An Ethiopian Mille-feuille : Unearthing the history of the Jesuit mission to Ethiopia (21th-16th)

International audienceThe context of the research journey that has led to the present book is a body of workof mainly 16th and 17th century textual documents concerning a mission of the Societyof Jesus that began in Ethiopia in 1555 and ended in 1633, when their last memberswere expelled from the country. Throughout its duration and afterwards, up to the18th century, the mission was the subject of an extended set of scriptural, archival andliterary documents, produced by the Jesuits themselves and others. Sources includecontemporary Iberian royal and governmental authorities in India, writings in Ge’ez(Ethiopia’s classical liturgical language) and works of local scholars, royal chroniclesand hagiographical sources, etc. Most of these documents are well known today andregularly feed a rich field of research on that period of Ethiopian history. However,despite the fact that the presence of the mission in Ethiopia has been carefully studied,there has still been little research on the mission’s own production of written material,based on those sources and their history. And this too requires critical attention.Indeed, it was between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20thcentury that this vast wealth of documental production underwent scholarlytreatment in European academic and ecclesiastic circles. Great effort went intocollating, compiling an inventory and editing the many hitherto unpublisheddocuments of both European and Ethiopian origin. Understanding the context of thiseffort and the methods of appropriation in comparison to previous attempts to do so,which are distant both in time and space, is the subject of the present book is centred on theprocess of creating an authoritative body of “scholarly” documental work at the endof the 19th century; i.e. I examine how it was “fabricated” by identifying the mainagents, the collating and cataloguing methods used, the stakes involved and themotives for their selection.This has meant redirecting my research towards retracing the steps these scholarstook to build a corpus of “primary sources” and towards questioning the specifichistorical context in which images and forms of knowledge were produced in anumber of European countries in various publications dedicated to Ethiopia, to thehistory of Portuguese-Ethiopian relations and to the Jesuit mission in the country ofthe source of the Blue Nile. Above all, the present effort aims to debunk the a priorijudgement of scientific neutrality of building up documental corpuses disregardingthe ideological context of late 19th- early 20th century Europe.My intention here is thus an attempt to historicise these materials, in order toquestion what they meant for their contemporary public and how they related to thesocial worlds that gave them meaning. The starting question for my research was howand in what way was the erudite production of the fin de siècle able to shape andcondition knowledge about a specific African region in the modern period. Theapproach I adopted was to consider knowledge as the object and the challenge ofoperations, processes and negotiations; i.e., by approaching knowledge not so muchas information content but rather as an object in the making, taking into account itssocial dimensions. The priority was thus to study the social production itself, as if Iwere arranging the movements of the different protagonists on a stage, looking at thedetails, the objects and the actors’ comments on what they were doing. Hence theattention given to the dialogue between the different types of sources (be they director indirect, material, figurative or written).My inquiry lies at the crossroads of several historiographies. On the one hand, thehistory of Christian missions: missions of the modern era, but not exclusively so,because the research topic leads to questions about the historiography of the Jesuitsover a period of time that spans four centuries and deals specifically with the linksconnecting the so-called “old” and “new” Society of Jesus. On the other hand, thehistory of missionary production of knowledge: this history has undergone aprofound renewal, which has been formalized by taking into account a variety ofactors and fields of activity, in particular the question of the historicality of thedocumentary sources of the knowledge. Finally, the third historiography is that of theexercise of Ethiopian power and of its concrete manifestations (the setting up of royalresidences), in the territory that kings aimed to control: the missionaries took part inthis endeavour, but to what extent? History, archaeology and anthropology must becalled upon to search for alternatives to European-centred and sometimes excessivelynationalistic, discourses