__________________ CHAPTER SIX __________________

Perpetua and Her Diary of Dreams

I saw a bronze ladder, marvelously long, reaching as far as heaven, and narrow too: people could climb it only one at a time. And on the sides of the ladder every kind of iron implement was fixed: there were swords, lances, hooks, cutlasses, javelins, so that if anyone went up carelessly or not looking upwards, she would be torn and her flesh caught on the sharp iron. And beneath the ladder lurked a serpent of wondrous size, who laid ambushes for those mounting, making them terrified of the ascent.1

THE YOUNG woman who dreamed this dream was killed on March 7, 203 C.E., in an amphitheater in Carthage.² Her name, Vibia Perpetua, may indicate that she came from a family of senatorial rank, but there is no doubt that she was well-born and well-educated.³ The occasion of her death was “the surreal horror of the damnatio ad bestias,” the condemnation of criminals to the ravages of wild beasts that formed part of Roman festival games; this particular “game” of torture was part of the city’s celebration of the birthday of the emperor Septimius Severus’ younger son Geta.⁴

Some weeks prior to her death, Perpetua and four members of her household had been arrested by provincial authorities on the charge of being Christians. Although there was no imperial legislation designating the profession of Christianity as a criminal offense, local provincial governors could exercise punitive authority against any group deemed to be threatening to civic order.⁵ As such a group, Christians were susceptible to the charge of atheism because of their refusal, on the basis of their monotheism, to participate in ritual gestures of honor toward the gods and the emperor; by their refusal, they were seen as flouting the traditional religious and political structures that undergirded the welfare of the society.⁶ Because of its apparent blasphemy against cherished canons of “Romanity,” Christian obstinence presented a particularly troublesome situation to local governors, who, as Lane Fox has observed, were “sensitive to charges of treason or disloyalty, not least because they could be prosecuted in Rome for failing to take them seriously."⁷ Further, Christians in a large city like Carthage were vulnerable to the prejudice of the crowd against a group perceived to be subversive. Given the prominence, in Roman civic life, of games and festivals in which gladiatorial contests and the execution of criminals were featured, “Christians, as criminals, could be employed for public entertainment. Prejudice against an alien group could be activated by the desire to enjoy a spectacle.”⁸

Perpetua’s story conforms to this scenario of localized persecution of Christians. Her father, urging her to recant her faith, accused her of pride: “Don’t flaunt your insistence, or you’ll destroy us all!”⁹ At the judicial hearing, the governor Hilarianus asked Perpetua to have pity on her father by performing the standard act of ritual respect: “Offer the sacrifice for the Emperor’s welfare.” When she refused and persisted in identifying herself as Christian, Hilarianus sentenced her and her colleagues to a contest with the beasts.¹⁰ They thus furnished at least some of the human material needed to celebrate Geta Caesar’s birthday with a spectacle, indicated in part by the fact that Perpetua and her party were dressed in ritual costumes before they entered the amphitheater. Although they refused to undergo their ordeal in this dress, they were sent into the arena nonetheless and attacked by wild animals to the reported delight of the crowd, and were finally killed by soldiers who slashed their throats with swords.¹¹

At the time of her arrest, Perpetua was twenty-two years old, married, and nursing an infant. An aristocratic matrona, she was also a Christian catechumen, as were one of her brothers and two of the family’s slaves. Their religious instructor, a man named Saturus, had not been present when the arrest occurred but later turned himself in to the authorities and joined them in their confinement. At first the group was detained under house arrest, and it was during this time that the catechumens were baptized. Some time later, they were transferred to prison.¹² While in prison, Perpetua kept a diary, and Saturus wrote down a long dream. An anonymous author combined these two documents with an account of the gruesome scene in the amphitheater to form a passio, an account of martyrdom called the Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis.¹³ This passio was part of a literary genre in early Christianity in which martyrdom was conceptualized as an illustrious combat followed ineluctably by spiritual victory.¹⁴

In her diary, Perpetua recorded the agonizing conversations that she had with her father, her worries about her child, the judicial hearing, and her fright at the darkness and intense heat of the prison. Dominating the diary, however, is a series of four dreams. Like other martyrs both before and after her, Perpetua was a dreamer; persecution and oneiric revelation formed a pair as the imminence of death provoked premonitory dreams.¹⁵ Characterized by one interpreter as spontaneously symbolic rather than artificially allegorical, the dreams of martyrs can be said to have proceeded from their physical and psychological condition, assuaging their fears and giving fortitude in the face of expectations of torment.¹⁶ I will argue later in this chapter that Perpetua’s dreams were not merely mimetic to her experience as a martyr, as the foregoing perspective suggests. In the perspective that I will develop, the dreams were also, and more importantly, expressive of a creative view of herself and her role as a Christian woman. However, I am going to attend first to the contexts in which Perpetua’s dreams have typically been placed by contemporary scholars. Then I will turn to a discussion of the document of her dreams as one that expresses the self-awareness of a specifically female dreamer.

Perpetua saw her first dream in response to a suggestion of her brother’s: “‘My lady, my sister,’ he said, ‘you are now greatly blessed: so much so that you can ask for a vision [visionem], and you will be shown [ostendatur] if it is to be suffering unto death or a passing thing.’” “And I,” she continues, “who know I was in dialogue with God [ego quae me sciebam fabulari cum Domino], whose great benefits I had experienced, promised him faithfully, saying, Tomorrow I’ll tell you.’ And I asked for a vision, and this was shown to me.”¹⁷ Characterizing herself as one who could “talk with God” (fabulari cum Domino), Perpetua betrays her oneness with her culture, which understood dreams as a form of communication with heavenly figures. Perpetua is one of those whom her contemporary Carthaginian, Tertullian, might have included in his remark that most people get their knowledge of God from dreams.¹⁸ What Perpetua asks to see is first called a visio, a technical onirological term designating a prophetic dream; later her oneiric experience, here and elsewhere in the diary, is further specified by verbal forms of the noun ostensio, a term that carries a symbolic or figurative sense in late-antique texts. As Amat has observed, “for Perpetua, as for Apuleius, the word [ostensio] appears to designate a striking scene, close to prodigious, that manifests divine power completely”; it denotes a type of figurative revelation that explains divine secrets.¹⁹ The figurative quality of Perpetua’s vision is also conveyed implicitly by the word she uses to characterize her speaking. Fabulari, from fabulor, “to converse” or “chat,” not only suggests that dreaming is a linguistic event, a kind of discourse; it also suggests that the dream is a particular kind of discourse, one associated with imaginative story-telling, with a “fabled” or poeticized perspective.²⁰ Again like Tertullian, who thought of dreams as parables, Perpetua’s language implies an understanding of dreams as imaginal events.

From antiquity to the present, commentary on the dreams has generally located Perpetua’s oneiric imagination in the context of her roles as catechumen and martyr. As the following summaries of reflections on her diary will show, the dreams have been construed as texts that mirror theological ideas and cultural praxis; curiously, their function as oneiric experiences—that is, as expressions of transformations of self-identity and deepened self-consciousness—has been largely neglected. A notable exception to the dominant interpretive perspective is that of Peter Dronke, who cautions that “Perpetua did not intend to construct spiritual allegories for the benefit of later Christians.”²¹ The tendency of the scholarly tradition has been nonetheless to isolate the various images of Perpetua’s dreams and to amplify them in terms of theological materials exterior to the texts of the dreams themselves.

DREAM ONE

In response to her brother’s recognition of her visionary ability and his suggestion that she ask for a dream to discern her and her companions’ fate, Perpetua had the following dream:

I saw a bronze ladder, marvellously long, reaching as far as heaven, and narrow too: people could climb it only one at a time. And on the sides of the ladder every kind of iron implement was fixed: there were swords, lances, hooks, cutlasses, javelins, so that if anyone went up carelessly or not looking upwards, she would be torn and her flesh caught on the sharp iron. And beneath the ladder lurked a serpent of wondrous size, who laid ambushes for those mounting, making them terrified of the ascent. But Saturus climbed up first (he was the one who at a later stage gave himself up spontaneously on account of us—he had built up our courage and then, when we were arrested, had been away). And he reached the top of the ladder, and turned and said to me: “Perpetua, I’m waiting for you—but watch out that the serpent doesn’t bite you!” And I said: “He won’t hurt me, in Christ’s name!” And under that ladder, almost, it seemed, afraid of me, the serpent slowly thrust out its head—and, as if I were treading on the first rung, I trod on it, and I climbed. And I saw an immense garden, and in the middle of it a white-haired man sitting in shepherd’s garb, vast, milking sheep, with many thousands of people dressed in shining white standing all round. And he raised his head, looked at me, and said: “You are welcome, child.” And he called me, and gave me, it seemed, a mouthful of the cheese he was milking; and I accepted it in both my hands together, and ate it, and all those standing around said: “Amen.” And at the sound of that word I awoke, still chewing something indefinable and sweet. And at once I told my brother, and we understood that it would be mortal suffering; and we began to have no more hope in the world.²²

In a general sense, the commentaries on this dream have taken their clue from Perpetua’s remark that she and her brother realized that their future would be one of suffering (intelleximus passionem esse futuram). The dream has been construed as participant in a martyrological tradition of premonitory dreams, in which the dream serves to prepare the martyr psychologically to withstand the forthcoming ordeal.²³ Dreams like this one of Perpetua’s have been compared with the dreams of prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War; in both cases, visions of sumptuous, paradisal scenes serve to protect the dreamer from the horrors of the real world in which he or she is living.²⁴ From the perspective of Perpetua’s role as martyr, this dream has been said to have a double thematic: the image of the dangerous ladder, bedecked with weapons of war, prefigures the martyr’s present and future torture, while the image of the shepherd in the garden prefigures the martyr’s delivery to another world where peace and blessing prevail.²⁵

Ancient commentators also appropriated the dream as a witness to the phenomenon of martyrdom, although they placed it in a theological rather than a psychological context. Augustine, who preached three sermons on the festal days marking the commemoration of the martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, emphasized the dedication to the faith that the martyrs’ actions demonstrated and situated their witness theologically with a vocabulary dominated by the categories of virtue and triumph.²⁶ In comments on this particular dream, he noted its ascensional aspect: the ladder was “that by which the blessed Perpetua went to God.”²⁷

Augustine, of course, no longer had to worry about governmental persecution of Christians and so was free to use the testimony of Perpetua’s diary in a generalized way as an ideal model of Christian ethics and dedication. Earlier in the African Christian tradition, however, Tertullian was not free of such worries, and he focused his theological vision more narrowly on this dream as proof of the privilege enjoyed by martyrs after death. In his De anima, Tertullian included a long section on Christian views of hell, and it was in this context that he referred to the dream of Perpetua.²⁸ According to Tertullian, hell is a vast and deep space in the interior of the earth to which all souls, even those of Christians, descend at death, there to stay imprisoned until released at the second coming of the Christ. Arguing against Christians who asserted that Christ’s descent into hell had relieved them of that underworldly sojourn, Tertullian counters with a reference to Perpetua’s dream: if all Christians go immediately to paradise at death, how is it that Perpetua saw only Christian martyrs there?²⁹ Seizing upon the dream’s image of “many thousands of people standing around [the shepherd]” (circumstantes candidati milia multa), Tertullian apparently took candidati to refer to martyrs as “candidates” for paradisal beatitude.³⁰ Thus he appropriated the dream for a theological program that extended to martyrs alone the privilege of entering paradise immediately after death, a program that may well have been influenced by the high esteem accorded to martyrdom by Montanism, a prophetic movement whose tenets Tertullian eventually embraced wholeheartedly.³¹ “The only key to paradise is your own blood,” is Tertullian’s terse summary of his view of Perpetua’s dream.³²

While contemporary scholarship has noted the martyrological aspects of this dream as well as the other three, it has given more attention to the dreams as representative of Perpetua’s status as a catechumen, that is, as one newly converted to and instructed in Christian doctrine. Thus the images of the dreams have been scrutinized for evidence of both Perpetua’s recent immersion in Christian belief and writings and her “pagan” past (because the author of the Passio described her as liberaliter instituta, “well-educated,” she can be presumed to have been familiar with polytheist practice and belief). With regard to this first dream, commentators have focused on the images of the ladder and the shepherd.

