Perpetua's Passions: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis. Edited by Jan N. Bremmer and Marco Formisano. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. viii + 390 pp. $150.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Perpetua's Passions: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis . Edited by Jan N. Bremmer and Marco Formisano . New York : Oxford University Press , 2012. viii + 390 pp. $150.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesThe Passion of Perpetua and Felicity is one of the most unique early Christian texts from the Principate. The prose of the text is an account of a pogrom written in four voices--two of which claim to be first person narratives and two are by later redactors. The persecutions took place in the City of Carthage in spring of 203 when P. Aelius Hilarianus was senior procurator. The reason for this persecution is unknown. Accusations that place blame on Septimius Severus are without foundation. Nine Latin manuscripts survive and one Greek. The Latin text is earlier than the Greek and is the language of the original composition. The manuscript tradition is late; the earliest surviving manuscript is the ninth century, St. Gallen 577. Lucas Holstenius first published the text in 1663, from the late eleventh-century version in Montecassino 204. Although not widely known in the Middle Ages, the Passion has remained popular since the seventeenth century and been edited many times. There are two later hagiographic epitomes of the Passion that were popular throughout the Middle Ages called the Acta .The narrative details the arrest of five young catechumens who were seized for their refusal to sacrifice to the health of the emperor. The prisoners were condemned to the beasts and executed in the Carthage amphitheater. While imprisoned, two of the five wrote of their experiences: Perpetua, a young educated married woman likely of the curiales , and a free man, Saturus. Perpetua's eloquent and moving account of her imprisonment is the earliest surviving first person narrative written by a female. Her story confounds many of our dearly held assumptions concerning the relationships within Roman families, particularly in the depictions of her relationship with her father.Jan Bremmer and Marco Formisano edited a nineteen-essay volume that seeks to read the Passion from perspectives other than that of early Christian and Classical scholars. To that end they have recruited some individuals who have not written on the Passion before. Happily they do include essays by readers who have a deep familiarity with the text. The nineteen essays are divided into three parts: part 1: "The Martyr and her Gender"; part 2, "Authority and Testimony" and part 3, "The Text, the Canon, and the Margins." Before I describe the nature of these varied approaches, it is well to note the varied, sometimes eccentric and wide-ranging interpretations made of the Passion . This first person narrative, to paraphrase Marco Formisano's essay, exists on the margins; it resists interpretation, existing somewhere between fiction and historical fact. Perpetua's narrative complicates the hermeneutic circle between reader and narrative, drawing the reader into an interpretative frame in which the historical is often contested by the idea of the fictive. Readers' interpretations often on the most elementary issues depart from what the text states. Some essays in this present volume illustrate such interpretative distances. For example, her trip from the prison to the amphitheatre in dream four is called "subterranean," it is not (it is et coepimus ire per aspera loca et flexuosa ); the Egyptian wrestler is described as black, he is not (he is Aegyptius foedus ); there is no suggestion that Felicity is married to Revocatus; nothing is said to indicate that Perpetua's mother is Christian; and Perpetua is referred to as God's whore, when the text uses the phrase "ut Dei delicate ," making "whore" an improbable semantic choice.Bremmer and Formisano open the volume with a solid and sensible introductory essay providing much of the basis historiography associated with the Passion . …