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Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr

Texts (review)

Virginia Burrus

Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 17, Number 4, Winter 2009,

pp. 684-685 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/earl.0.0286 

For additional information about this article

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v017/17.4.burrus.html

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684 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

L. Stephanie CobbDying to Be Men: Gender and Languagein Early Christian Martyr Texts 

Gender, Theory, and ReligionNew York: Columbia University Press, 2008Pp. xiii + 208.

The intersection o gender and martyrdom has drawn considerable scholarlyattention in the past teen years. One thinks, or example, o the signicantessays by Brent Shaw ( JECS 4 [1996]: 269–312) and Stephen Moore and JaniceCapel Anderson ( JBL 117 [1998]: 249–73) or the monographs by Judith Perkins(The Suering Sel , 1995), Daniel Boyarin (Dying or God , 1998), and ElizabethCastelli (Martyrdom and Memory, 2004). However, L. Stephanie Cobb has givenus something previously lacking—a monograph dedicated exclusively to explora-tion o the gendered infections o early Christian representations o martyrdom.In so doing, she has, moreover, produced a text admirable or both its lucidityand its conciseness, though each may come at some price.

Dying to Be Men opens with an invocation o the complex negotiations o identity that Cobb conronted as a college student in central Texas. What seemeda simple question—“are you a Christian?”—turned out to be merely the rststage in the elaborate yet ambiguous process o young adult identity ormation,in which distinctions between Christians oten mattered more than the dierencebetween Christians and non-Christians (1.). With this opening vignette, Cobbsignals the central importance o questions o  Christian identity or her book.Her argument is “that the martyr acts unctioned in the Christian communityas identity-orming texts and, more specically, that the authors o these textsappropriated Greco-Roman constructions o gender and sex to ormulate a seto acceptable Christian identities” (5). In making this argument, Cobb stronglyresists suggestions that martyrology subverts culturally dominant constructionso gender or refects a positive embrace o suering; rather, she emphasizes thedegree to which Christians shared with non-Christians the assumption that mas-culinity as traditionally dened was the most highly desired attribute and that

real men were impervious to suering. In so ar as the literature o martyrdomis engaged in showing that Christians exceed all others in manliness, it is, then,essentially agonistic and apologetic.

Cobb’s book is organized into our chapters. Chapter One lays groundworkor what ollows, rst by explicating the concepts rom social identity theoryon which Cobb is drawing, second by reviewing the current state o scholar-ship on understandings o sex and gender in late antiquity. The argument o the book is primarily conveyed by the second through ourth chapters. ChapterTwo investigates the use o gladiatorial, athletic, and martial imagery in martyracts, placing these tropes in social-historical context so as to demonstrate their

appropriateness or inscribing the gure o the martyr with distinctly masculineagency, power, and courage. Chapter Three demonstrates that the appeal to themartyr’s masculinity goes beyond those particular tropes, by attributing to themartyr virtues such as sel-control, endurance, rationality, and justice—even in

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BOOK REVIEWS 685

cases when the martyr is emale, enslaved, young, and/or elderly—and contrastingthe martyr avorably with both persecutors and apostates. Chapter Four considersthe particular case o emale martyrs, dealing with three texts, The Martyrdom

o Perpetua and Felicitas, The Letter o the Churches o Lyons and Vienne, andThe Martyrdom o Carpus, Papylus, and Agathonike. Cobb argues that thesetexts betray tendencies both to masculinize and to eminize emale martyrs andsuggests why that is so. On the one hand, when contrasted with non-Christians,emale martyrs are manly and can be compared to athletes and gladiators justas male martyrs can. On the other hand, they are also depicted as endowed withtypical emale virtues such as modesty and beauty, refecting their proper placewithin the Christian community.

Cobb’s privileging o masculinity with respect to ancient Christian identity isclearly very strong: “it appears that to be a Christian was to be a man” (20);“[m]asculinity . . . was not simply one among many equal aspects o Christianidentity; rather, in many o the martyr texts it is the very denition o Christian-ity” (91); “being a Christian meant being a man” (124). The near-complete col-lapsing o categories is acilitated by the interpretation o all culturally armedvirtues—e.g., courage, sel-control, strength, reason, justice—as not merelyattributes associated with masculinity (as these certainly are) but as signiferso masculinity. Rather than argue that Christian identity came to be structuredaround masculine ideals, Cobb seems to suggest that Christian identity wasounded on the etishization o manhood itsel, in other words. That is a boldand potentially interesting claim, but I am not sure that Cobb has ully supportedher case, either textually or by providing an explanatory context. (Nor am I surethat it would be possible to do so; at the very least, the thesis would need to benuanced.) She may also have missed an opportunity to strengthen and clariy herargument by her choice to orgo more extensive and textually specic engagementwith others who have written on relevant topics and sometimes taken dierentpositions. Not inrequently reerences to other scholars remain unspecied, bothwhen Cobb agrees with them (e.g., “other scholars have proposed that marty-rologies are identity-orming texts” [6]), and when she is dierentiating hersel rom them (e.g., “[t]he gendered language in the martyrologies . . . is ar more

complex than many scholarly analyses have allowed” [12]).This book might work well in the undergraduate or masters level classroom,given the attractiveness o the topic, the clarity and accessibility o the writing,and the compactness o the presentation. Certainly it will be a “must read” orscholars o ancient Christianity who are interested in gender and martyrdom,though some readers may nd themselves, like me, raising questions or simplywishing or a more theoretically sophisticated account.

Virginia Burrus, Drew University