E rin K athleen R owe . Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism

Erin Kathleen Rowe’s Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism exemplifies first-rate scholarship that not only redirects our framings, but also dazzles our eyes with its archive of visual texts. Centering my subject position as a Black scholar whose work resides at the intersections of early African diaspora studies and early modern Iberian studies, I thoroughly enjoyed learning from the wealth of archival materials, historical information, and visual culture presented in Rowe’s beautifully organized volume. Astute in its analyses, balanced in its thematic coverage, lucid in its prose, and meticulous in its attention given to bibliographic sources and methodological practices, Rowe reminds us that “the representation of black saints—visual and textual—stands at the center of early modern debates over embodied difference and universal humanity, since these saints flourished at the same time that the transatlantic slave trade accelerated” (6). More lucidly put, the author directly tells us that the book

Art · Art history · Diaspora · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Humanity · Library science · Literature · Political science · Politics · Representation (politics · ROWE · Scholarship · Subject (documents · Theology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies