Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts (review)

The intersection of gender and martyrdom has drawn considerable scholarly attention in the past fifteen years. One thinks, for example, of the significant essays by Brent Shaw (JECS 4 [1996]: 269–312) and Stephen Moore and Janice Capel Anderson (JBL 117 [1998]: 249–73) or the monographs by Judith Perkins (The Suffering Self, 1995), Daniel Boyarin (Dying for God, 1998), and Elizabeth Castelli (Martyrdom and Memory, 2004). However, L. Stephanie Cobb has given us something previously lacking—a monograph dedicated exclusively to exploration of the gendered inflections of early Christian representations of martyrdom. In so doing, she has, moreover, produced a text admirable for both its lucidity and its conciseness, though each may come at some price.

Dying to Be Men opens with an invocation of the complex negotiations of identity that Cobb confronted as a college student in central Texas. What seemed a simple question—"are you a Christian?"—turned out to be merely the first stage in the elaborate yet ambiguous process of young adult identity formation, in which distinctions between Christians often mattered more than the difference between Christians and non-Christians (1f.). With this opening vignette, Cobb signals the central importance of questions of Christian identity for her book. Her argument is "that the martyr acts functioned in the Christian community as identity-forming texts and, more specifically, that the authors of these texts appropriated Greco-Roman constructions of gender and sex to formulate a set of acceptable Christian identities" (5). In making this argument, Cobb strongly resists suggestions that martyrology subverts culturally dominant constructions of gender or reflects a positive embrace of suffering; rather, she emphasizes the degree to which Christians shared with non-Christians the assumption that masculinity as traditionally defined was the most highly desired attribute and that real men were impervious to suffering. In so far as the literature of martyrdom is engaged in showing that Christians exceed all others in manliness, it is, then, essentially agonistic and apologetic.

Cobb's book is organized into four chapters. Chapter One lays groundwork for what follows, first by explicating the concepts from social identity theory on which Cobb is drawing, second by reviewing the current state of scholarship on understandings of sex and gender in late antiquity. The argument of the book is primarily conveyed by the second through fourth chapters. Chapter Two investigates the use of gladiatorial, athletic, and martial imagery in martyr acts, placing these tropes in social-historical context so as to demonstrate their appropriateness for inscribing the figure of the martyr with distinctly masculine agency, power, and courage. Chapter Three demonstrates that the appeal to the martyr's masculinity goes beyond those particular tropes, by attributing to the martyr virtues such as self-control, endurance, rationality, and justice—even in cases when the martyr is female, enslaved, young, and/or elderly—and contrasting the martyr favorably with both persecutors and apostates. Chapter Four considers the particular case of female martyrs, dealing with three texts, The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, The Letter of the Churches of Lyons and Vienne, and The Martyrdom of Carpus, Papylus, and Agathonike. Cobb argues that these texts betray tendencies both to masculinize and to feminize female martyrs and suggests why that is so. On the one hand, when contrasted with non-Christians, female martyrs are manly and can be compared to athletes and gladiators just as male martyrs can. On the other hand, they are also depicted as endowed with typical female virtues such as modesty and beauty, reflecting their proper place within the Christian community.

Cobb's privileging of masculinity with respect to ancient Christian identity is clearly very strong: "it appears that to be a Christian was to be a man" (20); "[m]asculinity . . . was not simply one among many equal aspects of Christian identity; rather, in many of the martyr texts it is the very definition of Christianity" (91); "being a Christian meant being a...