Dronke’s cautionary note deserves to be sounded at the outset. Because “this is a painstakingly truthful record of authentic dreams . . . Perpetua’s account must be respected in every detail, not ‘smoothed’ into more conventional patterns, whether of a Christian or Gnostic or Jungian kind.” Although he does not doubt that the images in Perpetua’s dreams have associations with what she was experiencing in prison as well as with what she had read and been taught, he argues that equating the ladder of Perpetua’s dream with Jacob’s ladder, the shepherd with the Good Shepherd, and the cheese with the Eucharist constitutes a forced interpretation of the dream’s images that turns the individuality of Perpetua’s dream-images into “Christian commonplaces.”³³ Many commentators have in-deed treated the dream’s images as though they were transparent reflections of Christian belief and practice; implicitly, at least, the dream has been treated as though it were an allegory reflecting eschatological and theological doctrine (resurrection and the nature of God) and ecclesiastical ritual (the Eucharist). Also characteristic of the standard approach is a construal of the dream’s images as a pastiche of references to a variety of scriptural passages.

First, then, the ladder. An entire biblical tradition has been assembled in the scene of the ladder: Jacob’s dream of a ladder stretching from earth to heaven in Gen. 28 has been petitioned as a source, as has the appropriation of the image of Jacob’s ladder in the Gospel of John 1.51, where the Christ becomes the ladder upon which angels ascend and descend; furthermore, Perpetua’s confrontation with the serpent at the foot of the ladder has been seen as a reflection of Gen. 3:15, which envisions an enmity between woman and serpent, whose head will be bruised; and there is also Revelation 12, in which a woman newly with child escapes mortal danger posed by a dragon and is nourished in a wilderness.³⁴ Theologically, the image of Jacob’s ladder appears to have been prominent in African Christian catechesis, where it served as a judgmental warning that some would ascend and some would not.³⁵ Perpetua’s ascent of her ladder has been taken to signify not only in this eschatological context but also as a kind of protoasceticism in which spiritual ascent and detachment from earthly concerns form a pair.³⁶ Finally, the serpent at the ladder’s foot has been viewed theologically as a cipher for the devil, whom Perpetua, armed with the name of Christ, vanquishes.³⁷

The fact that the ladder bristles with weapons has been interpreted psychologically as a reflection of Perpetua’s fear of being lacerated, although it has also been seen as an oneiric reference to the actual catasta, or platform, upon which martyrs were tortured.³⁸ From the perspective of the phenomenology of religions, Dronke has suggested that the threatening ladder is an instance of a widespread tendency in many religious traditions to use the image of the ladder to evoke “the challenge of crossing into the beyond”; by climbing her ladder successfully, Perpetua achieves symbolically a kind of shamanic initiation into the celestial realm.³⁹ Amat has also noted the archetypal character of the image of the ladder of immortality and, while maintaining the primacy of the scriptural ladder of Jacob as source for Perpetua’s ladder, she suggests possible iconographic influence from the prominence of ladders in the cult of Mithras as well as from the presence of the motif of the ladder on stelae dedicated to the African god Saturnus.⁴⁰

Although the image of the ladder has generally been interpreted in the context of Perpetua’s newly found Christianity, this has not been the case with the shepherd. The setting in which the dream places the shepherd, the spacious garden, is said to draw on the convention of the locus amoenus or “pleasant spot” characteristic of Latin literature from Virgil and Ovid on.⁴¹ The shepherd who presides over this idyll has been connected with the shepherds in both the Shepherd of Hermas and the Hermetic Poimundres and has been thereby assimilated to a cultural typology that, cutting across lines of religious affliation, envisaged cosmic figures of enlightenment and redemption in a pastoral guise.⁴² Furthermore, Perpetua’s shepherd, described as a man “with the grey hair of the aged” (hominem canum), does not match early Christian iconography depicting the Christ as the Good Shepherd, an image familiar from the parable of the good shepherd in the Gospel of Luke as well as from Psalm 22. Catacomb iconography contemporary with Perpetua’s era showed the shepherd-Christ to be young and handsome, hardly a match for the figure who appears in the dream.⁴³

Despite this testimony, Amat has argued forcefully for the Christian provenance of Perpetua’s oneiric shepherd. She concedes that Perpetua’s oneiric imagination has modified iconographic representations but suggests that Perpetua’s image of a hoary shepherd is a reminiscence of images of God presented in Daniel 7:9 and Revelation 1.14; thus the shepherd, God as the “ancient of days,” and the Christ have been transposed in the dream.⁴⁴ She finds additional evidence for a Christianized reading of the image in the use of shepherd-imagery by Perpetua’s contemporary, the Carthaginian theologian Tertullian (in his De pudicitia), as well as in baptismal and catechetical use of Psalm 22, where the one newly cleansed of sin by baptism is a lamb led by the Lord as shepherd.⁴⁵

Interpretive decisions about the character of the shepherd have guided the way in which the shepherd’s activity has been interpreted. Milking sheep, he calls Perpetua to him and gives her “a mouthful of the cheese (caseo) he was milking.” Musurillo mistranslated caseum as “milk,” perhaps to make this scene more realistic, or, more likely, because he understood the scene as a reminiscence of baptism, as suggested by his reference to Tertullian’s De corona 3.3, where there is a remark about drinking milk after baptism.⁴⁶ Ancient interpreters also made the switch from cheese to milk.⁴⁷ Amat, who notes the strangeness of the mouthful of cheese, understands this substance as “lait caillé,” curdled milk, at once both food and drink. Placing the scene in both baptismal and eucharistic contexts, she assembles a wide variety of possible contexts for amplifying the shepherd’s gift: the biblical evocation of a “land of milk and honey,” used in early Christian prebaptismal rituals; references to milk as the drink of eternity in other African martyrologies; the transformative power attributed to cheese in magic; the use of curdled milk as a sign of creative power in Job 10:10 (“Didst thou not pour me out like milk, and curdle me like cheese?”) and, finally, the ritual structure of the scene, with its offer of symbolic nourishment accompanied by the formal “Amen!” of the crowd.⁴⁸

Dodds, on the other hand, found “cheese-eating in Heaven” to be “quite unorthodox” and dismissed reference to the sect known as the Artotyrites (“bread-and-cheesers”) as anachronistic.⁴⁹ From his perspective, the scene in which cheese is milked directly from the sheep derives its sense not from Christianity but from Freudian psychology: it shows “the sort of time-compression which is common in dreams” and is thus testimony to the autonomy of the oneiric imagination.⁵⁰ Among the non-Christian amplifications of this scene, the most ingenious is that offered by Dronke. He notes that, in other contexts, Perpetua’s manner of receiving the cheese, with her hands held together, might well be a ritual sacramental gesture; but, in her case, he imagines that the gesture is a practical one, “to prevent the runny curds from spilling.” As he explains, he envisions “a cheese rather like mozzarella, from which some liquid would ooze in the handling. What Perpetua receives is no Christian sacrament, nor any usual paradisal sustenance—nectar and ambrosia, milk and honey—but the food that, in many times and places, has symbolized the embryo and the process of birth.”⁵¹ Petitioning the “cheese analogy of conception” found in Aristotle as well as in Graeco-Roman medicine and folk belief, Dronke interprets the cheese as a symbol of the embryo and birth: “What Perpetua is given with her morsel of cheese is her destiny, her celestial birth.”⁵²

To conclude: although these diverse amplifications of the dream’s images appear to fragment the dream by focusing only on its various parts, most interpreters have nonetheless viewed the whole dream as a two-part panorama of Perpetua’s future. As a typical, if unusually detailed, member of the prophetic class of ancient onirology, this first dream of Perpetua’s provides a forecast of her suffering and its consoling reward.

DREAMS TWO AND THREE

Because these two dreams form a sequence, with the second of the two providing a resolution of the agonized problematic of the first, they will be discussed together. The quotation begins with Perpetua’s own explanation of the context in which the first of these dreams occurred:

A few days later, while we were all praying, suddenly in the middle of my prayer I let slip a word: Dinocrates. And I was amazed, for he had never entered my thoughts except just then. And I grieved, remembering his plight. Then at once I realized that I was entitled to ask for a vision about him,⁵³ and that I ought to; and I began to pray for him a lot, and plaintively, to God. That very night, this is what I was shown: I saw Dinocrates coming out of a dark place, where there were many people. He was very hot and thirsty, his clothes dirty and his looks pallid—he still had on his face the same wound as when he died. When alive he had been my brother, who at the age of seven died wretchedly, of a cancer of the face, in such a way that everyone saw his death with revulsion. So I prayed for him, and between him and me there was a great gap, such that we could not come near each other. Beside Dinocrates was a pool full of water, with a rim that was higher than he. And Dinocrates stretched up as if to drink. I was full of sorrow that, even though the pool had water, the rim was so high that he could not drink. And I awoke, and realized that my brother was struggling. Yet I was confident that I could help him in his struggle, and I prayed for him every day, till we moved to the military prison—for we were destined to fight in the garrison-games: they were on Emperor Geta’s birthday. Day and night I prayed for Dinocrates, groaning and weeping that my prayer be granted.

On a day when we remained in fetters, I was shown this: I saw the place I’d seen before, and there was Dinocrates, clean, well-dressed, refreshed; and where the wound had been I saw a scar; and the pool I’d seen previously had its rim lowered: it was down to the boy’s navel. And he was drinking from the pool incessantly. Above the rim was a golden bowl full of water. Dinocrates came near it and began to drink from that, and the bowl never ran dry. And when he had drunk his fill, he began to play with the water, as children do, full of happiness. And I awoke: I realized then that he’d been freed from pain.⁵⁴

Commentary on this dream has centered on determining the status of the dark place in which the hot and thirsty Dinocrates first appears and, in consequence, on deciding which structures of religious praxis best explain Perpetua’s intercessory power. Those who see the scene in terms of Perpetua’s Christian beliefs place it in the context of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31, which envisages an uncrossable abyss between the abode of the blessed (“Abraham’s bosom”) and Hades (presented as a hot place with no water). Tertullian’s use of the same parable to reinforce his belief that Hades will not be opened until the second coming of the Christ is petitioned as proof of the authentically Christian quality of the oneiric construct of the first of these two dreams, in which Perpetua and her brother are separated by a great gap (although Tertullian’s dismissal of appearances of the dead as demonic fictions seems to me to disqualify his thought as a useful theological context).⁵⁵ The second of the two dreams has been constructed as Christian on the basis of Perpetua’s apparent reference, when she remarks that Dinocrates now appears “refreshed” to early Christian belief in an otherworldly refrigerium or locus refrigerii, a “cooling” or “refreshing” place.⁵⁶ Further, the pool from which Dinocrates is at first banned, but in which he later plays, may recall the scriptural image of the healing of the paralytic by the side of the pool at Bethsaida.⁵⁷

