Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion, and Politics in Italy

Black Madonnas is a prize-winning, deeply researched, historical study demonstrating ancient goddess origins of Black Madonnas, subversive peasant customs and rituals surrounding images of Black Madonnas, and their contemporary transformative cultural and political implications.

In the 1993 edition, I considered Black Madonnas a metaphor for a memory of the time when the earth was believed to be the body of woman and all creatures were equal, a memory transmitted in vernacular traditions of earth-bonded cultures, historically expressed in cultural and political resistance, and glimpsed today in movements aiming for transformation. Since then my understanding of Black Madonnas has been deepened by geneticists finding that the origin of modern humans is Africa, that primordial migrations from Africa carried a belief in a sacred dark woman to all continents. Black Madonnas may be considered a metaphor for healing millennial divisions of gender and race in concerted world movements for justice.