An African Saint in Medieval Europe

In Europe, sometime between 1220 and 1250, amid a virulent, centuries-old discourse on blackness that was producing horrific images in visual art of vicious black African torturers of Christ, brutal African executioners of John the Baptist, and grotesque black African devils and demons, a saint who had been venerated for nearly a millennium in the Latin West was suddenly portrayed as a black African knight—imaged in an extraordinary, lifelike statue in Magdeburg Cathedral in eastern Germany, a cathedral where he was the patron saint. ¹