Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making Kristina Sessa Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making. By Elizabeth A. Castelli. [Gender, Theory, and Religion.] (New York: Columbia University Press. 2004. Pp. xx, 335. $25.50 paperback. ISBN 978-0-231-12987-9.) What is perhaps most gratifying about Elizabeth Castelli's rich study of martyrdom is the attention she pays not only to the parallels among constructions of the martyr in early Christian narratives but also to the ambivalences, to the places where Christians disagreed (sometimes even with themselves) over precisely what martyrdom meant and how the martyr should be remembered. Like many scholars who have embraced the cultural turn, Castelli explores this hoary topic not as a set of historical events or figures, but as a dynamic and sometimes paradoxical process of what she calls "memory making." Building [End Page 771] on theories of collective memory associated primarily with Maurice Halbwachs, Castelli argues that Christian authors between the second and fifth centuries contributed to the ethical and gendered constitution of early Christian culture through their representations of martyrs and martyrdoms. Martyrdom, she suggests, provided early Christians with a "useable past," which they (re)shaped into powerful discourses of authority. Through them, Christians not only contested hegemonic (Roman) structures and ideals but also asserted their own privileged status as members of the authoritative religion. Yet Castelli's study reaches beyond the chronological boundaries of late antiquity; she is fascinated by the enduring significance of martyrdom in contemporary society, although her fascination is tempered by a stated discomfort with the tendency of many modern Americans to (still) associate violence with truth. Discussing the depiction of Columbine victim Cassie Bernall as a martyr and American responses to September 11, 2001, Castelli suggests in the final chapter and epilogue that martyrdom and memory making remain ongoing cultural projects. Although Castelli explores some visual representations of martyrdom, the book primarily deals with literary constructions, with special attention given to ante-pacem texts. Following a lucid introductory chapter outlining collective memory as a theoretical model for the study of early Christian martyrdom, Castelli dedicates the next four chapters to rhetorical analyses of narratives, explaining how their authors variously appropriated past experiences of martyrdom for the purposes of defining Christian self-sacrifice, spectacle, and society. In chapter 2, for example, she shows how the writers of the pre-Decian martyr acta discursively exploited the fluid nature of the Roman legal system, while chapter 3 explores how three historical martyrs fashioned their own public personae as transformed athletes of Christ. Chapter 4 examines Christian responses to the arena and spectacle, with special attention given to gender (a major theme of the book). Chapter 5 looks at the commemorative reproduction of martyrdom through the lens of a single martyr:Thecla. Here Castelli explores the multiple "layers" of Thecla's life and martyrdom through a comparative discussion of the textual and visual representations of Thecla produced in the East between the second and seventh centuries. For scholars familiar with more positivist approaches to early Christian martyrdom, Castelli's study may seem jarring at first, since she expressly brackets questions regarding "what really happened." Although her rhetorical approach offers a fresh and innovative perspective on what is a seminal subject, she could perhaps have engaged more substantively with the historical communities that mediated these enduring discourses. Why, for example, was the fifth-century author of the Life of Thecla concerned to distinguish Thecla's miracles from magic? Why did many Egyptian artifacts bearing Thecla's image telescope her identity as a female martyr, eliding other facets of her history? Surely historical, geographical, and social location influenced the production of collective memories [End Page 772] of early Christian (and modern American) martyrdom. Such criticism, however, hardly negates this book's considerable achievements. Kristina Sessa The Ohio State University Copyright © 2008 The Catholic University of America Press