Abstract
A text that has long been acknowledged as a questioner and destabilizer of male-traditional attitudes concerning gender and the political structures of the Roman Empire is the Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis (Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas). This text is probably from the late second century.1 Critics have mostly focused on the apparently autobiographical account of a young North African noblewoman in the passio, Perpetua, who experiences trials and visions just before her martyrdom. If the account is genuine, these events are related in her own words—an attribution that the narrator insists upon: haec ordinem totum martyrii sui iam hinc ipsa narrauit sicut conscriptum manu sua et suo sensu reliquit (108) [Now from this point on the entire account of her ordeal is her own, according to her own ideas and in the way that she herself wrote it down (109)]. With the prison-diary section possibly representing an extremely rare example of feminine self-expression from this period, Perpetua’s passion has attracted much critical attention.2
Wommen ful trewe, ful goode, and vertuous. Witnesse on hem that dwelle in Cristes hous; With martirdom they preved hire constance.
—Proserpine to Pluto in Chaucer’s The Merchants Tale, from Fragment IV of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, lines 2281–83
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Notes
See Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 104. For the manuscripts and editions of this passio, see
Carolyn Osiek, “Perpetua’s Husband,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 10 (2002): 287, n. 1. For the later manuscript versions of this passio and its reception in centuries after its first appearance, see
Rex D. Butler, The New Prophecy and “New Visions”: Evidence of Montanism in “The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas” (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), pp. 98–126.
See Brent D. Shaw, “The Passion of Perpetua,” Past and Present 139 (1993): 45. The passio has been relatively neglected by specialists in literary analysis. A notable exception is
Erin Ronsse, “Rhetoric of Martyrs: Listening to Saints Perpetua and Felicitas,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 14 (2006): 283–327. See also
Thomas J. Heffernan and James E. Shelton, “Paradisus in carcere: The Vocabulary of Imprisonment and the Theology of Martyrdom in the Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 14 (2006): 217–23.
Perkins, The Suffering Self, pp. 105, 113, 112. See Barbara Baert, in “Mantle, Fur, Pallium: Veiling and Unveiling in the Martyrdom of Agnes of Rome,” in Weaving, Veiling, and Dressing: Textiles and Their Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Kathrun M. Rudy and Baert (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), nn. 9 and 18.
See Heidi Vierow, “Feminine and Masculine Voices in the Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas,” Latomus 58 (1999): 618.
See Ronsse, “Rhetoric of Martyrs,” pp. 292–93. See Brent D. Shaw, “Judicial Nightmares and Christian Memory,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11 (2003): 546; and
Joyce E. Salisbury, Perpetua’s Passion: The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 114.
Ross Shepard Kraemer, Her Share of the Blessings: Women’s Religions among Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Greco-Roman World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 159–61. For Montanism, see R. Butler, New Prophecy, pp. 9–43.
Elizabeth A. Castelli, “‘I Will Make Mary Male’: Pieties of the Body and Gender Transformation of Christian Women in Late Antiquity,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 33 and 42, her emphasis.
See Shaw, “Passion of Perpetua,” p. 29; Salisbury, Perpetua’s Passion, pp. 105–06; and Giselle de Nie, “‘Consciousness Fecund through God’: From Male Fighter to Spiritual Bride-Mother in Late Antique Female Sanctity,” in Sanctity and Motherhood: Essays on Holy Mothers in the Middle Ages, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker (New York: Garland, 1995), p. 119. The wound in Dinocrates’s face may be allegorized in other ways. See
F. J. Dölger, “Antike Parallelen zum leidenden Dinocrates in der Passio Perpetuae,” Antike und Christentum 2 (1930): 28–31.
Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 135.
Kristeva, Desire in Language, p. 139. See Virginia Burrus, Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. 28.
This idea of domestic space also connects Perpetua with Jewish traditions. See Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 81.
Ronsse, “Rhetoric of Martyrs,” p. 320. See Margaret R. Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), p. 59. Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, a vase or waterpot calls to mind besides John 4:6–30 associations with Rebecca (Genesis 24:10–20). See
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966, repr. London: Ark, 1984), p. 158. For Jerome, a water pitcher is an image of a chaste woman’s body. See Epistola 22, 64.
