The Writings of Medieval Women

An Anthology

Marcelle Theibaux

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780815313922
• eBook ISBN: 9781135507855
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"Royal and saintly women are well-represented here, with the welcome addition of women from the Mediterranean arc...Garland has done a solid job of presenting this book." -- Arthuriana "The Anthology gives a fine sense of the great range of women's writing in the Middle Ages." -- Medium Aevum

CHAPTER 1

Prisoner, Dreamer, Martyr

Perpetua of Carthage (d. March 7,203)

Early in the third century, when persecutions against Christians were raging like a virus in the North African city of Carthage, a young woman named Vibia Perpetua was arrested with four friends.

At twenty-two she was their leader and guiding spirit, rallying them in their last crisis and urging them to “stand fast in the faith.” Daughter of an upper-class provincial family, Perpetua was a young mother still nursing her son, but she willingly embraced the suffering revealed in the diary she wrote from her prison cell. With her was Felicity, a slave, and three young men. Another friend voluntarily joined them later. When arrested, the young people were Christian catechumens, beginners still taking instruction. The fact that they had themselves baptized in prison worsened the case against them, showing them to be more intransigeant than ever. After a trial they were sentenced to confront the beasts in the arena, part of a birthday celebration for the Emperor Geta. One died in the jail. The others were slain in the arena.

Martyrdom meant bearing witness, and belonged to the program of Christianity from the beginning. On the day of his Ascension Christ is said to have announced to the apostles their task: “You are to be my witnesses in Jerusalem and throughout Judaea, in Samaria, yes, and to the ends of the earth.”¹ The apostles had simply to give witness to what they had heard and seen and to keep on witnessing, unshaken and unswerving, even if they were dragged before kings and governors. “They will lay hands on you and persecute you. They will deliver you to synagogues and prisons … and all on account of my name. This will result in your being witnesses to them… They will put some of you to death.”² Inasmuch as Christ bore witness with the testimony of blood that he had come as the Messiah, the witness who put her life or his life on the line for Christ was a martyr in the strict sense.

Understandably, then, the martyrs who died for the faith earned reverence. The blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church, wrote the Christian theologian Tertullian, a contemporary of Perpetua's who was born at Carthage. The followers of dead martyrs showed this reverence by gathering and cherishing the bodily remains, “dearer than precious jewels and finer than gold,201D;³ often at great risk since burial was forbidden to criminals whom the state executed for breaking the law. Declaring oneself to be a Christian wasn't the crime. It was refusing to worship the Emperor and honor the religion of the Roman state: offering sacrifice, pouring and tasting libations to the Punic/Roman divinities. Jupiter Optimus Maximus and Juno Caelestis, the bearded Baal-Saturn with his sickle and solar disk, Bacchus, Demeter, and Kore were among those with shrines and altar mounds in pleasant courtyards and terraces, under porticoes, or beside sheltered pools. The town of Thuburbo—where Perpetua and her friends were arrested, some thirty kilometers southwest of Carthage—boasted an imposing temple of Baalat and one of Mercury in the forum. Mingled with the worship of the Roman gods were ominous rites of infant sacrifice, inherited from Phoenician cults of Baal and Moloch, whom African Romans inscribed as MLK. Of the priestly sacrifice of children, Tertullian reports, “To this day that holy crime persists in secret.”

The gravity of the crime of not worshiping all the deities was evident. Christians imperiled the well-being of the state by flouting the fury of the gods, who were known to visit famines, earthquakes, and other disasters on those who ignored their cults.

The martyrs were the first heroes of Christianity, mere mortals, really, but gifted with heroic strength at their final moment of need. Even though it was possible for Christians to fake it—to go through the motions of the sacrifices, pay a deputy, or buy false certificates of participation—astoundingly large numbers chose torture and death. Their eagerness to die explained why the Roman state had eventually to concede the impossibility of conquering Christianity by fire and sword. The “sword” was the metaphor of the notorious gladiator shows.

