Abstract
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 child, and in her ladder vision Saturus climbs to heaven first.
These examples are evidence of a leading character who slides back and forth along the gender spectrum, a point illustrated most forcefully in Perpetua’s combat vision. For Cotter-Lynch, this episode does not detail a definitive change in Perpetua’s gender or sex, as many commentators have suggested through their reading of the crucial phrase facta sum masculus. Rather, the feminine facta, along with other feminine textual markers, suggests that Perpetua envisions herself as a female who has assumed maleness. She thus does not become unambiguously male (or a man!), but “is at once male and female” (29). For Cotter-Lynch, this represents a “kataphatic moment,” an attempt to express a theological point that language struggles to convey—in this case, Paul’s exclamation that gender distinctions are dissolved within the Christian body (Gal 3:28). In the Passio, then, Cotter-Lynch finds a text that treats gender fluidly and does not associate it with sanctity (16).
In subsequent centuries, this memory undergoes significant alterations within an institutionalized church that shows little interest in affirming the gender ambiguities found in the Passio. The Acta Perpetuae, documents from the next stage of Perpetua’s memorialization, consciously rework the Passio to affirm more conventional views of gender. For example, Perpetua’s story is subsumed within a collective group of martyrs, and at her death she is paired with a male martyr, changes that effectively move her off “center stage.” The texts also diminish the human qualities of Perpetua by creating a radical division with her biological family and asserting that she, along with the other martyrs, were acting according to divine will. Most tellingly, however, Acta A thoroughly reworks the vision of Perpetua’s gladiatorial contest by transforming it into a communal battle between the martyrs and the Egyptian and eliminating Perpetua’s assumption of masculinity. Cotter-Lynch argues that these changes diminish the ambiguities and inversions found in the Passio and configure Perpetua as a female combatant in a cosmic war, a figure whose convictions are more admirable than they are imitable (50, 52, 54–55).
Sermons 280–82 of Augustine further advance the efforts to mute the unconventional gendered aspects of Perpetua’s story and make specific claims about the relationship between gender and sanctity. Like the Acta, Augustine places divine agency at the heart of his sermons, which, in conjunction with his spiritualized reading of Perpetua, moves her out of the realm of Christian imitatio. In addition, the bishop’s understanding of the imago Dei of Genesis 1:27 as either nongendered or masculine enables him to minimize the femaleness of Perpetua’s body and highlight her embodiment of (male) virtue, the primary trait of a martyr. The latter argument appears most prominently in Augustine’s revision of Perpetua’s gladiatorial contest, an event that signals Perpetua’s transformation from female to exclusively male (75). This remarkable occurrence, however, only reinforces the gender binary that the bishop sought to instantiate within his congregation: while both ordinary men and women might admire Perpetua, whose spirit, hope, and faith become a marker for sanctity, they should not try to imitate a figure imbued with divine power (64–65, 70, 73, 82).
As with so many other topics, Augustine’s interpretation of Perpetua became normative among later Christian commentators. For example, the narrative martyrologies of Bede and Ado of Vienne place Perpetua within a group of martyrs and highlight the separation of her body and mind, a phenomenon that highlights the otherworldly nature of the martyrdom: through the agency of God Perpetua was able to endure her death without feeling pain. A more sophisticated reading of Perpetua comes from Notker Balbulus, whose hymn “For the Festival of Holy Women” uses Perpetua’s visions of heavenly ascent as an image for envisioning the sanctity that all women can achieve. Yet the main message of the hymn is framed with an Augustinian nod to a gender differentiation, a point underscored by Notker’s larger contention that women achieve holiness through their relationship with men (98–101). Here, then, we see a particularly potent example of Cotter-Lynch’s feedback loop in action: a (male) author selectively engages a story of a third-century (female) martyr through the lens of later memorials and a ninth-century cultural world that placed strict regulations on women’s lives in order to create a new reading intended to shape the identities of his (male) monastic audience.
The memorial machinery in medieval England presents additional portraits of Perpetua. While the Cotton-Corpus Legendary omits Perpetua’s recollection of becoming male, which leads to an unambiguously female Perpetua fighting in the arena, the Old English Martyrology follows the Passio asserting Perpetua’s adoption of masculine attributes and highlights her ability to show agency. Similarly, Goscelin of St. Bertin’s Perpetua is a female warrior and martyr who assumes male qualities, a particularly apt image to shape the identity of his reader, an aspiring anchorite named Eva who was beginning to embark upon her own form of spiritual warfare and martyrdom. By highlighting the simultaneity of genders in this retelling, Cotter-Lynch suggests that Goscelin intimates that the withdrawal of anchorites from the world entails a corresponding distancing from traditional understandings of gender (129).
A final swing of the interpretive pendulum is found in the Legenda Aurea, Jacob of Voragine’s collection of saint’s lives. Cotter-Lynch shows that Jacob’s source material comes from Jean de Mailly, who himself was dependent upon Acta A and Augustine. As a result, Jacob shows the same interest in diminishing Perpetua’s stature by embedding her within the group of martyrs and erasing the gender ambiguities found in the Passio. He also modifies his source to further underscore Perpetua’s marginalization by erasing the interrogation of Perpetua and the father’s plea for the martyr to show mercy toward her newborn child. This decision eliminates Perpetua’s human traits, giving her an otherworldly virtue impossible to imitate (145). For Cotter-Lynch, this rhetorical move fits the context of a Dominican order intent on using the saints as teaching tools in the battle against heresy: impervious to physical pain, the saints become symbols of “abstract virtue in a comic-book struggle of good against evil,” and Perpetua herself a “visible manifestation of God’s agency on earth” (147–48).
While Perpetua has generated enormous interest among scholars, many of these works are restricted to specific historical periods. Cotter-Lynch’s book, by contrast, convincingly demonstrates that ancient and medieval depictions of the martyr should not be read in isolation but as part of an ongoing conversation about the relationship between gender and holiness. Moreover, using memory to account for the various changes made to the Perpetua tradition is instructive, although theoretically inclined readers may finish the book wishing Cotter-Lynch had chosen to mine the mountain of research on this topic more deeply, especially studies that specifically use memory to analyze Perpetua (e.g., Elizabeth A Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making, 2007). Greater attention to scholarship on the Passio would also be welcome, considering how important her controversial reading of this text is for later chapters. For example, if this text embodies the first half of Paul’s thoughts on the unity of Christian community (Gal 3:28c: “no longer male and female”), it is worth considering whether the gender ambiguity in the Passio moves even beyond the apostle, for whom this unity is gendered male (Gal 3:28d: pantes gar humeis heis este en Christo Iesou). These comments should not detract, however, from the many important insights that explain how and why writers employed Perpetua’s “machine” to configure the nature of the godly life.