Barbara Gold (Hamilton College)
Roman conceptions of personhood do not easily intersect with our contemporary delineations of what personhood is or means; we now tend to define personhood in a more malleable, elastic way that is less grounded in particular cultural values such as honor or masculinity (Barthes (1967), Foucault (1978, 1982), Butler (2004)). One striking example of people who possess an identity that is not stable and individual but is embedded in a community are martyrs, especially the early martyrs before the Church became hierarchical.
This paper takes its inspiration from contemporary works on personhood, gender theory and Christianity, among them MacDonald (1987), Aspegren (1990), Bal (1991), Castelli (1991-2008), Cooper (1998-2011), Butler (2004), and Cobb (2008).
Early Christian martyrs, especially from the second to the fourth centuries, allow us a glimpse into men and women who shed their original ethnic, cultural, and gender individual identities to become part of a new family group, one that superseded any private personal identity they had constructed before. The “I,” which had already been bifurcated by Roman writers into personal identity and literary personae, did not exist for these martyrs. The illusory nature of an individual consciousness was unimportant to them, except perhaps at the moment of their passion. My test case for these claims is Perpetua, an early precursor of our contemporary non-fixed configuration of personhood. Perpetua, who died in 203 CE, is one of the earliest of the female martyrs and also one who has left us a narrative (purported to be written by her but clearly revised and by several hands; Gurd 2011). Certainly not all martyrs were female, but Perpetua’s case is particularly interesting in the context of personhood, authorhood and gender. She is in many ways a strong character and holds her own against the men in the narrative. But this seeming self-assertion is mixed with a subordination of her personal identity to the church community. Her identity is not clearly gendered: she seems to manifest many male characteristics (she is the leader of her group of mostly men; is unafraid to contradict her father, the judge and the jailers; is confident and brave) and yet she is a nursing mother whose body is often foregrounded (Amat 1996; Perkins 2009). As an author, she probably wrote at least a part of her Passio but then turned it over willingly to the next author when it was her time for martyrdom (Passio 10.15).
Perpetua is then a classic example of a martyr, a woman, an author for whom the idea of maintaining a stable personal identity did not exist, in her life, in her writing, in her worldview. Even so substantially physical a marker as her virginity was open to question: she was a mother and yet her virginity was liturgically restored in the thirteenth century (Gold 2018). There was no simple way that the church fathers of the fourth century could write about or explain Christian women: their behavior, gender, and religious beliefs eluded any attempt to categorize them as stable “persons.”