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In this paper I study the version of the biblical story of the Eunuch of Candace found in the Portuguese medieval miscellaneous treatise known as Horto do esposo (Garden of the Spouse). While the Horto do esposo is a product of late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century Cistercian monastic culture and was constructed with the purpose of collecting and disseminating lettered culture in preaching, I will argue that the specific purpose of this story is to offer an allegory of conversion and the impact of reading the Bible on the soul of the gentile. The story portrays a character, an Ethiopian eunuch, and shows how he is converted through illustrating the meaning of a passage from the biblical book of Isaiah. This eunuch is part of an allegory of the importance of reading the Bible in the treatise. Furthermore, the use of this story equates the commonplace of an Ethiopian past in terms of sacred geography and history to an ideology of universal Christianity, and even though its collection predates the first expeditions of the Portuguese in West and East Africa by at least several decades, it helps inform the imagination of this expansion.
