Martyrdom and Rome by Glen W. Bowersock (review)

488 BOOK REVIEWS commitment and accommodation. Discussion in each of these sections is guided by Ernst Troeltsch's typology of Christian groupings within the context of Peter Berger's theories on the social credibility ofreligion in an environment characterized by increasing secularization and religious pluralism. It should be mentioned that the author is acutely aware that insights from sociology and history do not exhaust religious experience. He admits that they can clarify issues but insists that the relationship between these approaches and theology or other sciences should also be taken into account. A general confusion emerges to the effect that compromise is observed most often among intermediary agents rather than among top officials preoccupied with maintaining traditional identities. The problematic of intransigence or compromise is set up by the very nature of a religious grouping born of a prophetic impulse, namely, the tendency to maintain its initial vision and the tendency to institutionalize it. Here the author relies heavily on the work of Max Weber. The book is an invitation for readers to shed simplistic interpretations of the tensions facing Roman Catholicism and to realize that the relationship between society, culture, and religion is complex. More is involved than the bare opposition between tradition and modernity. For example, in the Province of Quebec, French Canadian marginalization and nationalism are major factors helping to explain the tensions experienced. For the professional historian and sociologist the last section, a sort of methodological appendix on the advantages ofusing sociological techniques in the study of historical data, is especially valuable. The book is highly recommended to anyone who can read French without difficulty. The qualification is important. Because of the author's style and sentence structure the book is not an "easy read." Raymond H. Potvin The Catholic University ofAmerica Ancient Martyrdom and Rome. By Glen W. Bowersock. [The Wiles Lectures Given at the Queen's University of Belfast.] (NewYork: Cambridge University Press. 1995. Pp. xii, 106, $2995.) This elegant volume, appropriately dedicated to the memory ofLouis Robert, is a significant contribution to the reawakened interest in the political and social dimensions of Christian martyrdom, as well as in the martyrological narratives themselves. The narratives of the early Christian martyrs, for a long time the domain of experts in theology or church history, have increasingly come under the scrutiny of classical literary scholars and historians of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Their perspectives have two broad fronts. The first is a renewed at- BOOK REVIEWS 489 tention to the texts as objects of literary criticism. In English-language scholarship alone, the concatenated efforts of Anne-Marie Palmer, John Petruccione, Michael Roberts, and Danuta Schanze on Prudentius'Peristephanon provide as good an example as any of these literary attentions. The other facet is marked by the increasing involvement of historians of the Roman empire with the problem of Christian martyrdom—an engagement which, for example, finds Antony Birley, a renowned political historian ofthe imperial period,working on a new edition of Musurillo's standard handbook of the "canonical" texts of the early martyrs. Iconoclasm and martyrdom are a powerful and inflammatory mix, but it is precisely this combination with which Glen Bowersock, professor of history at the Institute for Advanced Study, confronts the reader in the four concise, precisely argued essays that constitute the core ofthis book. Originally delivered in 1993 as the Wiles Lectures at The Queen's University, Belfast—the author notes the "powerful resonances" with the political life of Northern Ireland—the leanly written essays form sequential investigations into the creation of the Christian concept of martyrdom, the manner of its literary recollection, the civic function of martyrs, and, finally, the problem of martyrdom and suicide . They are supplemented by an equal number of valuable appendixes on technical matters: the concept of "protomartyr," the relationship of Ignatius to rv Maccabees, the problem of the "Great Sabbath" in the dating of the martyrdoms of Polycarp and Pionios, and the nature of the connections between the churches of western Asia Minor and the Lyon martyrdoms ofA.D. 177. The arguments presented by Bowersock constitute a direct challenge to what might be called an "etymological" explanation of Christian martyrdom. This scholarly tradition, which is at the heart...