Saint Perpetua across the Middle Ages: Mother, Gladiator, Saint by Margaret Cotter-Lynch (review)

In Martyrdom: A Guide for the Perplexed (2011), Paul Middleton claims that martyrs do not exist per se, but are instead "made'' through narratives that provide later readers with an "interpretative framework'' for making sense of a memorable death (17). For Middleton, the story precedes the category of the martyr, whose status is dependent upon the author's memorialization to shape how later generations remember the event. Equally important, such narratives are discursive constructions written through various ideological lenses rather than transparent descriptions of an objective event. They occupy contested social space and are susceptible to the forces of other memory-making activities within different communities and at later times.

Margaret Cotter-Lynch develops both of these lines of thought in her monograph on Perpetua, a young woman who died at the hands of the Romans in a Carthaginian amphitheater at the turn of the third century. Scholars have found her story helpful for exploring a wide range of topics, from late antiquity (e.g., Christian–Roman conflict, Roman spectacles, ancient conceptions of sex and gender, the emergence of ecclesiastical authority, theological attitudes on life, death, and cosmic war, prophetic charism, the emerging cult of martyrs) to contemporary mass killings. Cotter-Lynch, however, traces the "afterlives'' of Perpetua from the Passio Perpetuae through the thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea in order to demonstrate how later authors reconfigured the saint's death in order to advance specific theological positions on the relationship between gender and sanctity. Like Middleton, then, Cotter-Lynch's focus is not on the martyr herself but the power of a story whose continuous (re)telling creates "new'' depictions of the martyr, carefully tailored to conform to changing Christian sensibilities about female saints.

Memory, a central component for any investigation of textual reception, frames Cotter-Lynch's study. Following the research of Mary Carruthers, the author assumes, rightly, that culture, memory, and texts are dynamically related: culture (in this instance, Christian theology) organizes memories that authors engage through the production of literature that in turn contributes to the formation of cultural norms (4). In this "feedback loop,'' memory is malleable: groups make decisions about what should be remembered (and forgotten), and how these recollections should be understood. In this sense, memory has a practical function: instead of being admired from a distance, as though in a museum showcase, it is "a machine to be used'' (6). This "use'' emerges when communities engage their past together, determining the cultural traces that have resonance and making them constitutive in the formation of individual and social identities. Cotter-Lynch's work thus revolves around two central issues: how Perpetua was memorialized in Christian writings, and what purposes these constructions served (7).

The earliest example of Perpetua's memory-making derives from the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, a text that stiches together the martyr's own words and the reminiscences of a secondary redactor. In contrast to previous scholarship that has argued for a transformation of Perpetua's gender or sex, Cotter-Lynch presents a more nuanced reading in which the martyr's gender oscillates between the two poles. On the one hand, Perpetua's presentation of her own authority undermines the traditional notion of feminine subservience. In her interactions with her father, Perpetua upends Greco-Roman hierarchies that privilege both masculinity and age, while her father, assuming the role of supplicant, acknowledges that Perpetua is no longer his "daughter'' (filia) but a "lady'' (domina). Similarly, Perpetua assumes an authoritative posture when she recalls a conversation with Saturus: in this exchange, her male teacher asks her for a divine vision, and Perpetua, only a recent catechumen, asserts that she herself will provide an unmediated interpretation of her revelation. Moreover, the content of her vision—climbing up a ladder to heaven—positions her as a "new'' Jacob. On the other hand, Perpetua assumes a typically feminine "pull'' toward her family, especially her infant...