There has been some question about whether the dark place in which the suffering Dinocrates is first located represents a prototype of later, more developed ideas about purgatory, a place for the chastisement of Christians who have sinned after baptism.⁵⁸ Augustine assimilated the plight of Dinocrates to his theological view that unbaptized children, even babies, were damned. According to his interpretation of these two dreams, Dinocrates must have been baptized (even though evidence from the diary suggests that most members of Perpetua’s family were not Christian), or else Perpetua could not have interceded for him successfully; the child was in an otherworldly predicament in the first place because he had sinned after baptism— the wound on his face signifying, so Augustine said, the wound on his soul.⁵⁹ Most modern commentators, however, have followed Dölger in interpreting these two dreams as instances of the “pagan” substrate of the newly converted Perpetua’s imagination.⁶⁰ According to this view, the first dream conforms to the view that the dead are thirsty, and that they appear, as apparitions, with the same physical characteristics they had when they died.⁶¹ The second dream conforms to the belief in the efficacy of intercessory prayers for those who have died prematurely.⁶²

These two dreams have also attracted psychological readings. Both Dodds and Dronke follow Von Franz’s suggestion that Dinocrates “embodies a spiritual content in Perpetua herself so that his suffering, as portrayed in the dream, is in some way identical with her painful condition.” Thus “this little brother who died in early childhood, together with all the memories which are linked with him, undoubtedly represents a piece of her own past, something child-like, a spirit in herself as yet unbaptised for whom the redeeming truth, symbolized by the water, is literally ‘too high.’” The refreshed Dinocrates, in consequence, represents Perpetua’s coming to terms with inner conflict that had threatened her resolve.⁶³ With a lighter psychological touch, Dronke has perceptively observed that this pair of dreams occurs immediately after Perpetua recorded, in her diary, her relief at her discovery that her baby no longer needed her milk, thus enabling her to leave him in her family’s care without worry.⁶⁴ After the dreams, Dronke remarks, “Perpetua feels for the suffering not of the living but of the dead. She finds she can make her brother well again by praying. Symbolically, it suggests that she can give spiritual help to all her family, and it is this that finally relieves her earthly anxieties over them.”⁶⁵

DREAM FOUR

This dream, the longest and most elaborate of the four, is the final entry in Perpetua’s diary.

The day before our fight, this is what I saw in vision: Pomponius the deacon was coming to the prison gate and knocking urgently. And I went out to him and opened for him. He was wearing a loose, gleaming white tunic, and damasked sandals, and he said: “Perpetua, we are waiting for you: come!” He took my hand and we began to go over rough, winding ways. We had hardly reached the amphitheatre, breathless, when he took me into the middle of the arena, and said: “Don’t be afraid; here I am, beside you, sharing your toil.” And he vanished. And I saw the immense, astonished crowd. And as I knew I had been condemned to the wild beasts, I was amazed they did not send them out at me. Out against me came an Egyptian, foul of aspect, with his seconds: he was to fight with me. And some handsome young men came up beside me: my own seconds and supporters. And I was stripped naked, and became a man. And my supporters began to rub me with oil, as they do for a wrestling match; and on the other side I saw the Egyptian rolling himself in the dust. And a man of amazing size came out—he towered even over the vault of the amphitheatre. He was wearing the purple, loosely, with two stripes crossing his chest, and patterned sandals made of gold and silver, carrying a baton like a fencing-master and a green bough laden with golden apples. He asked for silence, and said: “This Egyptian, if he defeats her, will kill her with his sword; she, if she defeats him, will receive this bough.” And he drew back.

And we joined combat, and fists began to fly. He tried to grab my feet, but I struck him in the face with my heels. And I felt airborne, and began to strike him as if I were not touching ground. But when I saw there was a lull, I locked my hands, clenching my fingers together, and so caught hold of his head; and he fell on his face, and I trod upon his head. The populace began to shout, and my supporters to sing jubilantly. And I went to the fencing-master and received the bough. He kissed me and said: “Daughter, peace be with you!” And triumphantly I began to walk towards the Gate of the Living. And I awoke. And I knew I should have to fight not against wild beasts but against the Fiend; but I knew the victory would be mine.

This is what I have done till the day before the contest; if anyone wants to write of its outcome, let them do so.⁶⁶

This dream has been read as a structural homologue to the first dream in that it is both premonitory of suffering and predictive of consolation and triumph.⁶⁷ As the fourth in a sequence of dreams, it is climactic: as the actual confrontation drew nearer, the images of Perpetua’s dreams were intensified, both in terms of imaginal forms of terror—from cold-blooded snake to ill child to full-grown Egyptian warrior—and in terms of imaginal forms of spiritual reward—from heavenly cheese to ever-flowing water to golden apples.⁶⁸ Again as with the first dream, so also here Perpetua herself offers her own interpretive key to the dream’s significance. The wild beasts whose onslaught she will suffer are the material signs of a spiritual struggle with the devil (et intellexi me non ad bestias, sed contra diabolum esse pugnaturam), whom she will overcome. The devil himself appears, in his turn, to be a sign both for the familial and cultural opponents of Perpetua’s embrace of Christianity because, earlier in the diary, Perpetua recounts her father’s anger at hearing the word Christian as well as his attempts to shake her resolution. When she remains firm, she reports, “He departed, defeated along with his devilish arguments” (profectus est victus cum argumentis diaboli).⁶⁹ Father, beast, and Egyptian are thus related metonymically as signs of the forces that “bedevil” Perpetua and that succumb to her religious resolve.⁷⁰

In commentaries on this dream, the indebtedness of the oneiric imagination to elements of the “pagan” culture in which Perpetua was raised and educated has been emphasized. Dodds, arguing that the dream-cycle is authentic and not the product of Christian propaganda, notes that the judge of the combat in the arena is not pictured as Christ but as a trainer of gladiators and that the reward is not the expected martyr’s crown but the mythic golden apples of the Hesperides. “This pagan imagery,” he argues, “is entirely natural in the dreams of a quite recent convert.”⁷¹ Dronke also notes the dream’s pagan substrate but underscores the dreamlike qualities of the text as dream—its “sense of phantasmagoria” and its surreal details of flying and gender-transformation.⁷²

The most thoroughgoing reading of the dream in terms of its social context is that offered by Louis Robert. In his discussion, there is nothing surreal about the dream, which he reads as a straightforward reflection, in exacting detail, of the ecumenical games held in Carthage in honor of the Pythian Apollo, the Pythia Carthaginis.⁷³ Arguing on the basis of the Greek rather than the Latin text of the diary, he shows that the Latin word used to describe the Judge (lanista = “fencing master” or “trainer of gladiators”) has misled interpreters to view the scene of combat as a gladiatorial contest. Instead, what Perpetua’s dream envisages is a pancration, a contest combining boxing and wrestling. The oneiric images of Perpetua’s nudity, the oiling of her skin, and her sex-change are all seen as naturalistic details necessary to participation in this particular form of agōn. The dress of the judge, as well as his baton and branch of apples, are all authentic features as attested particularly by bas-reliefs and coins; by calling the agonothete a lanista, the Latin text has transposed onto the figure of the judge another official, one who supplied gladiators for games and also trained them.⁷⁴

Following Robert, Amat also recognizes the dream’s indebtedness to the iconography of the amphitheater.⁷⁵ However, she finds the significance of the dream not in its mirroring of a cultural phenomenon but rather in its representation of the martyr as athlete of Christ, particularly because this theme is present in other martyrological literature as well as in the letters of Paul. The theme of the martyr-athlete is the ground upon which Amat constructs an interpretation of the dream’s images in Christian terms. Imaginally linked by the loose tunics that they wear, Pomponius the deacon and the supernaturally large judge are both symbols of Christ, Pomponius because his knocking at the prison gate “prefigures the eschatological ‘passage’ to Christ,” the judge because the bands of purple symbolize the passion and are also found in representations of divine apparitions in catacomb paintings.⁷⁶ The judge’s baton is reminiscent of the rod used by God to punish transgressions in Ps. 89.32 and foreshadows Perpetua’s death by sword.⁷⁷ Perpetua’s oneiric picture of golden apples, while originally part of the mythic cycle of Heracles’ labors, is an example of the way in which her imagination has been guided by images in Christian literature and art: the tree of temptation in Genesis that becomes the tree of life in paradise regained, the tree of life with fiery fruits in apocryphyal apocalypses, and pictorial uses of apples to symbolize the orchard of paradise are all suggested as possible influences on the dream’s image.⁷⁸ Similarly, the oil rubbed on the oneiric Perpetua’s body is a memory of prebaptismal unction, and the image of the devil-as-Egyptian recalls the biblical condemnation of Egypt in the book of Exodus.⁷⁹

Although Dronke for the most part resists this kind of allegorical translation of the dream’s images, he contributes to a reading of the dream as a product of Perpetua’s Christian training by offering a unique exegesis of the opening of the dream as a reminiscence of the fifth chapter of the biblical Song of Songs. Perpetua’s dreaming has been influenced by early Christian mystical readings of the scenario of the Song’s bride awakened, called, abandoned by her lover-brother, and tormented as “a moment of divine visitation, both summoning and harshly testing the soul that loves God.”⁸⁰

Despite the debates over the sociocultural or religious derivation of the individual elements of this dream, commentators agree that the outstanding theme of the dream is the martyr’s courageous resolve to remain faithful to her new religious commitment. Facing physical death, Perpetua dreamed of spiritual life.

THE foregoing interpretations of Perpetua’s dreams exemplify the way in which the interpreter’s choice of perspective and context will to a large extent determine the kind and range of readings that a given text can yield. When the dreams are interpreted from the perspective of martyrdom, the texts yield a reading of Perpetua’s psychological condition as well as a view of her historical situation as one at the nexus of a religio-political conflict. On the other hand, when the dreams are interpreted from the perspective of Christian catechetical training, the texts yield a reading of Perpetua’s religious consciousness either as one immersed in Christian scripture and cultic practice, or as one that reflects the persistence of “pagan” literary and religious forms in the thought-patterns of the new convert.

In their various ways, these interpretive stances read Perpetua’s dreams as mimetic to the culture in which they occurred; this is part of their attempt to reproduce the text’s (and Perpetua’s) meaning. However, as John Winkler has pointed out, such attempts to reproduce an author’s meaning are involved in an important methodological issue: “Should we concede that much authority to the writers we read? If our critical faculties are placed solely in the service of recovering and reanimating an author’s meaning, then we have already committed ourselves to the premises and protocols of the past”—a past whose structures of cultural violence, such as the metanarrative of patriarchy that I will explore in the following pages, continue to exert a pernicious influence in the present.⁸¹ Winkler recommends the strategy of “reading against the grain” of conventional interpretive positions as a means to engage such protocols and also as “an occasion to struggle against the tacit, conventional, and violent embrace in which we are held by the past.”⁸²

The reading of Perpetua’s dreams that I will offer is such a “readingagainst the grain” which views the dreams as expressions of a Christian woman, as differentiated from conventional readings of them as expressions of a Christian woman. In so doing, I do not mean to displace or deny other readings but rather to add to the range of interpretive possibilities that these texts present. Using, as context, a perspective that dreams are vehicles for the forging of new understandings of self-identity, I will read Perpetua’s dream-diary as both reflective of and resistant to the sexual politics of her community, a community in which there was a power struggle that was engendered in male and female terms. When read as a critique of culture rather than only as a mirror of it, Perpetua’s diary offers a powerful articulation of a woman’s struggle to establish her own voice in the context of patriarchal devaluations of female witness.

In what follows, the term patriarchy will be used to designate a metanarrative. A metanarrative is a system of thought, or a structure of thinking, that suppresses difference in order to legitimate its own vision of reality; because it makes totalizing claims to universal validity, a metanarrative suppresses or devalues discourses that are “other,” that are different. As a metanarrative, patriarchy supports the dominance of the paternal metaphor in the establishment of meaning. I am going to argue that Perpetua’s diary, written in such a patriarchal context, can be read as an expression of difference, a voice of otherness that questions the dominance of maleness in the construction of meaning. In order to enable this voice of difference to speak from the diary, I will use interpretive strategies taken from French feminist writers. My own strategy in this endeavor is not to do violence to the historical specificity of an ancient text by replacing, and so erasing, its categories with those of a contemporary discourse, but rather to show another integrity in the text that is also consonant with contemporary discourse. The writers whose literary and feminist theory provide the interpretive position of the discussion that follows are Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, both of whom are in the vanguard of an ongoing critique of monological values in Western culture.

