The Many Lives of Täsfa Ṣeyon
An Ethiopian Intellectual in Early Modern Rome

The Many Lives of Täsfa Ṣeyon: the first life history of the most prolific African intellectual in early modern Europe.

Matteo Salvadore (Author), James De Lorenzi (Author), Deresse Ayenachew Woldetsadik (Author)

9781009595674, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 January 2025

110 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 0.8 cm, 0.303 kg

This Element examines the life and legacy of the sixteenth-century Ethiopian intellectual Täsfa Ṣeyon. It reconstructs his formative years in the Horn of Africa and his diasporic life in the Holy Land and Italian peninsula, where he emerged as a prominent intermediary figure at Santo Stefano degli Abissini, an Ethiopian monastery within the Vatican. He became a librarian, copyist, teacher, translator, author, and community leader, as well as a prominent advisor to European humanist scholars and Tridentine Church authorities concerned with the emerging field of philologia sacra as it pertained to Ethiopian Orthodox (täwaḥedo) Christianity. The Element reconstructs his wide-ranging contacts with the Roman Curia and emerging orientalist academy, and then scrutinizes his editio princeps of the Ge'ez Gospels. A final section traces his modern influence, erasure, and rediscovery by later generations of European, Ethiopian, and Eritrean intellectuals.

1. Introduction
2. The pious stranger
3. The mämher of Rome
4. The influencer
5. Rediscoveries
Glossary
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: European history [HBJD]