The life and struggles of our mother Walatta Petros : a seventeenth-century African biography of an Ethiopian woman / written by Gälawdewos ; translated and edited by Wendy Laura Belcher and Michael Kleiner.

Princeton, New Jersey ; Woodstock, Oxfordshire : Princeton University Press, 2015.

xxxvii, 500 pages : Grayscale Illustration, Tables ; 27 cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Jacket image reprinted by kind permission of the photographer, Claire Bosc-Tiessé. Portrait of Walatta Petros from a manuscript at Walatta Petros's monastery on Lake Tana; MS D, folio 134v; photographed in 1997.

Electronic text and image data. Ann Arbor, Mich. : University of Michigan, Michigan Publishing, 2019. EPUB file. ([ACLS Humanities E-Book])

Published by Princeton University Press.

English, translated from Ethiopic (Geez).

A “gädl” or hagiography, originally written by Gälawdewos thirty years after the subject's death, in 1672-1673. Translated from multiple manuscripts and versions.

This publication is made possible in part from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. This fund and the US Fulbright Scholar Program in large part funded this publication, including its images and the field research on which it is based. Additional vital funding came from the Princeton Center for African American Studies, Princeton Department of Comparative Literature, Princeton University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Science, Princeton Council of the Humanities, Princeton Center for the Study of Religion, and Princeton Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. The inception of the translation was a grant from the University of California at Irvine International Center for Writing and Translation.

Parts of the introduction sections “The Text's Seventeenth-Century Historical Context” and “Ḥabäša Royal Women's Anticolonial Role” were previously published in a much-extended form in Wendy Laura Belcher, “Sisters Debating the Jesuits: The Role of African Women in Defeating Portuguese Proto-colonialism in Seventeenth-Century Abyssinia,” Northeast African Studies 12 (Spring 2013).

This book has been composed in Linux Libertine O.

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in canada.

Introduction to the Text -- Manuscripts of the Text and Earlier Translations -- Introduction to the Translation of the Text -- The Ethiopian Script and Its Transcription -- The Translation of the Life-Struggles of Walatta Petros (Gädlä Wälättä P̣eṭros) -- The Translation of the Miracles of Walatta Petros (Täˀam∂rä Wälättä P̣eṭros) -- Summaries of additional Miracles of Walatta Petros (Täˀam∂rä Wälättä P̣eṭros) -- Summary of the Short History of Walatta Petros's Community (in MSS I and J only) -- The Translation of the Poem Portrait of Walatta Petros (Mälk∂ˀa Wälättä P̣eṭros) -- The Translation of the Poem Hail to Walatta Petros (Sälamta Wälättä P̣eṭros) -- Colophons.