By Margaret Cotter-Lynch
This examine lines the family tree of Saint Perpetua’s tale with a simple but formerly ignored query at its middle: How used to be Perpetua remembered and to what makes use of used to be that reminiscence positioned? some of the most well known and honored saints from 2 hundred CE to the 13th century, the tale of Saint Perpetua was once retold in dramatically varied varieties around the ecu heart a long time. Her tale starts within the area at Carthage: a 22-year-old nursing mom named Vibia Perpetua was once performed for being a Christian, abandoning a self-authored account of her time in criminal major as much as her martyrdom. by means of turns loving mom, militant gladiator, empathic younger lady, or impossible perfect, Saint Perpetua’s tale eventually is helping to track the stream of texts and the differences of beliefs of Christian womanhood among the 3rd and 13th centuries.
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Additional info for Saint Perpetua across the Middle Ages: Mother, Gladiator, Saint
Example text
While I agree that Perpetua undergoes an oneiric transformation that allows her to fight as a gladiator in the arena, in my view, she does not become male. Rather, she transcends the binary gender categories that dictate that women cannot be gladiators by redefining the categories themselves: as a woman, she becomes male, inhabiting both genders at once. This reading is further supported by the sentence’s diction: “masculus” is translated by Heffernan (and most other English translators of the Passio) as a substantive, an adjective which grammatically functions as a noun within the sentence.
Jordan, Telling Truths in Church: Scandal, Flesh, and Christian Speech (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003). 511: “Translated for a specific analysis of gender, I am suggesting that an apophatic sensibility shows us that we must always be recreating what we mean by gender, always 42 M. COTTER-LYNCH 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. theoretically and practically working to undo the genders we perform, never accepting any form of bodily signification as either accurate or complete. 512–513. Catherine Keller, “The Apophasis of Gender: A Fourfold Unsaying of Feminist Theology,” The Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no.
COTTER-LYNCH martyrs such as herself simultaneously inhabit both genders, perhaps even eradicating the relevance of gender as a category in the face of Christian eschatology. In Perpetua’s fourth vision, she is escorted from prison by the deacon Pomponius, who leads her to the amphitheater where she knows she is to be martyred. Once there, Pomponius reassures her and departs, leaving her in the middle of the arena, watched by the crowd. Then, she tells us (with Heffernan’s translation, emphasis mine): Et expoliata sum, et facta sum masculus, et coeperunt me favisores mei oleo defricare, quomodo solent in agone; et illum contra Egyptium video in afa colunantem.