Perpetua of History in Recent Questions

The account of Perpetua, Felicitas, and their fellow martyrs remains one of the most captivating stories preserved from the ancient world. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that this story still interests scholars from multiple fields and elicits numerous publications.¹ Three volumes have recently emerged that add significantly to current understandings of Perpetua and her fellow martyrs. In what follows, I will briefly summarize the contribution and offer critical engagement with each volume. Then, by way of conclusion, a question for future scholarship will be offered in response to the trend found in these three volumes.

Bremmer and Formisano, Perpetua’s Passions

Rather than speaking of the Passio of Perpetua (et al.), the contributors to Perpetua’s Passions speak of the martyrdom as distinct from the “story.” Bremmer and Formisano’s rationale for decentering the Passio itself in our understanding of these martyrs is as follows. While largely finding the text historically reliable,² Bremmer contends that in light of recently discovered sermons of Augustine, the two versions of the Acta also retain historical memories—namely, the court proceedings and the provenance of the martyrs (i.e. Thuburbo Minus).³ To be sure, the use of the Acta will remain an open question, but Bremmer and Formisano have now made the question one which cannot be legitimately ignored. This contribution illustrates the importance of the volume.

The essays were originally delivered at Humboldt University in 2007 on the Passio and aimed to “detach the text . . . from traditional historical readings . . . by emphasizing its broader literary and cultural aspects” (v). Most essayists did engage traditional historical questions, but they did so from non-traditional frameworks, such as philosophy, literary studies, and political science. Thus, it is better to say that “this volume [has] two souls: a historical one and a literary one” (7). Rather than being a “Handbook” or “Companion,” the editors claim that this volume is the “opposite . . . it does not assert common views but rather challenges them” (8). Classicists in particular are criticized as myopic in their discipline (12), and so postmodern theories ranging from feminism to psychoanalysis are invoked as supplementary (9–11).

Bremmer and Formisano co-author an introductory essay, which in the first half provides an excellent summary of the key issues. J. Farrell and Craig Williams have provided a new translation of the Passio, as well as a new Latin text based on Van Beek’s.⁴ Christoph Markschies’s excellent essay (277–90) is on the alleged Montanism found in this martyrdom (Markschies’s conclusions will be further discussed below when it is placed in dialogue with Heffernan’s work). In short, the strengths of this volume are legion, and although the editors reject the “Handbook” genre, it deserves some equivalent status in future studies of Perpetua and her fellow martyrs.

The details of such a study are obviously too numerous to engage here in point-by-point fashion. Instead, the volume’s overall aims, manifested in the various essays, merit attention. First, it must be said that this volume is rewarding to read for the numerous classical comparanda and gems like a thinly veiled Bob Marley reference in Giulia Sissa’s essay (248).

The multidisciplinary approach is not without its share of difficulties, however. The range of fields covered, while a laudable endeavor, sometimes over-reaches and takes the discussion down difficult paths to follow. At times, this could have been supplemented with more bibliography in order to guide readers to the major interlocutors of the specific field invoked. For example, Luca Bagetto’s essay uses Carl Schmitt’s reading of Hamlet. Schmitt (the reader may know) was a philosopher, jurist, and advocate of political theology, specifically of the Nazi variety. This simply begs...