Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe
Palgrave Macmillan 2021, 319 pages, ISBN: 978-3-030-64933-3, DOI 10.1007/978-3-030-64934-0. Visit publisher's website here.

Medieval Ethiopian Kingship explores why Ethiopian kings pursued long-distance diplomatic contacts with Latin Europe in the late Middle Ages. It traces the history of more than a dozen embassies dispatched to the Latin West by the kings of Solomonic Ethiopia, a powerful Christian kingdom in the medieval Horn of Africa. Drawing on sources from Europe, Ethiopia, and Egypt, it examines the Ethiopian kings’ motivations for sending out their missions in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries – and argues that a desire to acquire religious treasures and foreign artisans drove this early intercontinental diplomacy. Moreover, the Ethiopian initiation of contacts with the distant Christian sphere of Latin Europe appears to have been intimately connected to a local political agenda of building monumental ecclesiastical architecture in the North-East African highlands, and asserted the Ethiopian rulers’ claim of universal kingship and rightful descent from the biblical king Solomon. Shedding new light on the self-identity of a late medieval African dynasty at the height of its power, this book challenges conventional narratives of African-European encounters on the eve of the so-called ‘Age of Exploration’.

One of the 'Best Medieval Books of the Year 2021' according to the Medieval Podcast & Medievalists.net! Recent media coverage, interviews & reviews can be found in the Smithsonian Magazine, BBC History Podcast, the Medieval Podcast, Al Jazeera China, Spiegel Geschichte & the New York Review of Books. 

Read more on this project —including the Introduction of the book— here. 

Africa Collecting Europe: Patronage and Power in Ethiopia, 1470–1530 
ca. 320 pages, completion expected for 2023

This book project, Africa Collecting Europe, centres long-neglected material culture sources from Christian Ethiopia to tease out an untold story about the assertion of power in a pre-colonial African kingdom. Focussing on a period of alleged political decline (the years between 1470–1530 CE), it mines the object histories of dozens of religious works — ranging from locally painted blonde Madonnas and pseudo-Flemish crucifixion scenes to imported icons and enamels from Crete, Flanders, and France — for their contexts of production, acquisition, modification, and utilisation by the Ethiopian Christian nobility. Placing these objects in their historical context and studying the connection between courtly patronage practices and political actions at a moment of crucial change, Africa Collecting Europe traces a moment of cultural efflorescence. The book offers a radically new history of a powerful late medieval kingdom in the Horn of Africa — and demonstrates its carefully cultivated and long-lasting connections with other parts of the world.

Read more on this project here. 

Ethiopia and the World, 500-1530
together with  Dr Yonatan Binyam (Penn State University / UCLA)

as part of the Elements in the Global Middle Ages Series, 
edited by Geraldine Heng and Susan J Noakes. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2022. 

This handbook, forthcoming in late 2022 as part of the Cambridge Elements Series in the Global Middle Ages edited by Geraldine Heng and Susan J Noakes, is an accessible introduction for non-specialist historians and other interested readers to the history the Ethiopian-Eritrean highland plateau between 500-1530 CE.
In line with the series' objectives of providing concise studies that 'introduce  researchers and instructors to an interconnected world, c. 500-1500 CE', Ethiopia and the World, 500-1530, considers the history of both local Muslim and Christian kingdoms in their interrelation to Afro-Eurasia across the medieval millennium. 
It offers an interdisciplinary synthesis of recent archaeological, historical, and literary research and is structured chronologically into four chapters. 

Read more on the Global Middle Ages Series here.



OTHER MONOGRAPHIC PUBLICATIONS  

PhD Thesis (microfiche publication)

Krebs, Verena: Windows onto the World: Culture Contact and Western Christian art in Ethiopia, 1402-1543, [Dissertation]. Konstanz: University of Konstanz 2014. Published September 2018.
Access Data can be found here.