Until Christianity became a threat, gladiator spectacles were public events, military funeral games staged by wealthy patricians to venerate their dead. Prominent citizens, too, might be forced to subsidize beast shows as a kind of status tax. The African arena (the word meant “sand,” which in practical terms was sifted over the blood after each combat) could be decorated with props and scenery to simulate wilderness settings into which animal cages were lowered with pulleys. Gladiators engaged in combat with each other or with wild animals. Starved animals were set at each other's throats. Condemned victims were loosed in the arena unarmed, or given rudimentary weapons like bows and arrows or firebrands to defend themselves. Attendants and slaves officially employed in the sports sometimes dressed as gods—Mercury, Pluto, Charon. The sight led Tertullian to describe the arena as “the temple of all the demons.” Victims who were condemned criminals or war captives were paraded around, often forced to wear the garb of Roman priests and priestesses before being stripped and driven to the wild beasts. Leopards, lions, bulls, bears, elephants, antelopes, even crocodiles were likely to show up as their adversaries. After human victims were sufficiently mauled, they were delivered the coup de grace, the jugulum, or the slitting of their throats by gladiators whose job that was.⁴

Not only were the arena sports wildly popular as theatrical entertainment, but citizens also wanted mementos, costly decorative artifacts, in their homes. A mosaic found in a villa near Leptis Magna, North Africa, portrays a scene from the death games. A roped bull tussles with a chained bear, a nude man challenges a horse with a hooked baton, a soldier goads another nude man with a whip to confront a charging lion. The second nude man shows resistance.⁵ Another mosaic from a house in Smirat shows gladiators impaling bleeding leopards on their lances while a patron runs forward from the sidelines with the prize money. An even more gruesome depiction survives from the house known as the Domus Sollertiana at the city of Thysdrus near the African east coast. The artist renders a panther clambering up on a bound prisoner, both hind claws fixed into one staggering knee, front paws gripping his shoulder and breast while the animal eats the man's eyes and face. Blood spouts graphically.⁶

Gladiators, venatores, and bestiarii (swordsmen, huntsmen, and animal fighters) were professional athletes employed in the games. Unlike the stripped victims, they were sufficiently armed. They were “stars” in the public eye, their performances compensated with bags of denars and gold coins. Usually of humble birth, the athletes achieved their gaudy celebrity by the strength of body and brawn. Their allegedly glamorous lives were violent and usually short. Popularly viewed as heroes endowed with sexual as well as athletic prowess, gladiators were thought appealing to women. The Latin gladius, or sword, also colloquially meant penis, and gladiators were apt to be represented pictorially as phallic combatants.⁷

Beasts and gladiators figure in the story of Perpetua. Her male companions are mangled finally by a leopard. Drenched in their own blood, they hear the mobs roaring with ironic wit, “Well washed! Well washed!” (salvum lotum). This was a customary greeting of good health exchanged by friends after a bath and could be found inscribed in a bathing pool or grotto.

There are ancient amphitheaters dotting North Africa, including one at Thuburbo and a 27,000—seat amphitheater at Thysdrus. These offer rich excavation sites whose ruins can be seen today. The gladiator mosaics described previously date from the early third century, the period of Perpetua's death.

It is important to note that Perpetua's journal and the surrounding testimony are not legend but constitute a document that survives in numerous Latin manuscripts, some abridged, with one Greek version, the last found in Jerusalem. Before the journal begins, an eyewitness's introduction bearing the marks of a sermon is written in a far more scholarly and convoluted style than the lucid, unadorned words of Perpetua. This introduction, with allusions to the preservation of texts, gives an oral reminder of the martyrdom to those who already know it at first hand, and it introduces the holy event to those who now learn of it through hearing (nunc cognoscitis per auditum).

The opening states the document's fourfold purpose: to verify the acts of God and to honor God, to teach men and women and to comfort them. The introduction raises the question of the greater authority of older history over recent and contemporary. But these contemporary prophecies and visions will, in their turn, attain the respectability of the old, as the preacher points out. Today's news will become great history. So the preacher exhorts the hearers to venerate the new, especially as the new becomes identified with the world's “last days.”

