In this guest blog post, Wendy Laura Belcher offers a brief introduction to Walatta Petros, an early modern African woman.
by Wendy Laura Belcher

Wälättä P̣eṭros is an early modern African woman who was an important religious leader and nonviolent resister to early protocolonial European incursions and who became a saint in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. I became interested in this fascinating woman when I came across mentions of the royal Ethiopian women in Samuel Johnson’s translation of a book about Ethiopia. I soon learned that paired with the Jesuits’ European accounts about Ethiopia in the seventeenth century were Ethiopian accounts of the same events, when these women resisted converting from their ancient African form of Christianity (dating to the fourth century) to Roman Catholicism. These women were sainted in the Ethiopian church for their resistance. The more I learned about Wälättä P̣eṭros, the more I admired her. She was a fierce leader, with none of the saccharine sweetness we have come to associate with women saints.
To learn more about Wälättä P̣eṭros, see the new translation of her hagiography, done by myself and Michael Kleiner. The book was written by a monk named Galawdewos in the African language of Gəˁəz in 1672.
In the process of translating the book, we discovered many new things about the saint, including the fact that an anecdote in the text about nuns being lustful with each other had been censored in nineteenth-century versions of the hagiography. This story and many other intriguing facts and observations can be found in the translation.
A digital version of the original manuscript of the Gädlä Wälättä P̣eṭros, located in Walatta Petros’s monastery of Qʷäraṭa on Lake Ṭana in Ethiopia, is posted online for all to read.

Two hymns in honor of the saint are posted online: Portrait of Walatta Petros and Hail to Walatta Petros. They are great for teaching with, as they include a page with the English literary translation and a facing page with a word-by-word translation, transliteration, and Gəˁəz, as well as an Ethiopian priest singing one in the original language: audio file
My introductory preface about my childhood experiences in Ethiopia with manuscripts is also available: Introduction
You can listen to a slide presentation in which I analyze women’s relationships in the text: Women’s Intimacies in an Early Ethiopian Text.
The book has received a fair amount of media attention, one of which was Earliest Known Biography of an African Woman Translated to English for the First Time in The Guardian (December 3, 2015). (17,461 shares on social media)
My summer 2016 article on women’s relationships in the text Same-Sex Intimacies in the Early African Text Gädlä Wälättä Peṭros (1672): Queer Reading an Ethiopian Woman Saint is posted on my Academia.edu site.
Wendy Laura Belcher is associate professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson: Ethiopian Thought in the Making of an English Author and Honey from the Lion: An African Journey. Michael Kleiner is a historian of Ethiopia and a translator. He has taught at the universities of Göttingen, Marburg, and Hamburg, as well as at Addis Ababa University.