In an essay entitled “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” Kristeva presents and develops the idea of “carnivalesque discourse” introduced by the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin.⁸³ In contrast to linguistic practices that are univocal and prohibitive of polysemy, carnivalesque discourse is discourse that achieves a poetic logic: “By adopting a dream logic, it transgresses rules of the linguistic code and social morality as well.”⁸⁴ In the discourse of the carnival, words are poetic, “polyvalent and multidetermined,” and they conform to a “logic exceeding that of codified discourse,” coming to expression fully only in the margins of culture.⁸⁵

Carnivalesque language is thus language that constitutes an “other” side of the discourse that is dogmatic, determined by what Kristeva calls Law and Definition. In the carnival, authority is challenged because words are freed from presupposed values; carnivalesque discourse is rebellious and subversive insofar as it allows the articulation of marginal, misunderstood, or repressed perspectives to emerge.⁸⁶ Transformation of values in language is the experience of the carnival.

The exuberance suggested by the metaphor of the carnival has, however, its sinister aspect. As Kristeva says, “Pathological states of the soul, such as madness, split personalities, daydreams, dreams, and death, become part of the narrative.”⁸⁷ Such pathological elements—dreams, split personalities, death—are pertinent to carnivalesque discourse because “they destroy man’s epic and tragic unity as well as his belief in identity and causality; they indicate that he has lost his totality and no longer coincides with himself.”⁸⁸ In the carnival, one dreams subversive, irreverent dreams and in the process sees his or her identity split, dead, no longer “total.” Further, in the carnival a transformation of identity is taking place, and that transformation is accomplished through the polysemantic discourse of a perspective that has been repressed or marginalized by univocal structures of discourse usually attributed to Law, God, and Father—that is, to the metanarratives of patriarchy.

It has been noted by interpreters of Perpetua’s diary that, in the course of discussions with her father and the judge at her trial, Perpetua gives up her name. “Christiana sum,” she says: “I am a Christian/ I am Christiana.”⁸⁹ She thus loses—even denies—the identity given her by the dominant culture.⁹⁰ Interestingly, in the Acta minora, a shorter, somewhat later version of Perpetua’s story, the “carnivalesque” quality of Perpetua’s change of name is reinforced by the following statement attributed to her. In reply to the judge’s question whether she is a Christian, she says, “I am a Christian, and I follow the authority of my name, that I may be perpetual” (Christiana sum, et nominis mei sequor auctoritatem, ut sim perpetua).⁹¹ Her embrace of the Christian “non-name,” which is itself a “new” name, at the same time reveals another dimension of her “old” name.⁹²

Curiously, to follow the authority of the name is to flout authority. Perpetua’s new name sets her free from paternal and social definition. In Kristeva’s terms, this name is a word from the carnival, because in the carnival words are freed from presupposed values and so are subversive of the master narratives of established authority. Luce Irigaray might agree, but she would describe this scene differently, arguing not from literary theory but rather from a feminist perspective. The purpose for bringing these two theorists, Kristeva and Irigaray, together is to show that there is a feminist dimension of carnivalesque discourse—or better, to suggest the ways in which the language of the carnival is particularly pertinent to female discourse and, more basically, to female presence in language.

In her book This Sex Which Is Not One, Irigaray argues that, because of male dominance in language and culture, the female has been reduced to a kind of “shadow” of the male. She quotes the psychiatrist-philosopher Jacques Lacan to this effect: “There is no woman who is not excluded by the nature of things, which is the nature of words. . . . ”’⁹³ This means that “the feminine occurs only within models and laws devised by male subjects.”⁹⁴ Women, then, are “objects” deprived of an authoritative discourse of their own.

Irigaray does not resolve the problem of feminine silence at the hands of masculine definition, but she does provide gestures toward possibilities of the expression of the feminine in language; these are the points at which her theory makes contact with Kristeva’s notion of the carnivalesque. Irigaray writes that if there were to be such a thing as “feminine syntax” in language—that is, an “order” of discourse not organized by conceptual, representational thinking—“there would no longer be either subject or object, ‘oneness’ would no longer be privileged, there would no longer be proper meanings, proper names, ‘proper’ attributes. . . . It would preclude any distinction of identities, any establishment of ownership, thus any form of appropriation.”⁹⁵ Surely this is what Kristeva describes as carnivalesque discourse, which precisely splits identity and subverts totality. As with Perpetua, “proper” names break apart and reveal dimensions not authorized by Father or Law. Indeed, when Perpetua declares Christiana sum, her father rushes at her as though to pluck out her eyes, and the judge condemns her to the beasts.⁹⁶ Her discourse, however, declares that she will not be owned by masculine definitions of what it means to be “Perpetua.”

For Irigaray, the issue in the “issue” of a feminine presence in discourse is not the elaboration of a “new theory of which woman would be the subject or the object, but of jamming the theoretical machinery itself, of suspending its pretension to the production of a truth and of a meaning that are excessively univocal.”⁹⁷ The idea of “jamming” discursive practices that depend upon such distinctions between subject and object will be pertinent to my analysis of Perpetua’s oneiric discourse as one in which subject and object, author and text, are confabulated as “author” becomes “character” in her own narrative, which, as dream, is not univocal but polyvalent.⁹⁸

If there were to be such a thing as “her language,” what would it be? For Irigaray, it would be “somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason, inaudible for whoever listens to [it] with ready-made grids, with a fully elaborated code in hand.”⁹⁹ Further, “one would have to listen with another ear, as if hearing an ‘other meaning,’ always in the process of weaving itself, of embracing itself with words. . . . ”¹⁰⁰ The “other ear” hears a whisper of an “other” that lies waiting within fixed, congealed perspectives: the laughter of the carnival, but also its discourse of dream and death.

According to Irigaray, women are outside the system. On the one hand, this means that “woman does not have access to language, except through recourse to ‘masculine’ systems of representation which disappropriate her from her relation to herself. . . . ”¹⁰¹ On the other hand, being outside the system gives her critical leverage on it—even if her only means of expressing something different from the system is the dream-speech of the carnival.

Perpetua wrote her diary in a time and place in which the masters of discourse were men and maleness was the determinant of meaning. In order to understand how feminist theory can be useful in eliciting a reading of Perpetua’s diary that allows her voice to be heard as a woman’s voice, some attention to the patriarchal narratives that dominated the sexual politics of her social and religious world is necessary.

Foremost among the representatives of the patriarchal perspective in Perpetua’s own community in Carthage was Tertullian, arguably the most prominent Latin Christian theologian of his day. In his writings, the patriarchal contours of the context in which Perpetua professed her faith can be clearly discerned. Tertullian’s most basic dictum on woman is his characterization of her nature in theological terms. The truth of woman’s condition, he says, should be enacted bodily: she must avoid elegant dress and wear rags, thus presenting herself as a mourning and repentant Eve.¹⁰² Tertullian thought that woman’s outer appearance should match her inner nature, indelibly tainted by “the disgrace of the first transgression and the odium of the ruin of humankind.”¹⁰³ Everywoman is Eve, and she lives under the judgment of God. In a famous piece of rhetoric, Tertullian says: “You are the devil’s gateway; you are she who unsealed that tree; you are the first deserter of divine law; you are the one who persuaded him whom the devil was not able to bribe; you easily destroyed the image of God, the man Adam.”¹⁰⁴ This is a blunt articulation of the univocal discourse of representation in which a masculine “subject” judges a feminine “object,” depriving her of access, except through male discourse, to relations with God, herself, and (as we shall see) to speech as well. In Irigaray’s terms, Tertullian’s construction of woman exemplifies the sexual logic that privileges the paternal metanarrative.¹⁰⁵

Theologically, woman is defined sexually, and her sexuality is negative; it is something to be repressed, subjected to submission, plainness, and lack of show. These qualities are the proper character of women’s dress that most appropriately signify her inner condition.¹⁰⁶ Tertullian presents his definition of woman as though it had the character of theological law. How could a woman like Perpetua come to terms with such a definition? How could a female martyr acknowledge the value of a Law that stigmatized her as “the devil’s gateway”?

There is a striking passage in Perpetua’s diary that might speak to these questions. Perpetua reported that, following her baptism while under arrest, “the spirit enjoined me not to seek from that water any favor except physical endurance” (sufferentiam carnis).¹⁰⁷ Her inspiration pertained to endurance, perseverance, suffering of the flesh. The meaning of such a statement in the context of her captivity seems clear: she wanted the strength to live in order to testify. In the context that I propose, however, her statement speaks on another plane of signification altogether. What might suffering the flesh connote for a woman whose “flesh” had been so degraded theologically? What might physical endurance mean in a condition of captivity to a discourse for which a female witness must surely have been a paradox, if not a contradiction in terms? One of the most compelling of Irigaray’s arguments revolves around what she calls “sexual indifference”: if the female exists only insofar as she is defined by the male, then there is actually only one sex.¹⁰⁸ This phenomenon showed itself, for example, in Augustine’s sermons, where the “virile” quality of Perpetua’s acts as martyr is constantly underscored. This is an interpretive move that effectively reduces, if it does not deny altogether, the possibility of conceptualizing spiritual courage as female. Indeed, Augustine went so far as to say that Perpetua’s virtuous mentality had made her “sexuality according to the flesh” “invisible” and that, in her oneiric fight in the arena, the devil had felt himself in the presence of a woman who acted like a man.¹⁰⁹ Given this kind of assimilation of the female to the male, Perpetua’s petition for “endurance of the flesh” can be read as a petition for, and a spirited affirmation of, the perseverance of her very body—her female being—as a fitting testament to a system that would not, theologically, allow such a testament.

In Kristeva’s terms, Perpetua’s statement is a “poetic word,” because it “adheres to a logic exceeding that of codified discourse,” the theological discourse of her own church.¹¹⁰ Perhaps such multi-determined words were the only kind available to her, given Tertullian’s pronouncement on female speech. Commenting on various practices of heretics, Tertullian explodes:

These heretical women—what impudence! They dare to teach, to engage in argument, to perform exorcisms, to promise healings, and perhaps even to baptize.¹¹¹

Elsewhere, Tertullian shows that it is not only heretical women who, by virtue of speaking, are immodest. In fact, the real heresy is that women should speak at all. In one treatise, he attacked a woman who taught and led one of the North African congregations, calling her a “viper,” and in another he petitioned “the precepts of ecclesiastical discipline concerning women”:

It is not permissible for a woman to speak in church, nor is it permitted for her to teach, to baptize, or to offer [the Eucharist], nor can she claim a share for herself in any masculine office, not to speak of any priestly duty.¹¹²

If, as Tertullian makes so clear, woman was cut off from the discourse as well as the sacramental offices of the institution, what role did she play in the church? For she did have a role to play. In the following quotation, it is evident once again that sexual logic dominated Tertullian’s description of (apparently permissible) female Christian activities. This passage comes from a lengthy letter to his wife, in which Tertullian raises the specter of the scenario that might occur should a Christian woman marry a pagan man.