As distinct from the preacher's overarching, didactic view of slow-gathering historic time, Perpetua's journal measures the painful day-to-day passage of time intimately experienced by a condemned woman who waits for her execution. The word “days” drums like a refrain. Perpetua's account of prison life sounds quite convincing. There are also mysterious notes and omissions. Where is her husband? Why is her father the only member of her family who, she says, does not rejoice at her plight? These questions may one day find answers.

Perpetua's memory was kept green and thriving. Saint Augustine of Carthage wrote sermons in honor of his compatriots, Perpetua and Felicity, and their names are in the Roman calendar of saints. Mosaics of the two, garbed as slave and mistress, survive in Ravenna. During the great period of church building in the fourth century, a Byzantine church known as the Damous-el-Karita (the House of Charity) was consecrated at Carthage. This was the largest church in North Africa. A short walk from the church led to a wide cemetery where one could read the inscription indicating the tomb of the martyred Perpetua. One such inscription stated that it was in the Great Basilica that the bodies of the holy martyrs Perpetua and Felicity were buried: Basilicam Majorum ubi corpora sanctarum martyrum Perpetuae atque Felicitatis sepulta sunt.⁸

By the mid-ninth century the legend appears in abbreviated form in the Old English Martyrology for March 7. The author may have found the story in the Sermons of St. Augustine:

On the seventh day of the month is the commemoration of the holy women St. Perpetua and St. Felicity, whose bodies rest in the large town of Carthage in Africa. Perpetua dreamt when she was in her girlhood that she had the appearance of a man and that she had a sword in her hand and that she fought with it valiantly. All this was afterwards fulfilled at her martyrdom, when she overcame the devil and the heathen persecutors with manly determination [werlice geïohte]. Then there was Felicity, a Christian woman, and she was with child as she was sent to prison for Christ's sake. When therefore the persecutors were about to dismiss her, she wept and prayed to God to rid her of the child, and then she brought it forth on the same night in the seventh month of her pregnancy, and she suffered martyrdom for Christ's sake.⁹

The record of Perpetua's martyrdom consists of four parts: Sections 1–2 give the introduction and eyewitness report, perhaps by TertuUian or one of his circle; Sections 3–10 are Perpetua's own words, her personal narrative of the period in prison before her death and the journal's central document; Sections 11–13 move to the narrative of a fellow prisoner, Saturas, who relates his own vision and gives testimony to Perpetua; Sections 14–21 round off the journal with an eyewitness's conclusion and account of Perpetua's death and those of her comrades.

Introductory Sermon by an Eyewitness

1. From ancient times, examples of the faith have been committed to writing in order to verify God's grace and provide guidance for human-kind. The aim of recalling the past through the written word has also been to honor God and reassure humanity. Why then should we not record more recent events for these purposes? For some day such events will also become ancient. Future ages will need them, even though in their own time they seemed less important because ancient history claims the greater respect.

People who think that there is a single Holy Spirit for all times and periods ought to reflect that more current events should be considered more important. An overflowing grace has been promised for these last days of the world. The Lord said, “In the last days I will pour out of my spirit upon all flesh; and their sons and their daughters shall prophesy and on my servants and handmaids I will pour out of my spir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Select Bibliography
• 1. Prisoner, Dreamer, Martyr
• 2. A Pilgrim to the Holy Land
• 3. Calumniated Empress and Poet
• 4. An Ill-Fated Gothic Queen
• 5. Three Consecrated Women of Merovingian Gaul
• 6. “Words Flowing Like Gold Fringes”
• 7. Barbarian Women, Holy Women
• 8. Mother to a Young Warrior
• 9. Hagiographer, Playwright, Epic Historian
• 10. A Byzantine Historian of the First Crusade
• 11. The Trobairitz in Love and Strife
• 12. “Marie Is My Name: I Am of France”
• 13. Good Queen Maud
• 14. A Benedictine Visionary in the Rhineland
• 15. Handmaid of God
• 16. Brides of the Celestial Bedchamber
• 17. A Woman of Letters at the French Court
• 18. An Anchoress of England
• 19. Four English Women of the Fifteenth Century
• Index