Subproject 7: The Medial Status of the Body – Body in Image and Body Image. Ethiopian Saints in the Early Modern Period

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Margit Kern
• Subject Area: Art History ; African, American and Oceania Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 435118611

The art-history and Ethiopian studies project examines the medial status of the body analyzing constructions of the body image of Ethiopian (or so perceived) saints of the early modern period by using the approach of critical whiteness studies. The aim of the second phase of funding is to explore the role of liturgy in more depth, i.e., liturgy is to receive particular attention as a (body) image-generating process – especially with regard to processes of negotiating the (in)stability of skin color. In this subproject, liturgical acts are focused on as practices that are characterized by a relational structure of different bodies, that operate strongly in networks of permanent and situational-ephemeral intermediality, and that are linked to ideas of a processual openness and mutability of body images. This subproject will analyze how, in the textual sources and images, counter-narratives or alternative narratives to topoi such as the “white-washed” soul in the black body in the sacrament of baptism can be developed against the background of the assertion of a transformative potential in the liturgy, when whiteness or purity are related to different concepts of body image (the resurrection body, the interior of the body, the soul). The aim is to examine in more detail the extent to which typological and allegorical interpretive methods are significant as starting points for developing alternative readings in the (inter-)medial complexity of the liturgy. With the premise that a discussion of the surface as a medium is particularly relevant to the re-perspectivization of the project, attention is also directed to aesthetic discourses whose goal is not to determine monolithic categories (outside vs. inside; black vs. white; etc.), but rather focus on the transitional or situational. In other words, against the background of the examination of concepts of the claritas of the body of the saint or candidez as a third category between black and white, this subproject investigates aesthetic phenomena such as the agency of light or how glamor in the sense of an “aesthetics of difference” (Schmidt-Linsenhoff) can be grasped as a counter-discourse to hegemonic narratives. Questions of vestimentary art history also play a role here.With respect to the research objective of the second funding period of this subproject, the focus, beyond the saints previously considered, is very specifically on the white apostle Matthew and the “eunuch of Queen Candace of Ethiopia” (Acts 8:27–39), and thus on two figures who are central in the traditional narratives of the Christianization of Ethiopians and whose more thorough investigation is still pending, not only with regard to the reception of their hagiographic tradition.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5138: Spiritual Intermediality in the Early Modern Period
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Alessandro Bausi