Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (review)

It is not enough for there to have been martyrs; martyrs needed to be seen as such to be of hagiographical value. But it is not enough for the flesh-and-blood martyr to become the stuff of legend at a particular point in time. The martyr's story is in no way static or self-sustaining. As the situation of Christian communities changes, so, too, does hagiography which serves new needs. The process by which the community and its memory of the martyr enter into a mutually sustaining relationship over time is the subject of Castelli's book. For "martyrdom is not simply an action but rather the product of interpretations and retelling . . . rhetorically constituted and discursively sustained" (173), providing meaning to events of otherwise senseless violence.

In the Introduction, Castelli provocatively begins with recollections of childhood and the role the courage of martyrs played for confirmandi in the selection of names, anchoring the exploration of the role of memory in her own recollection and, I suspect, in that of many of her readers. In the first chapter she lays her theoretical groundwork using the work of Maurice Halbwachs, a pupil of Bergson and Durkheim. Halbwachs postulated that individual memory was produced within a social context. Production was a basically conservative activity and offered the possibility of continuity in identity for the individual and community. The author considers and appropriates critiques of this theory and, after refining it, applies it to Christian accounts of persecution and martyrdom. The value of this application is that it does not rely on the scientific historicity of events in martyrs' lives to find value and utility. It is especially helpful where knowledge of events is buried under layers of redaction, such as in the case of Thecla, or not otherwise witnessed, as for most stories of ancient martyrs.

Next, the author explores the inscription of martyrdom as an act defying and transforming Roman construals of power, reason, law, and order. Here she also includes consideration of the gender-bending accomplished by the community constructions of the martyrs' deaths. Another chapter accords a similar treatment to the idea of spectacle. Christians' stage management of their own deaths serves to turn the tables on the purpose of spectacle from the Romans' shaming of those deemed social outsiders to the glorification of those who serve as role models.

The specific matryrdoms treated at length include the autobiographical accounts in the stories of Ignatius, Perpetua, and Pionius as well as the multi-layered traditions of Thecla. This last saint serves in turn to license and support both martyrdom and asceticism. The treatments of particular texts prove the theoretical chapters and make this volume a particularly valuable resource; however, readers will need to fill in a few blanks in this world construal, especially the contributions of ambient religious traditions and classical literature.

In a book driven by memories of the martyrs of September 11th, whether they were self-sacrificing police and fire first responders or sacrificers of self and others in crashing planes, Castelli's final chapter brings home concerns about a "willing and self sacrificing death . . . hardwired into the collective consciousness of Western culture"(33). She deals with the Columbine massacre of 1999 as well as other contemporary deaths deemed by some as martyrdoms. At Columbine two armed students shot and killed classmates including one young woman who was purportedly questioned about her Christian faith before being shot. For a moment the text seems to waiver from its theoretical underpinnings. A long digression on the historicity of Columbine's "martyr" Cassie Bernal's profession of faith in Jesus appears to distract from Castelli's project, which in the first part of the book deliberately is eschewed, i.e., considerations of historicity. Yet this serves as the necessary though prolonged foregrounding of a treatment of contemporary martyrs in the same mold as those of antiquity.

This volume is a fine complement to the more historical treatments of martyrdom...