Who would allow his wife, for the sake of visiting the brethren, to go around from street to street to other men’s meager huts? Who will willingly tolerate her being snatched from his side by nocturnal assemblies? Who will bear without anxiety [her attendance] all night long at the Paschal rites? Who will, without his own suspicion, send her forth to attend the Lord’s Supper, which they defame? Who will suffer her to creep into prison for the purpose of kissing a martyr’s fetters or, indeed, to exchange the kiss with some one of the brothers?¹¹³

As outlined here by Tertullian, women’s duties as Christians are erotic— or at least potentially so from the male perspective. Deprived of speech, woman is the one who creeps into jail to kiss the chains of martyrs, and who can tell what might transpire during the ritual of the kiss of peace? Thus, even when she is serving the discourse of the Law, woman is erotically suspect, tainted by her sex.¹¹⁴

As a context for understanding Perpetua’s historical situation, Tertullian’s unremittingly patriarchal construction of woman in theological terms may not tell the whole story. There is a possibility that Perpetua had been a participant in a revivalist movement within Christianity, the “New Prophecy” of Montanus, that held out tantalizingly “liberationist” promise for women. Montanism, as the movement was later called after the name of its founder, originated in Phrygia in Asia Minor in the late 150s or early 160s, when Montanus began to fall into ecstatic trances, claiming that his prophetic utterance was the voice of the Holy Spirit speaking through him.¹¹⁵ He was joined by two female prophets, Priscilla and Maximilia. Central to the message of this movement was the conviction that the Spirit could still speak directly to the Christian community through inspired individuals, whether male or female. Envisaging the imminent end of the world and the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem, the New Prophecy urged its followers to testify publicly on behalf of their faith, thus appearing to encourage martyrdom.¹¹⁶

This movement was notable for the leadership roles that it accorded to women, as its opponents did not fail to perceive.¹¹⁷ According to the fourth-century heresiologist Epiphanius, Montanists viewed Eve as the source of knowledge and also admired the prophetic sister of Moses.¹¹⁸ In this movement, even divine sources of revelation could be feminized, as the following oracle attributed to Priscilla suggests: “Appearing as a woman clothed in a shining robe, Christ came to me [in sleep]; he put wisdom into me and revealed to me that this place is sacred and that here Jerusalem will come down from heaven.”¹¹⁹ Most important to a view of the New Prophecy as a movement that offered expanded opportunities to women was its apparent claim that confessor-martyrs, once released from prison, had ministerial status, at least in Asia Minor. Central to this claim was the view that martyrs could exercise “the priestly power of the keys,” that is, the power to forgive sinners and so restore them to the faith. As Frederick Klawiter has explained:

By exercising this power to forgive, the martyr was able to restore a lapsed person back into communion with Christ and his church. Since the power of the keys had been traditionally in the hands of the bishop-presbyter, anyone who exercised such power was thereby demonstrating a ministerial power. Strict logic would lead one to conclude than an imprisoned confessor could have the status of a minister.¹²⁰

Thus both in its individualistic view of prophecy and in its attribution of priestly power to martyrs, Montanism posed a political threat to the stable hierarchy of the church as an institution and it challenged its construction of ecclesiastical authority as male.¹²¹

Despite the condemnation of Montanus and his followers by Asian bishops and eventually by the bishop of Rome as well, the New Prophecy spread westward rapidly, taking hold especially in Carthage.¹²² The two main witnesses to the strength of Montanism in the Cathaginian church are Tertullian, who became a full-fledged adherent of the movement, and the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas.¹²³ The anonymous author who wrote this passio incorporated the writings of Perpetua and Satyrus in a frame that is clearly Montanist in perspective, offering the visions of these two martyrs as proof that the Holy Spirit continues to speak and emphasizing the “grace” of martyrdom.¹²⁴ A Montanist-inspired respect for women may be indicated by the title of the work, which names the female martyrs even though the stories of their male companions are also part of the document, as well as by the lengthier narrative attention given to describing the deaths of the two women.¹²⁵

Was Perpetua herself an adherent of the New Prophecy, and if so, was she attracted to this movement within Christianity because of its empowerment of women? The evidence is suggestive. Her firm espousal of martyrdom as well as her oneiric visionary abilities are consonant with the beliefs and practices of the New Prophecy.¹²⁶ Furthermore, her understanding of her dream of her brother Dinocrates as evidence of her ability to release him from punishment may stem from the role played by “the power of the keys” in the New Prophecy’s view of the status of martyrs.¹²⁷ Also, the author of the passio twice calls attention to Perpetua’s role as leader of the group of martyrs in prison.¹²⁸

While this evidence is suggestive, it is not definitive. If Perpetua was a Montanist, this dimension of her profession of Christianity was ignored or suppressed by later interpreters like Augustine, who used her witness as exemplary of orthodox Christian courage and faith and, as we have seen, understood her fortitude as male.¹²⁹ Also, even the author of the passio, who appears to highlight the importance of the female martyrs, has framed Perpetua’s diary in a theological context that directs attention away from the specificity of her testimony as a woman by using it to polemicize on behalf of the New Prophecy’s spiritualist revivalism. There are even paternalistic touches in this author’s commentary: he calls Perpetua “a wife of Christ,” and his description of Perpetua in the arena, tidying her hair and covering her thighs after having been tossed by a heifer, coheres more with Tertullian’s view of female modesty than it does with the Perpetua of the diary.¹³⁰ As Dronke remarks, such a woman “will hardly have gone to her death in a fit of prudery.”¹³¹ Finally, Tertullian’s view of women, particularly his refusal to accord them any kind of institutional authority, shows that, at least in Carthage, being Montanist did not necessarily entail an acceptance of expanded roles for women in the church. Thus while Perpetua may have perceived the liberationist elements that the New Prophecy held out for women, the institution to which she belonged did not choose to incorporate those elements into its theology or its praxis.¹³²

As opposed to these various strategies that deflect a reading of Perpetua’s diary as a woman’s testimony, I suggest that, when it is so read, it expresses the plight of a woman caught in the cross-currents of a theological debate in which sexual politics played a prominent role. Although the evidence is not conclusive, it is certainly strong enough to indicate that there was a debate about the status of women’s leadership and authority in the Carthaginian church. It appears that in Perpetua’s religious context femaleness was affirmed by the views and practices of a revivalist movement, but finally subjected to the dictates of the patriarchal metanarrative of the larger institution.

Given such a context, it is not surprising that all of the figures in Perpetua’s dreams, her own presence excepted, are male. Maleness is the fundamental trope of her oneiric language. From the perspective of dream, male figures are constitutive of her martyred condition, and it is these that are being acknowledged—but they are also being subverted because, as Kristeva indicates, oneiric language is a discourse of the carnival. Significantly, the male figures of Perpetua’s dreams are not single but double, both positive and negative, perhaps reflecting the division in her community regarding women but also indicating an unhinging of the masculine from its univocal moorings in authority.¹³³

The masculine image in the first dream, the shepherd, has uniformly been viewed as a kind, fatherly figure, and the discussion of Dream One above has shown how commentaries have domesticated the meaning of this dream, including the image of the shepherd, in service to a theological metanarrative by placing it in the context of catechetical and martyrological teaching and scriptural references.¹³⁴ From a carnivalesque perspective, however, this dream speaks differently. The gray-haired shepherd does seem to be kindly and paternal; indeed, he is a paternal figure shown in a maternal stance, milking sheep and thus connected with female sexual fluids. However, he is, as the dream says, “huge” or “vast” (grandem). What looms large here is the male; the female, in the form of Perpetua, is suppliant, obviously subordinate to this Father in his immense garden. Further, the shepherd is linked by the ladder to the serpent, a signifier whose exaggerated phallicism is clearly a threatening trope of male domination. The ladder that links these two may indeed be an image of otherworldly initiation, as some have argued.¹³⁵ But its function as something that establishes a connection between the figures of shepherd and serpent has not to my knowledge been noticed. Laden as it is with sharp, pointed weapons (metallic repetitions of the phallic serpent), and described as flesh-rending and mangling, the ladder suggests that “beneath” the paternal position lurks a phallic figure of destruction. In the carnival of Perpetua’s first dream, kindly shepherd and destructive serpent belong together. This is indeed an “other” world.

A further issue in this dream is the stance of Perpetua as oneiric figure. Again the serpent is important. As the factor that tries to prevent Perpetua from stepping on the ladder, the serpent is that which might undermine her stance or standpoint. Perpetua, however, is unafraid of phallic terrorization and treads on its head, thus taking a first step toward that transformation of identity characteristic of the carnivalesque discourse of dream. Just as male identity is split open (like the split personality of the carnival) and subverted by the connection between shepherd and serpent, so female lowliness is here countered with an assertion of power. We will meet again this “repeated metaphor of trampling,” because there is in Perpetua’s dreams “a curiously consistent association of feet with power.”¹³⁶

A final perspective on this first dream is provided by the frame of the dream, the narrative portion of the diary. At several points, Perpetua describes the agonized relationship she had with her father.¹³⁷ He was opposed to her insistence on following the martyr’s path and tried to dissuade her. Two of his attempts at dissuasion involved force, one when he rushed at her as though to pluck out her eyes, and the other during her trial, when he pulled her off the step of the tribunal (just as the serpent tried to keep her from the rung of the ladder).¹³⁸ In the longest scene between them, Perpetua’s father appealed to her sense of duty as daughter and mother and characterized her commitment to her faith as pride. In so doing, he framed her within the sexual dictates of patriarchal law: her being is filial and maternal only, and her courage is reduced to a moral vice. He ends this interview by throwing himself at her feet, while Perpetua remains unmoved.

Perpetua’s standpoint, signified by her feet, is unshaken by the Father’s emotional appeal in the face of the breakdown of its own authority. The paradox here is that the “real” Perpetua lived out literally a masochistic fantasy, at least when her death is viewed as support for a theology that denied the value of her being, while the oneiric Perpetua of the diary engaged in a discourse that mocked the very structures that mediated the “real” woman’s death. As an imaginal space, the dream was a vehicle for articulating a view of female worth that revised cultural norms.

Death was much on Perpetua’s mind, not only in the immediate circumstance of her forthcoming contest in the arena, but in her dreams as well. Subsequent to the emotional interview with her father, Perpetua saw the two dreams of her brother Dinocrates. The first of these dreams presents an extremely pathologized image: it shows Dinocrates in a dark, dirty place with the cancerous facial wound that would kill him still festering. As one commentator has suggested, “The dream-figure Dinocrates is suffering from a cancer: that is to say, he is subjected to a state of inner decay which cannot be arrested.”¹³⁹ Furthermore, his wound is on his face; what is cancerous, from the perspective of the dream, is this male persona that is “brother” to Perpetua. This persona is placed by the dream in heat, dirt, and darkness.

Once again, maleness is the problematic that is being troped by the dream. It is striking that, in the narrative portion of the diary that introduces this dream, Perpetua described the presentation of the word Dinocrates to her conscious awareness as a slip: “I was amazed,” she wrote, “for he had never entered my thoughts except just then.” A word from the carnival intruded itself, and this was followed by the fully developed carnivalesque picture of the dream, a picture that suggests that it was precisely what she had embraced as “brother” that was cancerous. If one reads these dreams as constitutive of Perpetua’s conflicted situation, then the testimony offered in this dream is especially strong. As a trope of maleness, the brother is afflicted with a deadly wound—yet he is alive in the carnival of the dream as a dimension of Perpetua herself because, in dream, author becomes character in her own narrative. Other readers of this dream have also noted that in some way Dinocrates’ suffering is an image of Perpetua’s painful condition.¹⁴⁰

Whatever one might say about the painful situation of the “actual” Perpetua, existing within a system that would allow her no discourse other than that of the dominant male grid, the oneiric Perpetua does articulate her suffering. In this dream, suffering is presented as a state of decay in the persona of the brother. Suffering is also presented as a great abyss that separates Perpetua and her brother; it is a separation so profound that no approach is possible. What the female and the male both appear to be lacking is the possibility of approach, that is, the possibility of relationship, each allowing the other to be. In this context, the separation between the two figures can be read as a sign that sexual difference—as opposed to sexual indifference—is a possibility; yet no approach to a situation in which the female is granted independent value is possible as long as she is tormented by the cancerous aspect of the male.

