Triumphant Martyrdom and Inglorious Victimhood: Abelard’s Exegesis of Jephtha’s Daughter’s Sacrifice

In this article I analyze one of Abelard’s Laments in which he creatively interprets the Old Testament story of Jephthah’s daughter’s sacrifice to show an incipient shift in medieval piety concerning the idea of victimhood. Historically, the notion of victim underwent a radical transformation from its early usage, when it referred to the object of a sacrifice, to our contemporary understanding of the victim as an unjustly suffering person. In this article I will show how the changing Christian piety of the High Medieval period affected the dissemination of the figural meaning (in the sense of “a person who has been attacked, injured, robbed, or killed by someone else”) of the concept victim. In particular, I will examine how this figural sense was incorporated into a new imagery of martyrdom that appeared at the beginning of the 12th century.