It is transliterated into the Latin alphabet in many ways online and scholarship, including the Library of Congress spelling Walata Péṭros and Walatta Pēṭros.
[1] After Jesuit missionaries privately converted Emperor Susenyos from Ethiopian Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism in 1612, he called on Walatta Petros's husband to repress the anti-Catholic rebellion started in 1617.
When Malka Krestos left to fight the rebellion, leading abbots in the Ethiopian monasteries on Lake Ṭana assisted Walatta Petros in leaving her husband and joining them.
After arriving at a monastery on Lake Ṭana, she took a vow of celibacy and shaved her head to become a nun in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, refusing to convert to Roman Catholicism.
She returned home, but when she found out that her husband had supported the killing the abuna of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, she left him for the final time, becoming a nun at the age of 25 in 1617.
She then moved to the northern regions of Waldebba and Sallamt and began preaching that people should reject the faith of the foreigners and never mention the name of the emperor during the liturgy.
She was again called before the court in 1625 for this treason, and this time her husband dissuaded the emperor from killing her, urging him to send the leader of the Jesuit priests, Afonso Mendes, to try to convert her.
Walatta Petros continued as the abbess of her mobile religious community, leading it with her woman friend Ehete Kristos and without male leadership.
The first was written by the French art historian Claire Bosc-Tiessé, who conducted field research at monasteries on Lake Ṭana about the creation of a royal illuminated manuscript of Gädlä Wälättä P̣eṭros.
[21] The American literary scholar Wendy Laura Belcher argued that Walatta Petros was one of the noble Ethiopian women responsible for the defeat of Roman Catholicism in Ethiopia in the 1600s.
[27][28] Members of the Ethiopian Orthodox Täwaḥədo Church have stated online that “this book claims Walatta Petros is a lesbian”[29] and have written many comments about sexuality on a Guardian article about the translation.
[31] In a September 2020 academic article, Dr. Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes argued that Belcher and Kleiner lacked an understanding of the Ge'ez language and pushed an orientalist and racist narrative of a queer, sex-driven, violent African woman in their translation.
He added that Ethiopian church members understand the second meaning ይትማርዓ/ይትማርሐ (yətmarrəˁa, yətmarrəha, [feminine] guide/lead each other) as is common in monastery life.