Certainly the theological discourse of Perpetua’s time did not valorize male and female equally, and it was to the institution that authorized this discourse that Perpetua had committed her faith; she was, after all, preparing to die for it. Yet, in the polysemantic language of her dreams, it appears that, paradoxically, what she was dying for was itself dying, yielding to a logic that exceeded that of the conventional code.

There is a further scene of suffering in this dream. Dinocrates, hot and thirsty, stands by a pool whose rim is too high to allow him to drink. Separated, with no approach open to his sister, the brother has no access to the water of life.¹⁴¹ Surely the conventional code would have reversed this scene because, according to one of its representatives, Tertullian, God’s image was man’s prerogative, ruined by woman. Should not she be parched, rather than he? A transformation has occurred in this dream, a transformation that becomes more evident in the dream that followed this one.

Upon awakening from the dream of Dinocrates and realizing his suffering, Perpetua began to pray for him, confident that she could help. Her subsequent oneiric image of Dinocrates showed him clean, healed, drinking water and even playing in it. The precondition for this dream was an assertion of power by Perpetua; she knew that she could help that ailing male so separate from her, yet so near. Once inside the dream, there is immediately a change of face, that is, a change in the way in which the male trope is “faced” or presented. Now it is healed, no longer dark and dirty. When the female is empowered, the male is no longer in a state of inner decay; the badly faced aspects of maleness have been faced and released into play. As Dronke has suggested, Perpetua “transforms the Dinocrates element in herself from something anguished into something liberated.”¹⁴²

This release has something to do with water, the dream’s major metaphor. There is an abundance of water, both in the pool and in the golden bowl. The bowl is said specifically to be a container that does not contain, in that it never runs out of water, while the rim of the pool, whose containing sides were earlier formidably high, has now been lowered; its barrier is down. Such containers of fluid substances are feminized images, particularly of breasts, suppliers of the milky water of life.¹⁴³ In the first dream of Dinocrates, where the male is so cancerous that no approach by the female is possible, such containers are inaccessible; the univocal world of patriarchal discourse prevents the flow of life’s substance. When that discourse is “split” by contact with the empowered female, however, healing occurs, and the brother is released into play. Just as, in Perpetua’s first dream, the shepherd as male trope has been feminized by its contact with the maternal sheep, so here maleness is “refreshed” when it approaches or makes room for the female. In these dreams, the discourse of a marginalized perspective is coming to expression, just as the discourse of mastery is being exposed and split apart.

When she awakened from this dream of the healed brother, Perpetua wrote, “I realized that he’d been freed from pain” (intellexi translatum eum esse de poena). Literally, Dinocrates has been “translated” from torment. The term translatum is derived from transfero, which means not only “to carry or bring over,” but also “to translate into another language,” “to use figuratively or tropically.” Translatio means “trope” or “metaphor.”¹⁴⁴ In the present context, this language suggests that in the carnivalesque discourse of dreams there is a translation taking place, a troping of suffering, and, for Perpetua, a release into a language different from the paternal metanarrative.

Prior to her fourth and final dream, Perpetua had a final interview with her father. She writes in the diary that “wasted and worn, he began to tear out the hair of his beard and fling it on the ground, and he hurled himself headlong and cursed his life, and said such things as would move every living creature. I ached for his unhappy old age.”¹⁴⁵ Dronke’s observations on Perpetua’s reaction to her father in this scene are compelling. “While she depicts him more impassioned and desperate than ever,” he notes, “a tone almost of detachment enters her description, as if her father’s behaviour had become more like a histrionic performance, which she was watching sadly but without any impulse to participation. The last phrase—T ached for his unhappy old age’—while voicing compassion, comes so abruptly after his extremes of pleading that it has a strangely dry effect. She has made herself deaf to him.”¹⁴⁶ Although I do not want to deny the father’s real grief, I would extend Dronke’s observations by adding that Perpetua had “made herself deaf” to her father as patriarch who had once tried to confine his daughter within the dictates of a male economy of power; that patriarch is now powerless, prostrate, his face in the dust. This scene from the diary provides an appropriate context for Perpetua’s final dream, which repeats and intensifies the “doubled male” as well as the female desire of earlier dreams.

In this dream, maleness is again the major trope, so much so that Perpetua herself becomes male. In comparison with the other dreams, a striking transformation in the dream’s masculine images has occurred. In the dream of shepherd, ladder, and serpent, the two male images were equally huge; the sinister serpentine figure, signifier of phallic mastery, was equal in size, and so in importance, to the kindly paternal shepherd. In this last dream, however, the bestial opponent, the Egyptian, while still male, is reduced in size. This dimension of mastery, associated with the phallic sword as instrument of death, is now seen by Perpetua “rolling himself in the dust.” This figure is decisively defeated as Perpetua, flying, knocks him down on his face and steps on his head, just as she had done before with the serpent. Further, the Egyptian, like both her father and the serpent, is unable to threaten her stance, even though he tries to do so by grabbing at her feet. The transformative message is that, when the female is in the ascendant, elevated above the foul figure of repressive structures, that foul figure succumbs to the liberating rebellion of what it had marginalized.

The Egyptian’s oneiric double is Pomponius, equal in size to the Egyptian but opposite him in the dream’s valorization. Pictured by the dream as the caring deacon who called Perpetua out from prison, Pomponius takes her to the scene of the contest, assures her of his presence, and disappears. Immediately following his disappearance, the Egyptian appears; in the dynamic of the dream, both aspects of maleness have been quickly juxtaposed. It is significant that Pomponius and the Egyptian are not related to each other as the images of the shepherd and the serpent were in the first dream. There is no link between them, because Pomponius vanishes before the Egyptian enters the scene. It would seem that, in the oneiric imagination, the destructive aspects of paternal kindliness have been erased. In the figure of Pomponius, the ecclesiastical “prison” has opened itself to a recognition of the value of the female.

The male trope that dominates this dream both literally and figuratively is the fencing-master. Surprisingly, what the dream emphasizes in its description of this figure is not his symbol of authority, the baton, which may have been understood in antiquity as a personification of the agon.¹⁴⁷ Deemphasizing the sign that would link this figure with male contestation, the dream associates him with exquisitely ornate sandals, and with a branch laden with golden apples, whose importance is underscored by being mentioned three times. The sandals are made of silver and gold; unlike the metal attached to the ladder of the first dream, which was shaped into weapons that inflict pain, these metals are precious, and they “contain” the stance or standpoint of a male trope no longer undermined by a sinister figure as large as itself. Further, this is the standpoint that emerges immediately following Perpetua’s transformation into a man. How is this juxtaposition to be understood?

Commentators both ancient and modern have remarked that Perpetua’s transformation into a man signifies her recognition that she would need “male” qualities in order to brave the ordeal that she was facing. According to this view, Perpetua realized that she must shed all that was “womanish” in her—in this case, her female body, and so also her sexual identity—in order properly to testify.¹⁴⁸ This kind of reading views the dream as a mirror of the conditions of Perpetua’s social situation, which denied the value of female witness. In order to be valuable, her witness must be male. In this interpretation, the dream would merely replicate the conventional code of patriarchal denial of power to women.

From the perspective developed in this chapter, however, the oneiric imagination is transformative and not only mimetic. For although the dreams do present a picture of Perpetua’s painful situation within the paternal order, they also present a vision of a new, empowered sense of selfidentity that is “other” to the constructs of the social order. Thus the dream is an irruption into the master narrative of paternal logic, which it subverts and rebels against, offering as it does a competing vision of the female.

Perpetua’s dream does not mean that she somehow “became male.” Such a perspective undermines her sexual being, her worth as a woman. It is important to emphasize that it was in the carnival that Perpetua becamemale; the transformation took place in oneiric image, not spiritual or physical fact. This moment in the dream suggests that what was formerly signified by male images no longer pertains. Sinister shepherd, cancerous brother: these tropes of a totalizing discourse of mastery and domination have been emptied of their power. Now the masculine trope can be embraced; it has become the site for an expression of otherness. How this is accomplished in the poeticized logic of the dream will take the discussion back to the fencing-master’s bough of apples.

Throughout antiquity, the apple was thought to be an erotic, female fruit.¹⁴⁹ Frequently used as a symbol for women’s breasts, the apple was above all the fruit of Aphrodite and so was seen as an embodiment of eros and of female desire in particular.¹⁵⁰ As a figure of love, the apple played a role in courtship and marriage, processes of erotic binding. Literary renditions of this role show, for example, the lovers Daphnis and Chloe throwing apples at each other; Philostratus portrays Erōtes kissing an apple that they throw back and forth; and “Lucian adds the refinement of biting a piece out of an apple to cast into the bosom of the girl.”¹⁵¹ In the social realm, brides were to munch an apple of Cydon before crossing the threshold of the bridal chamber by order of the Solonic code. According to Plutarch, apple-eating would give the bride sweet words!¹⁵² Medicinally, the apple was thought to be an antidote to poison; as a poisoner of poison, it was the fruit of life and death, as in the tale of Callimachus and Chrysorrhoe, in which an apple both kills the hero and brings him back to life. Finally, apples were the only fruit, or so the lore had it, that would give relief to a woman in labor.¹⁵³

In Perpetua’s dream, the fencing-master holds a bough of apples. Thus connected with an object with Aphroditic associations, this male trope has been intensely feminized or radically eroticized in the direction of female desire. The fencing-master appears in the dream just after Perpetua has become a man: just at the moment when she fully embraces the male, that trope is itself troped by the appearance of an image of sexual identity that is female and not inscribed within the code of patriarchal definition. When Perpetua embraces the male, what appears is an image of maleness whose highly valued stance is a recognition of female identity. The “sweet words” that these apples offer is the possibility of a female discourse or, as Irigaray says, a “feminine syntax” that would “preclude any distinction of identities, any establishment of ownership, and thus any form of appropriation.”¹⁵⁴ In the image of the fencing-master, the masculine is released from the destructive code of univocal discourse by virtue of its recognition of female value. Such recognition is, indeed, the defining quality of this dream-image. To use Kristeva’s formulation, the male “has lost his totality and no longer coincides with himself.”¹⁵⁵ The “irreverent” dream of this carnival releases the male as well as the female from the prison of sexual indifference.

In her dream, Perpetua wins the golden apples for herself and is kissed by the fencing-master, who wishes her peace. She then walks alone toward the Gate of Life in triumph. The oneiric Perpetua was, one might say, a woman in labor for whom the apples were a prize signifying both life and death. What dies in her dream-discourse is the master narrative of theological doctrine that so devalued female identity. In this sense, the dreams unlock theological prejudice by exposing it to the polyvalent discourse of the oneiric imagination. Similarly, what comes to life in the dreams’ poetic logic is a series of gestures toward the expression of female desire. The eros of Perpetua’s dream-diary is its articulation of the value of difference, and its imaginal empowering of a woman’s voice.

¹ Passio Sanctorum Perpetuae et Pelicitatis 4.3-4 (ed. Van Beek, p. 12). I have used the translation of Perpetua’s dream-diary by Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, pp. 2–4. Also useful is the translation of the entire Passio by Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs pp. 107–31.

² The precision of this traditional hagiographical dating of Perpetua’s martyrdom has been disputed, although it has been shown compellingly that Geta Caesar’s birthday, the day of the martyrdom itself, was in early March, and there is no doubt that this text stems from very early third-century African Christianity. See Barnes, Tertullian, pp. 263–65.

³ On the proconsular Vibii as possible ancestors of Perpetua’s family, see Barnes, Tertullian, p. 70; the Passio states that Perpetua was “honeste nata, liberaliter instituta": “well-born and well-educated” (Pass. Perp. 2.1 [ed. Van Beek, pp. 6–8]).

