Introduction

The legend of the black saint, Moses the Ethiopian (c. 330–405), offers a unique insight into the complexity not just of fourth-century asceticism, but of the evolution of popular attitudes towards questions of ethnic origin and somatic type in Christian tradition as a whole. Characterized by an overarching impression of duality, Moses stands partly as one of the many who followed in the footsteps of St Antony of Egypt, forsaking the corruption of society to lead a life of ascetic isolation in the desert, but partly also as an exception, remarkable not for his achievements in piety, but for the colour of his skin. This is marked in various accounts – ancient and medieval alike – as a signifier of alterity, and ultimately, cognate notions of iniquity and racial inferiority.

As a hybrid amalgam of Christian ascetic and marginalized other, Moses's legacy is one that can be appraised from a variety of perspectives and subjected to a number of critical approaches. A productive and informative tool is postcolonial theory, which although often regarded as suitable for application to a series of specific spatio-temporal locations linked in dialogue with modernity, is applicable more generally to relations of hegemony and resistance in the encounter between different cultures and peoples, and particularly, to interstices produced by hierarchically uneven cultural contacts wherever they are found.