The premise of this volume, and of the 2007 conference from which it arose, is provocative – namely, that it might be fruitful to invite and indeed privilege non-specialist interpretations of the curious third-century Latin text known as the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas. The nineteen readers recruited include not only classicists, ancient historians and scholars of religion, but also literary theorists, cultural theorists and philosophers, a multidisciplinary assemblage that reflects choices of both inclusion and exclusion. As the editors explain, the volume aims ‘to detach the text … from traditional historical readings … by emphasizing broader literary and cultural aspects’ (p. v).
The editors also admit, however, that ‘this volume could be said to have two souls: a historical one and a literary one’ (p. 7), and indeed, many of its essays are traditionally historical or philological in approach. This suggests two things. First, the exclusion of specialists is more precisely the exclusion of ‘scholars of early Christianity’ (p. 8) – a theological exclusion, perhaps: several of the contributors, including the co-editors, have published significant works on the Passio, but they have done so from the disciplinary perspective of classics or ancient history. Second, the volume is structured by a contest (as M. Bal says of the Passio itself) – a contest between ‘traditional historical’ and ‘literary and cultural’ readings that is primarily internal to the field of classics. What is at stake, for at least one of the editors, is nothing less than the transformation of Latin studies: ‘In our opinion, the Passio, for its radical originality, could represent a sort of laboratory for new methods of reading’, F. proposes. How so? ‘By challenging the usually taken approaches by classicists, by expanding the canon of Latin texts, relativizing and possibly subverting it, and finally by providing the opportunity to ask fundamental questions about the reading of ancient texts and more generally about the function of literature itself and its link to life’ (p. 8). The very strangeness of this non-canonical text – a strangeness and non-canonicity not to be too easily reduced to its Christianness, as J. Farrell argues – promises to queer the reading practices that constitute the field of Latin classics as such, then. I will return to the question of the extent to which this promise is fulfilled. For now, it is significant that it is invoked at all.
The volume opens with not only an introduction by the editors but also a fresh translation of the Passio by J. Farrell and C. Williams, accompanied by a slightly amended version of van Beek's Latin edition. The nineteen essays that follow are divided into three parts; a list of the authors and titles will give some sense of the spectrum of topics and approaches. Part 1, ‘The Martyr and her Gender’, includes B., ‘Felicitas: the Martyrdom of a Young African Woman’; C. Williams, ‘Perpetua's Gender. A Latinist Reads the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis’; W. Ameling, ‘Femina Liberaliter Instituta – Some Thoughts on a Martyr's Liberal Education’; H. Sigismund-Nielsen, ‘Vibia Perpetua – an Indecent Woman’; J. Willem van Henten, ‘The Passio Perpetuae and Jewish Martyrdom: the Motif of Mother Love’; M. Bal, ‘Perpetual Contest’; and J. Weitbrecht, ‘Maternity and Sainthood in the Medieval Perpetua Legend’. Part 2, ‘Authority and Testimony’, includes J. den Boeft, ‘The Editor's Prime Objective: Haec in Aedificationem Ecclesiae Legere’; S. Weigel, ‘Exemplum and Sacrifice, Blood Testimony and Written Testimony: Lucretia and Perpetua as Transitional Figures in the Cultural History of Martyrdom’; K. Waldner, ‘Visions, Prophecy, and Authority in the Passio Perpetuae’; H. Böhme, ‘The Conquest of the Real by the Imaginary: on the Passio Perpetuae’; G. Sissa, ‘Socrates’ Passion'; and L. Bagetto, ‘Nova Exempla. The New Testament of the Passio Perpetuae’. Part 3, ‘The Text, the Canon, and the Margins’, includes C. Markschies, ‘The Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis and Montanism?’; D. Konstan, ‘Perpetua's Martyrdom and the Metamorphosis of Narrative’; J. Farrell, ‘The Canonization of Perpetua’; P. Mesnard, ‘The Power of Uncertainty: Interpreting the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas’; F., ‘Perpetua's Prisons: Notes on the Margins of Literature’; and M. Warner, ‘Memories of the Martyrs: Reflections of a Catholic Girlhood’. The essays are supplemented by an extensive bibliography.