⁴ The quotation is from Brown, The Body and Society, p. 75; for references to this event in the text, see Pass. Perp. 6.6, 7.9, 16.3, 19.1-21.10 (ed. Van Beek, pp. 18, 22, 40, 44–52).

⁵ Barnes, Tertullian, pp. 143–61; Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, pp. 421–26.

⁶ For discussions of the development of these issues, see W.H.C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church, pp. 162–253; see also Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, pp. 425–26.

⁷ Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, p. 426.

⁸ Barnes, Tertullian, p. 160.

⁹ Pass. Perp. 5.4 (ed. Van Beek, p. 16).

¹⁰ Ibid., 6.3-6 (ed. Van Beek, pp. 16–18).

¹¹ Ibid., 18.4-21.10 (ed. Van Beek, pp. 42–52).

¹² Ibid., 3.1-6 (ed. Van Beek, p. 8).

¹³ For discussions of the authenticity of the diary and the dream of Saturus, once (but no longer) thought to be forgeries, see Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, pp. 47–52; J. Amat, “L’Authenticité des Songes de la Passion de Perpetué et de Felicité,” pp. 177–91; Barnes, Tertullian, p. 263; see Pass. Perp. 2.3 and 11.1 (ed. Van Beek, pp. 8, 28) for the anonymous author’s statements that he is presenting texts written by the martyrs themselves. Perpetua’s diary composes sections 3–10 of the Passio, and Saturus’ dream, sections 11–13; sections 1–2 are the author’s preface, and 14–21 recount the martyrs’ deaths.

¹⁴ For a discussion of the genre as well as of the Pass. Perp. in the context of other martyrdoms, see Amat, Songes et Visions, pp. 52–55, 66–86; also Dulaey, Le Rêve, pp. 41–46.

¹⁵ Polycarp and Cyprian are notable examples of other martyrs who received premonitory dreams concerning their own deaths; for discussions of these martyr-dreamers, see Dulaey, Le Rêve, pp. 42–44 (Cyprian) and Amat, Songes et Visions, pp. 62–66 (Polycarp); see also Pierre Courcelle, Les Confessions de Saint Augustin dans la tradition littéraire, pp. 127–30.

¹⁶ Amat, Songes et Visions, pp. 53, 67–68.

¹⁷ Pass. Perp. 4.1-2 (ed. Van Beek, pp. 10–12).

¹⁸ For Tertullian’s oneiric theory, see pp. 66–70 above.

¹⁹ Amat, Songes et Visions, p. 68; for further uses of ostensio to designate oneiric experience, see Pass. Perp. 7.3 and 8.1 (ed. Van Beek, pp. 20, 22). The religious intensity of dreaming was underscored by a later passio that used the Pass. Perp. as its model. In the Passio Mariani et Iacobi, the narrator exclaims, “O sleep more intense than all our waking hours!” and remarks about the martyr-dreamers in his text that, while their companions cared for them by day, Christ cared for them by night in dreams (7.5; 6.2, ed. and trans. Musurillo, pp. 205, 201).

²⁰ See Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.v. fabulor, fabula.

²¹ Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 7.

²² Pass. Perp. 4.3-10 (ed. Van Beek, pp. 12–14).

²³ Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, p. 50; Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, pp. 7–8; Amat, Songes et Visions, p. 50; Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, pp. 400–401.

²⁴ Dulaey, Le Rêve, pp. 44–45.

²⁵ Amat, Songes et Visions, p. 67; Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, pp. 7–8.

²⁶ Augustine, Sermons 280–82, collected in Van Beek, ed., Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis, pp. 149*-154* (=PL 38.1280-1286). Barnes notes that, in Augustine’s era, the Pass. Perp. was read in church and regarded by some as canonical (Tertullian, p. 79); see Augustine, De natura et origine animae 1.10.12, in Van Beek, p. 154* (=CSEL 60.312).

²⁷ Augustine, Serm. 280.1 (in Van Beek, p. 150*).

²⁸ Tertullian, De an. 55–58 (ed. Waszink, pp. 73–80); for detailed discussions of Tertullian’s views of the afterworld and hell, see Waszink, Tertulliani De anima, pp. 553–93; Amat, Songes et Rêves, pp. 148–53.

²⁹ Tertullian, De an. 55.3-4 (ed. Waszink, pp. 73–74).

³⁰ Tertullian may have conflated the dream of Saturus, which does use the word martyr to describe those whom he saw in heaven, with the first dream of Perpetua, which does not refer to martyrs per se. See Pass. Perp. 11.9 (ed. Van Beek, p. 30) and the discussion in Waszink, Tertulliani De anima, pp. 561–62.

³¹ For a thorough discussion of Tertullian’s relationship with Montanism, see Barnes, Tertullian, pp. 164–86; the role of Montanism in the church will be discussed later in this chapter.

³² Tertullian, De an. 55.5 (ed. Waszink, p. 74).

³³ Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, pp. 6–7.

³⁴ Miller, ‘“A Dubious Twilight’: Reflections on Dreams in Patristic Literature,” pp. 158–59; Amat, Songes et Visions, pp. 70, 74.

³⁵ See Amat, Songes et Visions, p. 70. For Tertullian’s use of the image of Jacob’s ladder in this way, see p. 103 above; see also the slightly later Carthaginian text, the Passio Sanctorum Montani et Lucii 7.6 with its oneiric reference to “the sign of Jacob” (ed. and trans. Musurillo, p. 218).

³⁶ Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 8; Amat, Songes et Visions, p. 71; Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Passion of Perpetua, p. 18.

³⁷ Amat, Songes et Visions, p. 73; Von Franz, The Passion of Perpetua, pp. 24–25, for a psychological reading of the serpent; Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, pp. 8–9, sees in this scene “the traditional gesture of the victor in ancient combats,” and he suggests further that the juxtaposition of the serpent with the ladder of weapons may be a reminiscence from Perpetua’s reading of Virgil, Aeneid 2.469-75, where the warrior Pyrrhus, who breaks the bronze doors of Priam’s palace, is described in terms of weapons and a snake.

³⁸ Amat, Songes et Visions, p. 72 and n. 145.

³⁹ Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, pp. 7–8, suggests a shamanic context for understanding Perpetua’s dream after observing the important differences between Perpetua’s dream of a ladder and Jacob’s. The only feature that the two ladders share is that they stretch from earth to heaven:

None of the other connotations of Jacob’s ladder has any particular bearing on Perpetua’s dream. Jacob himself does not mount his ladder—it is angels who go up and down on it. . . Yahweh leans over the top of that ladder, offering Jacob earthly prosperity. Perpetua’s ladder, by contrast, is one that she must climb; it is a means of ascent only, not descent. There are no angels on it, for it is too narrow for more than one being to mount at a time. It is a painful way of climbing, encompassed by terrors. . . . (p. 7)

⁴⁰ Amat, Songes et Visions, pp. 69–70 and “L’Authenticité des Songes,” p. 183.

⁴¹ Amat, Songes et Visions, p. 119; see also Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, p. 438, for observations on similar visions of the “pleasant spot” in the Pass. Mariani et Iacobi 6.12 and 11.9 (ed. and trans. Musurillo, pp. 202, 208). For a discussion of the possible influence of the pastoral visions of the Shepherd of Hermas on the Pass. Perp., see Amat, Songes et Visions, p. 119. Daniélou, on the other hand, thought that the dream’s picture of paradise as an “immense space of garden” came from Judaeo-Christian apocalyptic (in A History of Early Christian Doctrine Before the Council of Nicaea, 3:60).

⁴² Von Franz, Passion of Perpetua, pp. 27–32.

⁴³ Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 9; Amat, Songes et Visions, pp. 119–21 and especially the iconographical references on p. 121n. 24.

⁴⁴ Amat, Songes et Visions, p. 121; Daniélou, A History of Early Christian Doctrine Before the Council of Nicaea, 3:60.

⁴⁵ Amat, Songes et Visions, pp. 119–21.

⁴⁶ Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, p. 113 and n. 8.

⁴⁷ See the reference in Quodvultdeus, Sermo 5.6 (ed. Van Beek, p. 156* [=PL 40.703]) to the lactating Perpetua accepting milk from the fatherly shepherd; see also Pseudo-Augustine, Sermo 394 (ed. Van Beek, p. 161* [=PL 39.1716]).

⁴⁸ Amat, Songes et Visions, pp. 75–76.

⁴⁹ Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, p. 51; to the contrary, Amat, Songes et Visions, p. 75.

⁵⁰ Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, p. 51.

⁵¹ Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 9.

⁵² Ibid.

⁵³ Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, p. 115, translates this passage as follows: “At once I realized that I was privileged to pray for him” [et cognoui me statim dignam esse et pro eo petere debere]. Dronke’s translation, “I realized that I was entitled to ask for a vision about him,” distinguishes between petere, “to seek or request,” and orationem facere, “to offer prayers,” in the next sentence; Dronke’s translation maintains a structural analogy between this scene and Perpetua’s request for a vision in Dream One and is, in my view, the more appropriate of the two translations.

⁵⁴ Pass. Perp. 7.1-8.4 (ed. Van Beek, pp. 18–22).

⁵⁵ Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, p. 115n.10; Amat, Songes et Visions, p. 129. See Tertullian, De an. 57.1-12 (ed. Waszink, pp. 76–78, and Waszink’s commentary on pp. 574–75).

⁵⁶ Amat, “L’Authenticité des songes,” p. 180; Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, pp. 48–50. Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 285n.46, cautions that “it is important to realize that Perpetua also uses refrigerare twice with an unequivocally earthy significance” at Pass. Perp. 3.7 and 9.1.

⁵⁷ Amat, Songes et Visions, p. 130.

⁵⁸ Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, pp. 49–50, argues that the Pass. Perp. offers a “glimpse” of what will later be a fully developed idea of purgatory: “The importance of the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas in the prehistory of Purgatory should be neither exaggerated nor minimized. It is not Purgatory as such that is being discussed here, and none of the images contained in Perpetua’s two visions recur in medieval imagery associated with Purgatory.” See also Amat, Songes et Visions, pp. 128–29, 131.

⁵⁹ Augustine, De not. et or. an. 4.18.27 (ed. Van Beek, p. 155*= CSEL 60. 405.

⁶⁰ Franz Joseph Dölger, “Antlike Parallelen zum leidenen Dinocrates in der Passio Perpetuae,” pp. 1–40.

⁶¹ Ibid., p. 29; Amat, Songes et Visions, pp. 128–29; Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 11, suggests that Perpetua’s reading of Virgil’s Aeneid might also have influenced her oneiric vision of Dinocrates: “She would have remembered the wails and weeping of dead infant souls that greeted Aeneas when he had been ferried across the Styx; and she would have retained in her fantasy the dark, muddy place, and the haunting images that follow, of those who, like Dido, perished through their wounds and still bore those wounds in Hades” (see Aeneid 6.426ff.).

⁶² See Dölger, “Antlike Parallelen zum leidenen Dinocrates in der Passio Perpetuae,” pp. 13–15, 29–34, who cites as a parallel a passage from the Acts of Paul and Thecla 28, in which the dead daughter of a noble woman speaks to her mother in a dream, asking that Thecla pray for her so that she might be transferred to the otherworldly place of the righteous; on the idea of the intercessory “power of the keys” wielded by martyrs, see Frederick C. Klawiter, “The Role of Martyrdom and Persecution in Developing the Priestly Authority of Women in Early Christianity: A Case Study of Montanism,” pp. 254–60; on the motif of the aoroi, the untimely dead, see J. H. Waszink, “Mors immature,” pp. 107–12.

⁶³ Von Franz, The Passion of Perpetua, p. 36, 37–43; Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, p. 51; Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 12.

⁶⁴ See Pass. Perp. 6.7-8 (ed. Van Beek, p. 18).

⁶⁵ Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 11.

