilgrims at the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, found in an illustrated manuscript of the <em>Cantigas de Santa Mar{\'\i}a</em>, made for King Alfonso X of Castilla in the late 1270s. Analyzing this image against the backdrop of changing European textual and visual traditions related to Ethiopia and Ethiopians, I suggest that unlike the more fantastical black stereotypes deployed elsewhere in the manuscript, this figure signals a growing Castilian awareness of the actual Ethiopian Christians who were present at the site and with this a new interest in the reality of black Africans as part of a shared world of faith, pilgrimage, crusade, and commerce.</p>},
  year = {2023},
  journal = {La Cor{\'o}nica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures},
  volume = {52},
  pages = {87{\textendash}112},
  month = {06/2025},
  url = {https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961710},
  doi = {10.1353/cor.2023.a961710},
}