The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity by Thomas J. Heffernan (review)

Vibia Perpetua, a young Roman matron, was martyred in Carthage on March 7, 203, with a group of her fellow Christians. Although it has been the subject of much debate, the account of their time in prison and their execution in the arena, later known as the Passio sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis, is now usually accepted as having been put together in Latin shortly after these events by an editor, or possibly editors, from two earlier documents, the prison diaries of Perpetua and her religious instructor Saturus, to which an introduction and a graphic description of the deaths have been added. The Acta, apparently a somewhat later text, which includes an account of the interrogation of the martyrs and greatly abbreviates Perpetua’s description of her four visions while in prison, was accepted as the definitive version of the story from the end of antiquity until the later seventeenth century and used in the Christian liturgy; it has now been eclipsed by scholarly excitement over the apparently unique female voice and startlingly effective imagery of Perpetua’s portion of the Passio. Oxford University Press gives us from Thomas Heffernan a new edition, a felicitous translation, and a very detailed commentary on historical, prosopographical, theological, and philosophical issues, and from Jan Bremmer and Marco Formisano a volume of nineteen essays on the Passio, written by an extremely varied group of scholars, some experts on Latin literature, some approaching the text from other areas and for the first time.

Earlier relegated to marginal status and even misidentified chronologically and generically as “late antique” or “medieval” because it was seen as “women’s literature,” the Passio gives Bremmer and Formisano an opportunity to explore the nature of “the canon” and the limitations of classical studies as currently pursued, and to present what they call a “laboratory for new methods of reading.” Although many of the essays are extremely good, the claim to originality of approach in the volume as a whole is overstated, since twenty or thirty years ago Brent Shaw, Mieke Bal, and Peter Dronke, among others, were already treating Perpetua’s words as literature, not bits of historical evidence, and proposing quite radical interpretations. I and my fellow instructors taught the text as part of the required syllabus in Columbia University’s western civilization course in the mid-1990s. Nothing is more canonical than the syllabus of a western civ. course. Moreover, the best essays in the volume—which include Sigrid Weigel on sacrifice, Craig Williams on gendered language, Christoph Markschies on Montanist echoes, Walter Ameling on education, Joseph Farrell on the question of canonization (in several senses of the word), and Marco Formisano himself on marginality—are not the most experimental. Those that leap to strained analogies—for example, the effort to shed light through an awkward use of Carl Schmitt’s exegesis of Hamlet, and the several comparisons to Greek texts such as Plato’s Phaedo or Xenophon’s Ephesiaca, which Perpetua is alleged to have “perhaps read” (although she almost certainly could not read Greek)—weaken the volume’s plea that we need revolutions in method. Indeed, a few of the more far-fetched essays romp through this literary arena like the mad cow that tossed Perpetua; like that cow, however, they do seemingly little harm. But who at Oxford University Press, in a more egregious misjudgment, decided to put Gustav Klimt’s Danae on the dust jacket?