⁶⁶ Pass. Perp. 10.1-15 (ed. Van Beek, pp. 24–28).

⁶⁷ Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, pp. 50–51; Amat, Songes et Visions, p. 76; Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 13.

⁶⁸ Von Franz, The Passion of Perpetua, pp. 52, 71; Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 15.

⁶⁹ Pass. Perp. 3.3 (ed. Van Beek, p. 8).

⁷⁰ See Mary R. Lefkowitz, “The Motivations for St. Perpetua’s Martyrdom,” p. 418: “We can recognize in Perpetua’s resistance to her father and gradual withdrawal from her family the standard behavior pattern of conversion; a wish to break from the past, a need to substitute strong new ties that can replace the old.”

⁷¹ Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, p. 52.

⁷² Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 14.

⁷³ Louis Robert, “Une Vision de Perpetué martyre à Carthage en 203,” p. 232.

⁷⁴ Robert, “Une Vision de Perpetué martyre à Carthage en 203,” pp. 255–71.

⁷⁵ Amat, Songes et Visions, pp. 77–79.

⁷⁶ Ibid, pp. 80–81.

⁷⁷ Ibid, pp. 78–79. For other symbolic associations of the baton, see Martine Dulaey, “Le Symbole de la baguette dans Part paléo-chrétien,” pp. 3–38.

⁷⁸ Amat, Songes et Visions, p. 80.

⁷⁹ Ibid, pp. 82–83; Robert, on the other hand, sees the presence of the Egyptian in the dream as an accurate reflection of the participation of large numbers of Egyptians in athletic competitions in the imperial era (“Une Vision de Perpetué martyre à Carthage en 203,” pp. 272–73); Dronke, referring to Graeco-Roman associations of Egypt with “pagan sacred wisdom,” suggests that the Egyptian represented for Perpetua an “Egypt of the mind” which, after her conversion to Christianity, she was struggling to overcome (Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 14).

⁸⁰ Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 13.

⁸¹ Winkler, The Contraints of Desire, p. 126.

⁸² Ibid.

⁸³ Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” pp. 64–91.

⁸⁴ Ibid., p. 70.

⁸⁵ Ibid., p. 65.

⁸⁶ Ibid., pp. 70, 78–80.

⁸⁷ Ibid., p. 83.

⁸⁸ Ibid., p. 83.

⁸⁹ Pass. Perp. 3.2; 6.4 (ed. Van Beek, pp. 8, 18).

⁹⁰ On the status of the name Christian, Peter Brown observes about the martyrs that “friendship with God raised the Christians above the identity that they shared with their fellows. The nomen Christianum they flaunted was a ‘non-name.’ It excluded the current names of kin and township. . . .” (The Making of Late Antiquity, p. 56). See also Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 5, for his characterization of Perpetua’s insistence on her new name as a kind of “grammatical Platonism” for which “names are not arbitrary; there is a primordial, divinely ordained harmony between names and things.”

⁹¹ Acta minora 5.9: “Proconsul ad Perpetuam dixit: ‘Quid dicis, Perpetua? Sacrificas?’ Perpetua respondit: ‘Christiana sum, et nominis mei sequor auctoritatem, ut sim perpetua” (ed. Van Beek, p. 66).

⁹² Brown, The Making of Lute Antiquity, p. 56.

⁹³ Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 87.

⁹⁴ Ibid., p. 86 (italics in original).

⁹⁵ Ibid., p. 134.

⁹⁶ Pass. Perp. 3.3; 6.5-6 (ed. Van Beek, pp. 8, 18).

⁹⁷ Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 78.

⁹⁸ This is where Perpetua’s characterization of her dream-speech with the verb fabulor assumes its importance as a perspective on oneiric constructions; see p. 151 above.

⁹⁹ Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 29.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., p. 85.

¹⁰² Tertullian, De cultu feminarum 1.1.1 (CCL 1.343).

¹⁰³ Ibid.

¹⁰⁴ Ibid. 1.1.2 (CCL 1.343).

¹⁰⁵ Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 90.

¹⁰⁶ This is Tertullian’s argument throughout De cultu fem. See, for example, his conducting chapter, in which he states that it is not enough for Christians to be modest; they must also present a modest appearance. “[Christian modesty] must be complete to such an extent that it emanates from the soul to the clothing and bursts out from the conscience to the outer appearance” (De cultu fem. 2.13.3 [CCL 1.369]).

¹⁰⁷ Pass. Perp. 3.5 (ed. Van Beek, p. 8).

¹⁰⁸ Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 69.

¹⁰⁹ Augustine, Serm. 280.1 (in Van Beek, p. 150*); Serm. 281.2 (in Van Beek, p. 152*); De not. et or. an. 4.18.26 (in Van Beek, p. 155*); see also Serm. 282.3 (in Van Beek, pp. 153*-54*).

¹¹⁰ Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” p. 65.

¹¹¹ De praescriptione haereticorum 41.5 (CCL 1.220).

¹¹² On the “viper,” see De baptismo 1.2-3 (CCL 1.277); on the denial of official ecclesiastical duties to women, see De virginibus velandis 9.1 (CCL 2.1218-19).

¹¹³ Ad uxorem 4.2-3 (CCL 1.389).

¹¹⁴ Lefkowitz, “Motivations for St. Perpetua’s Martyrdom,” has pointed out that the church fathers praised Perpetua and Felicitas for “acting uncharacteristically for women, in overcoming the inherent weakness and sinfulness of their flesh.” She goes on to note “the consistent failure of male scholars to acknowledge the positive significance of femininity in the performance of certain heroic acts” (p. 421 and n.13). In a similar vein, Stevan Davies has discussed the roles of women in early Christian Acta, showing that women were often categorized (negatively) according to conventional values and that they were denied “apostolic” roles, even when they had shown themselves to be as chaste, as pious, and as devoted as their male companions. See The Revolt of the Widows: The Social World of the Apocryphal Acts, passim.

¹¹⁵ Montanism’s date of origin is disputed; for discussion, see Robert M. Grant, Augustus to Constantine, pp. 132–33.

¹¹⁶ Klawiter, “The Role of Martyrdom and Persecution in Developing the Priestly Authority of Women in Early Christianity,” p. 253; Grant, Augustus to Constantino, pp. 133–35; Barnes, Tertullian, p. 131.

¹¹⁷ See Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, p. 407, for the insistence of Montanism’s opponents on viewing prophets as male. Evidence for the persistence of such misogyny is his quotation of a lexical article on Montanism in the Dictionary of Christian Biography, published in 1882: “If Montanus had triumphed, Christian doctrine would have been developed not under the superintendence of the Christian teachers most esteemed for wisdom, but of wild and excitable women” (p. 409).

¹¹⁸ Epiphanius, Panarion 49.2 (PG 41.882A).

¹¹⁹ Ibid., 49.1 (PG 41.880C), translated by R. M. Grant, Second-Century Christianity: A Collection of Fragments, p. 96.

¹²⁰ Klawiter, “Role of Martyrdom and Persecution,” p. 254.

¹²¹ For a discussion of these issues, see Ross Shepard Kraemer, Her Share of the Blessings, pp. 165–66, 170, 177–81.

¹²² Grant, Augustus to Constantine, pp. 135–38; Barnes, Tertullian, p. 131.

¹²³ See Barnes, Tertullian, pp. 130–42, for a full account of Tertullian’s Montanist views.

¹²⁴ Pass. Perp. 1.1-6 (ed. Van Beek, pp. 4–6); see Barnes, Tertullian, p. 77; Kraemer, Her Share of the Blessings, p. 161; Klawiter, “The Role of Martyrdom and Persecution in Developing the Priestly Authority of Women in Early Christianity,” p. 257.

¹²⁵ Kraemer, Her Share of the Blessings, p. 161.

¹²⁶ See Epiphanius, Panarion 49.1-2 (PG 41.880-82), for evidence that Montanists practiced dream-incubation.

¹²⁷ Klawiter, “The Role of Martyrdom and Persecution in Developing the Priestly Authority of Women in Early Christianity,” pp. 256–60; Barnes, Tertullian, pp. 77–78.

¹²⁸ Pass. Perp. 16.2-4; 18.4-6 (ed. Van Beek, pp. 38–40, 42–44).

¹²⁹ On the later use of Perpetua as an exemplary figure, see Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, pp. 16–17.

¹³⁰ Pass. Perp. 18.2; 20.3-5 (ed. Van Beek, pp. 42, 46–48).

¹³¹ Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 15.

¹³² Klawite’s conclusion is worth quoting:

In the catholic church woman was ‘liberated’ to become a minister as long as she participated in the suffering of Christ. The moment she was set free from the suffering of prison, she was placed back into the ‘imprisoning’ role of female subordinate to male. In the New Prophecy, liberation also came by participating in the suffering of prison on account of the name, but a release from such suffering did not mean a retreat to the former role of subordinate female prior to prison experience. (“The Role of Martyrdom and Persecution in Developing the Priestly Authority of Women in the Early Church," p. 261).

¹³³ See Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, pp. 5–6 for a discussion of the juxtaposition of positive and negative male figures in Perpetua’s diary.

¹³⁴ See pp. 152–58 above.

¹³⁵ There are extended discussions of the ladder as symbolic of an initiate’s journey to a higher or heavenly consciousness in Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, pp. 7–8, and Von Franz, The Passion of Perpetua, pp. 16–20.

¹³⁶ Lefkowitz, “The Motivations for St. Perpetua’s Martyrdom,” p. 419.

¹³⁷ Pass. Perp. 3.1-3; 5.1-6; 6.2-5 (ed. Van Beek, pp. 8, 14–18).

¹³⁸ Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 6.

¹³⁹ Von Franz, The Passion of Perpetua, p. 37.

¹⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 36; Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 12.

¹⁴¹ On the water of immortality, see M. Meslin, “Vase sacrés et boissons d’éternité,” pp. 127–36.

¹⁴² Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 285n.51.

¹⁴³ For a discussion of such female symbols, see Page duBois, Sowing the Body, pp. 47–49, 107–9, 110–29. See also Nor Hall, The Moon and the Virgin, pp. 53–58.

¹⁴⁴ Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.v. transfero and translatio.

¹⁴⁵ Pass. Perp. 9.2-3 (ed. Van Beek, p. 24).

¹⁴⁶ Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 13.

¹⁴⁷ Robert, “Une Vision de Perpetué Martyré à Carthage en 203,” p. 261.

¹⁴⁸ Brown, The Body and Society p. 75, understands her transformation as “a triumph of Perpetua’s will”; Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 14, remarks that the change in gender is “not so much a sexual fantasy as a willed identification, in her dream, with the heroine’s end to which she aspires. . . . Perpetua wants to strip herself of all that is weak, or womanish, in her nature.” See also p. 163 above. Amat, Songes et Visions, p. 83, says that the change of sex “materialized the masculine aspects of the young woman’s personality and qualities of audacity,” although she admits that the mutation is “not exempt from some misogyny” (p. 84).

¹⁴⁹ For an extensive collection of literary references, see A. R. Littlewood, “The Symbolism of the Apple in Greek and Roman Literature,” pp. 147–81. For mythological and social functions of the apple, see Marcel Detienne, Dionysos Slain, pp. 40–44.

¹⁵⁰ Littlewood, “The Symbolism of the Apple in Greek and Roman Literature,” pp. 159–60; Detienne, Dionysos Slain, pp. 40–44.

¹⁵¹ Littlewood, “The Symbolism of the Apple in Greek and Roman Literature,” pp. 153–55 and n.15.

¹⁵² Detienne, Dionysos Slain, p. 43, referring to Plutarch, Moralia 2 (Conjugal Precepts): 138D.

¹⁵³ Littlewood, ‘The Symbolism of the Apple in Greek and Roman Literature,” pp. 167n.40, 174–75, 159n.25.

¹⁵⁴ Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 134.

¹⁵⁵ Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” p. 83.