The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684-1706

John K. Thornton is a historian of Africa and the African diaspora, and this Cambridge University Press book is the standard scholarly monograph on Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, the Kongolese prophet who led the Antonian movement from 1684 to 1706, covering her family background and the movement's rise and suppression. Its strength is that Thornton draws on primary Kongolese and European missionary sources to reconstruct Kimpa Vita's life and teaching within its actual Kongolese religious and political context, rather than treating her only through the lens of the Catholic missionaries who opposed and ultimately executed her. Its limit is that as with any history reconstructed substantially from outside missionary records, some detail about Kimpa Vita's own inner religious experience necessarily remains interpretive, a limit Thornton is careful to acknowledge in his own analysis.