CFP: Textualities of Martyrdom
2022 SCS Annual Meeting in San Francisco
Organizers: Alexandria Istok, NYU (alex.istok@nyu.edu) and Stephanie Crooks, NYU (smc729@nyu.edu)
This panel aims to move away from questions about pain and embodiment that have occupied scholars of Classics in the 25 years since the publication of Judith Perkins’ seminal work, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (1995) and to focus on other similarities that exist between martyr narratives and Greco-Roman works. Martyr accounts have often been regarded as Christian texts, and for this reason, a comprehensive study of their narrative form, i.e., their rhetorical style and genre, has been largely neglected by the field. To fill this gap, our panel intends to draw upon recent work in early Christian studies by James Corke-Webster (2019), Paul Middleton (2015), Candida Moss (2013), and Elizabeth Castelli (2004), among others, to achieve two things: First, we will investigate how the rhetorical strategies, the presentation of philosophical ideas, and the reimagining of power that are present in the martyr acts speak to wider literary and cultural trends occurring in the early empire. Second, we plan to interrogate possible precedents for martyrdom. More specifically, we seek to draw comparisons between the ways in which the martyr’s death evokes “noble deaths” found in Greco-Roman literature beginning with the death of Socrates in 399 BCE (Middleton 2015). To this end, possible areas of inquiry for the panel include, but are not limited to:
- Generic comparisons between exitus literature, biography, epistolography, etc., and martyr narratives.
- Moments of intertextuality between descriptions of deaths in Christian martyr narratives and non-Christian texts (focusing on shared rhetoric, imagery, desire for a “noble” death, etc.).
- Paratexts, such as monuments and relics, that seem to extend the life of the martyr beyond biological death and which support the text as it circulates among early Christian communities.
- Descriptions of martyr and martyr-like figures: What makes someone a martyr? Why are certain deaths regarded as memorable or significant? How does gender influence that significance?
- The formation of a distinctive Christian collective memory through martyr texts and their narratological practices.
- The appropriation of Roman systems and strategies on the part of the Christians to claim power.
Anonymous abstracts of no more than 500 words (excluding bibliography) should be submitted as email attachments to info@classicalstudies.org by March 31; the subject line of the email should be the title of the panel; and the text of the abstract should not mention the name of the author. The organizers aim to select between 3-6 papers for presentation at the 2022 SCS Meeting. There will be a short question and answer session at the end of the panel.