The passion of Perpetua - Christian woman martyred in Carthage in A.D. 203

Past & Present, May, 1993 by Brent D. Shaw

Perpetua was privileged not just in her inherited social rank, but also because of her acquired skills, notably her literary education. This is evident not just from her ability in composition and her use of common literary allusions from "high culture", but from the simple fact that she was literate -- at least in Latin, perhaps also in Greek.(34) If So, she was unusual not only in her literacy, but also because, in the self-laudatory pronouncements of proud north Africans, she was educated in both Greek and Latin (utraque lingua erudita).(35) It is precisely this fact that draws our attention to her case. For, after having briefly repeated the main facts regarding the arrest of the group around Perpetua, the editor of the martyrdom announces: "The whole series of events concerning her own death she herself narrated, just as she wrote it down with her own hand, and according to her own feelings on the matter" (2.3). The achievement was significant enough for the editor to emphasize the fact yet again at the conclusion of Perpetua's account: "These were the remarkable visions of those most blessed martyrs Saturus and Perpetua, which they themselves wrote down" (14.1). But it was the extraordinary existence of an account in her own words of a woman's personal experiences which was seen, even then, as something of great rarity.

First, a few elementary facts. The actual number of surviving pieces of literature from all of antiquity that were written by females is, of course, exiguously small. If one excepts the writing of letters (of which relatively few survive) and operational documents to which they were signatories (wills, bills of sale and such) there is not much left at all in terms of writing, much less reflective literature. To have any one such document, therefore, is to be presented with unusual opportunities both in terms of the simple content of the document, and for a quality of interpretation that is otherwise systematically denied us. We have the hope, however fleeting, of being able to seize for a moment in time the perceptions shared by an individual whose entire class of persons was systematically denied this sort of expression. Beyond this, of course, also lies the simple fact of Perpetua's martyrdom. Given the various factors that clearly indicate to most historians that many more females than males were converting to Christianity in its first centuries, one would tend to expect them to be in the front line of persecution.(36) Females may well have been martyred just as frequently as males in the sporadic fits of persecution that erupted in various regions of the Roman empire, but their chances of being memorialized in literature was nowhere near as frequent. In fact, males were celebrated four times (or more) as frequently as females. A useful point of view on that imbalance is provided by a study of medieval and early modern sainthood. As its authors remark: "The ideal type we discussed in answering the question |Who was a saint?' might well have been separated into males and females, for nothing so clearly divided the ranks of the saints as gender".(37) In their whole survey, only about one out of six of all the "saints" (sancti) whom they counted as part of their study were females, a proportion which rose in the "era of female saints" in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to about one in five, but which fell as low as about one-tenth of all saints in the eleventh and twelfth centuries -- a male preference which the authors see as closely linked to the deepseated male prejudices of medieval society.(38), Although the criteria for saints and martyrs are not the same, the two categories demand personal characteristics that are broadly similar, and it therefore cannot be purely accidental that the proportion of "female entry" to these highly privileged religious statuses is much the same.