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Justine A. Walden |
HISTORIAN
Current Research
Three books connect religious history to formations of race and a global history of African Catholicism.
The Afrocatholic Atlantic
Collating c. ten years of research in Propaganda Fide and related archives, this project follows Kongolese Christians and Italian Capuchins from Kongo to Rome, Brazil, Cuba, and Martinique to show how Africans developed a unique form of Catholcism and collaborated with Capuchin missionaries to develop arguments against the unjust enslavement of Black Africans before Protestants advanced arguments against slavery. Afro-Catholicism is a story of transnational religious networks that recovers African social agency, religious alliances across color lines, maritime mobility, and an activist Black Catholicism that shaped diasporic identities.
The Sacred
and the Secular
Vallombrosan Exorcisms and the Rise of Observance
in Renaissance Florence (Brepols · 2026)
This book charts institutional rivalry, spiritual authority, the transition from medieval to early modern, and the political conflicts which attended Observant reform in Renaissance
Naming Race
in the Renaissance
Italian popular print reveals how religious polemic, aelective breeding, and humanist language lay at the basis of the classificatory mechanism we now call race. The book traces the term 'razza' from applying to animal lineage and religious difference to its refashioning as a term used to described bodies and physiognomy. Research complete; in draft.
Articles in progress
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“Palafox and Yanga” describes how maroons and Afro-Mexicans placed their faith in episcopal authority in colonial Puebla. Nearly complete; for Hispanic American Historical Review.
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“Black Bodies Resurrected” considers sermons by Spanish and Italian preachers to show how opinions differed over the matter of whether black people would appear in heaven as black in the seventeenth century. Nearly complete for Religions.
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“Black Births” shows how Italian Renaissance hagiographies were deeply concerned with interracial intimacy, maternal imagination, and miraculous whitening.
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