Perpetua's Passion

The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman

Joyce E. Salisbury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136050947
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Perpetua's Passion studies the third-century martyrdom of a young woman and places it in the intellectual and social context of her age. Conflicting ideas of religion, family and gender are explored as Salisbury follows Perpetua from her youth in a wealthy Roman household to her imprisonment and death in the arena.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1 Eusebius, The History of the Church, trans. G. A. Williamson, (Harmonds-worth, 1984), 341–42.

2 Ibid., 342.

ONE: ROME

1 T. Barnes, Tertullian. A Historical and Literary Study (Oxford, 1971), 70, argues for senatorial rank for the family. More convincing is B. Shaw's argument for decurial rank in “The Passion of Perpetua,” Past and Present 139 (1993): 11.

2 See E. Cantarella, Pandora's Daughters: The Role and Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Baltimore, 1987), 11.

3 See J. Hallett, Fathers and Daughters in Roman Society (Princeton, 1984), for an excellent discussion of the centrality of this tie.

4 Pliny the Younger, in Women's Lives in Greece and Rome, ed. M. R. Lefkowitz, et al., (Baltimore, 1982), 144.

5 See, for example, Jerome, “To Eustochium” in Jerome: Letters and Select Works, trans. W. H. Fremantle (Peabody, Mass., 1995), 22.

6 See B. Rawson, ed., The Family in Ancient Rome: New Perspectives (Ithaca, 1986), 8.

7 See ibid., 40, and S. B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York, 1975), 170; both emphasize the importance of education to Roman daughters.

8 Quintilian, “Institutes of Oratory,” in Lefkowitz et al., Women's Lives, 235.

9 Ibid.

10 Rawson, 22, and Pomeroy, 164. However, see B. Shaw, “The Age of Roman Girls at Marriage: Some Reconsiderations,” Journal of Roman Studies 77 (1987): 30–46, who argues that the late teens were probably a more customary age for young women to marry.

11 Rawson, 22.

12 “Passion of Perpetua,” in The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, comp. and trans. H. Musurillo (Oxford, 1972), 109. Shaw, “Passion of Perpetua,” 11–12, figures her marriage age at about eighteen or nineteen. I think this calculation is off by a year or two, although with the scarcity of information it is impossible to tell for sure.

13 Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1984), 282–83, summarizes the arguments proposed for the absence of Perpetua's husband from the text.

14 Shaw, “Passion of Perpetua,” 25.

15 M. A. Tilley, “One Woman's Body: Repression and Expression in the Passio Perpetuae,” in Ethnicity, Nationality and Religious Experience, ed. P. C. Phan (New York, 1991), 62.

16 Ibid, 58.

17 S. Dixon, The Roman Mother (Norman, Ok., 1988), 24, 233. See also Cantarella, 134.

18 W. H. C. Frend, Martyrdom, and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus (Oxford, 1965), 104–5.

19 Cicero, De Natura Deorum, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, 1967), 131.

20 Augustine, City of God, trans H. Bettenson (Harmondsworth, 197...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• one Rome
• two Carthage
• three Christian Community
• four Prison
• five The Arena
• six Aftermath
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index