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. 

"Ethiopia" and the World, 330-1500 CE
co-authored with  Dr Yonatan Binyam (IAS Princeton / UC Berkeley)

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2024. 

This book, published in May 2024 as part of the Cambridge University Press Elements in the Global Middle Ages Series edited by Geraldine Heng and Susan J Noakes, is an accessible and interdisciplinary introduction to the histories of the Ethiopian and Eritrean highlands from late antiquity to the late medieval period. 

Early Western scholarship, often by philologists and religious scholars, upheld 'Ethiopia' as an isolated repository of ancient Jewish and Christian texts. In line with the series' objectives of providing concise studies that 'introduce  researchers and instructors to an interconnected "medieval" world', "Ethiopia" and the World, 330-1500 CE  reframes the region's history, highlighting the political, economic, and cultural interconnections of different kingdoms, polities, and peoples. Utilizing recent advancements in Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies as well as Medieval Studies, it reevaluates key instances of contact between 'Ethiopia' and the world of Afro-Eurasia, situating the histories of the Christian, Muslim, and local-religious or 'pagan' groups living in the Red Sea littoral and the Eritrean-Ethiopian highlands in the context of the Global Middle Ages.

A PDF of the full book is available for download free of charge until the end of May 2024. 

Africa Collecting Europe: Patronage and Power in Ethiopia, 1470–1530 
ca. 320 pages, under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press

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.


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.