See Eva C. Keals, “Attic Vase-Painting and the Home Textile Industry,” in Ancient Greek Art and Iconography, ed. Warren G. Moone (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), pp. 209, 210–14, and figs. 14.1–6. In ancient Greek art a woman carrying a water jar is subject to “male erotic fantasies,” “voyeurism,” and “rape.” See pp. 212, 210, 214. For the vase in the passio, see Miles, Carnal Knowing, p. 59. For an early medieval artwork depicting a woman at a well, see
Lynda L. Coon, Sacred Fictions: Holy Women and Hagiography in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 47, fig. 1.
See Robert Rousselle, “The Dreams of Vibia Perpetua: Analysis of a Female Christian Martyr,” The Journal of Psychohistory 14 (1987): 193–206, for a very convincing psychological reading that has received much acknowledgment, but little engagement.
See Alvyn Pettersen, “Perpetua—Prisoner of Conscience,” Vigiliae Christianae 41 (1987): 144. “Caseo” certainly means “cheese,” not “milk.” The image makes heaven Eucharistic, but the substance that Perpetua consumes comes from a ewe, a female source, rather than from Christ’s male body.
Clement of Alexandria, Le Pédagogue, ed. Henri-Irénée Marrou, 3 vols. (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1960–83) 1:6.42.3, 43.3–4, 46.1. I found this reference in de Nie, “‘Consciousness Fecund through God,’” pp. 113–14, and see Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 132–35; and
Susan Signe Morrison, Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England: Private Piety as Public Performance (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 10.
The image is common. See LA, 168, 203–04, 794, and Thomas J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 288.
De Nie, “‘Consciousness Fecund through God,’” p. 119, and see n. 82. For a summary of the various interpretations of Perpetua’s first dream, see Patricia M. Davis, “The Weaning of Perpetua: Female Embodiment and Spiritual Growth Metaphor in the Dream of an Early Christian Martyr,” Dreaming 15 (2005): 263–64.
See Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 38–39, 43–45.
Cf. Maud Burnett McInerney, Eloquent Virgins: From Thecla to Joan of Arc (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 21; and
AA Perkins, Roman Imperial Identities in the Early Christian Era (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 163–69.
See Wayne A. Meeks, “The Image of the Androgyne: Some Uses of a Symbol in Earliest Christianity,” History of Religions 13 (1974): 165–208. McInerney notes that masculus could be an adjective rather than a noun, so Perpetua might become “masculine” rather than “a man” at this juncture. The treatment of her by the attendants, in my view, suggests instead an actual change of sex. See Eloquent Virgins, p. 26.
See Castelli, “‘I Will Make Mary Male,’” p. 37. Critics are perhaps wary of calling a text “feminist” when it cannot be described as such. See p. 46. Feminism, in its twentieth-century and twenty-first-century manifestations, is a body of attitudes that late antique people could not possibly have held or even considered. At best a kind of “locational feminism” may be detected in previous eras. See Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 3–13, 102–03.
Mary R. Lefkowitz, “The Motivations for St. Perpetua’s Martyrdom,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 44 (1976): 421. See also Miles, Carnal Knowing, p. 59, who notes that her dreams tend to be of men—lots of men. She never dreams of a woman, save herself. Examples of benign, supportive men would be the old shepherd, Dinocrates, the trainer, and Perpetua’s seconds at the wrestling match.
See John Anson, “The Female Transvestite in Early Monasticism: The Origin and Development of a Motif,” Viator 5 (1974): 1–32; and
Mathew Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 241–42.
Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch, pp. 147. See also pp. 243–44, and Virginia Burrus, “Begotten, Not Made”: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 138–40.
For masquerades and sexual differences see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 47–48, 50, 137–39.
AA Burrus, “Reading Agnes: The Rhetoric of Gender in Ambrose and Prudentius,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 3 (1995): 33. See also pp. 25, 42–43.
Virginia Burrus, “‘Equipped for Victory’: Ambrose and the Gendering of Orthodoxy,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4 (1996): 472.
Bruno Krusch, ed., Ionae Vitae Sanctorum Columbani, Vedastis, Iohannis (Hanover: Impensis Bibliopolii Hahniani, 1905), 1–294;
Jo Ann McNamara, John E. Halborg, and E. Gordon Whatley, eds. and trans., Sainted Women of the Dark Ages (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), pp. 155–75. See also Coon, Sacred Fictions, pp. 24–26, 120–41; and
Jane Tibbetts Schulenberg, Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society ca. 500–1100 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
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Waugh, R. (2012). The Female Patience Figure as Speaker. In: The Genre of Medieval Patience Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230391871_2
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