Like any multi-author volume, this one invites the reader to disassemble and reassemble its parts. Several of the essays address historical issues, such as Felicitas' motivations in choosing martyrdom (B.) or Perpetua's education (Ameling). Others address the ‘editor's’ promotion of the Passio as sacred scripture and his putative Montanism (den Boeft, Farrell, Markschies). Others attempt to situate the Passio in particular literary/cultural contexts, whether Latin (Weigel, Williams), Greek (Konstan, Sissa), Jewish (van Henten) or Christian (Waldner). And still others deal with the complex reception of the text (Sigismund-Nielsen, Weitbrecht, Farrell, Warner).
A few of the contributions are genuinely innovative with respect to their interdisciplinarity; in each case, they also produce readings that are more ‘literary’ than ‘historical’. Bal's essay, a slightly revised version of a 1991 publication that, F. urges (p. 10), has not received the attention it deserves, combines ‘narratology, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction in a voluntarily anachronistic appropriation’ of the Passio (p. 134), discovering in the figure of Perpetua not only a ‘proto-feminist heroine’ but also ‘a proto-post-modern’ (p. 149). Böhme also takes a psychoanalytic approach, arguing for the subversiveness of a text in which ‘the symbolic and the real are annihilated; the imaginary triumphs’ (p. 243). Bagetto reads the Passio from the perspective of Carl Schmitt's analysis of the relationship of law and exceptionality, arguing that ‘the martyr repeats the act of the sovereign in setting himself against himself, suspending his own law …. The witness brings the non-being of the new world into the being of the old one’ (p. 268). Finally, Mesnard brings his study of testimonial works dealing with the Nazi concentration camps and the genocide of the Jews to bear, in a particularly evocative reading that emphasises the polyphony and uncertainty generated by the Passio, the ‘lacunary polysemia which the text itself produces and of which it is constituted’ (p. 325). He suggests that these features point to the logic of testimony itself, as the witness to an event that cannot be accommodated by language: ‘it is necessary … that the silence of the outside (which is the radical violence) … be re-inscribed in the sphere of language without making it prolix, without making it speak’ (p. 328).
Although penultimate in the line-up (being followed by Warner's memoir), F.'s essay functions as a kind of bookend for the collection, a literary manifesto balancing the historical essay by his co-editor B. with which the volume opens. With hindsight, one detects a subversive logic at work in B.'s choice to focus not on the iconic Perpetua but rather on the marginal Felicitas, for marginality is also F.'s theme. Complementing Farrell's study of the historical marginalisation of the Passio relative to various canons, F. argues that the Passio is not merely incidentally but inherently marginal, in so far as it actively resists interpretation: ‘it is the text itself which eludes centrality and places itself outside of a literary canon’ (p. 330). Building on Bal's work, and leaning into the literary theory of Roland Barthes, among others, he focuses on ‘the enigmatic structure of the text’ (p. 311), with special attention to its ambiguous generic and temporal status as both autobiography and prison literature, its literarisation of death as ‘the point where history and fiction merge’ (p. 342), and finally its pleasurably disturbing resistance to canonicity or classification of any sort. In all of this, he himself resists ‘the sometimes excessive tendency of classicists to collect historical and philological data in order to reconstruct the context of the text under study’ (p. 336) while seeking to decentre or even undo the classical canon as such.
Bal suggests that ‘the contest set up in the beginning between ancient and recent times is brilliantly won’ by Perpetua, in the overcoming of narrative by description, ‘as she moves way beyond the recent past into the future of vision and the present of writing’ (p. 149). This volume may seem to perform a similar triumph, ‘moving way beyond’ historical narration into the present of reading. Yet Bal also insists with respect to the Passio that the contest is ‘perpetual’, and the same might be said of Perpetua's Passions. Both ‘historical’ and ‘literary’ voices remain, necessarily, in tensive dialogue.
