Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making / Edition 1

by Elizabeth Castelli

Overview

Martyrs are produced, Elizabeth Castelli suggests, not by the lived experience of particular historical individuals but by the stories that are later told about them. And the formulaic character of stories about past suffering paradoxically serves specific theological, cultural, or political ends in the present. Martyrdom and Memory explores the central role of persecution in the early development of Christian ideas, institutions, and cultural forms and shows how the legacy of Christian martyrdom plays out in today's world.

In the pre-Constantinian imperial period, the conflict between Roman imperial powers and the subject Christian population hinged on competing interpretations of power, submission, resistance, and victory. This book highlights how both Roman and Christian notions of law and piety deployed the same forms of censure and critique, each accusing the other of deviations from governing conventions of gender, reason, and religion. Using Maurice Halbwachs's theoretical framework of collective memory and a wide range of Christian sources—autobiographical writings, martyrologies and saints'lives, sermons, art objects, pilgrimage souvenirs, and polemics about spectacle—Castelli shows that the writings of early Christians aimed to create public and ideologically potent accounts of martyrdom. The martyr's story becomes a "usable past" and a "living tradition" for Christian communities and an especially effective vehicle for transmitting ideas about gender, power, and sanctity.

An unlikely legacy of early Christian martyrdom is the emergence of modern "martyr cults" in the wake of the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School. Focusing specifically on the martyr cult associated with one of the victims, Martyrdom and Memory argues that the Columbine story dramatically expresses the ongoing power of collective memory constructed around a process of rendering tragic suffering redemptive and meaningful. In the wake of Columbine and other contemporary legacies of martyrdom's ethical ambivalence, the global impact of Christian culture making in the early twenty-first century cannot be ignored. For as the last century's secularist hypothesis sits in the wings, "religion" returns to center stage with one of this drama's most contentious yet riveting stars: the martyr.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231129879
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	06/05/2007
Series:	Gender, Theory, and Religion
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	6.75(w) x 9.12(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Elizabeth A. Castelli is associate professor of religion at Barnard College at Columbia University. She is the author of Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power, coauthor of The Postmodern Bible, and editor of several books, including Women, Gender, and Religion: A Reader. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and is the editor of a new journal, Postscripts: Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds. In 2003 and 2004 she was the senior research scholar at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University.

Table of Contents

Collective Memory and the Meanings of the Past
Performing Persecution, Theorizing Martyrdom
The Martyr's Memory: Autobiography and Self-Writing in Ignatius, Perpetua, and Pionius
Martyrdom and the Spectacle of Suffering
Layers of Verbal and Visual Memory: Commemorating Thecla the Protomartyr
Religion as a Chain of Memory: Cassie Bernall of Columbine High and the Contemporary American Legacy of Early Christian Martyrdom

What People are Saying About This

David Frankfurter

In probing the collective allure of the ancient atrocity, a story that both unites us and compels us to action or ceremony, Castelli has produced the best study of martyrdom yet, with implications far beyond the world of early Christianity.

— David Frankfurter, University of New Hampshire

Jennifer Glancy

Through her meticulous and compelling analysis of the ways that narratives of martyrdom shape the collective memory of early Christians, Castelli succeeds in raising disturbing questions about the grip of the double-edged logic of martyrdom on contemporary political discourse.

— Jennifer Glancy, Le Moyne College

Editorial Reviews

Castelli succeeds brilliantly in her aim to reveal the way martyrdom constructed a new ideology... that subverted Roman notions.

Biblical Theology Bulletin - Kimberly B. Stratton

Castelli's stimulating and provocative study is a creative contribution to this flourishing area.

Ecclesiastical History - Judith Lieu

Castelli's stimulating and provocative study is a creative contribution to this flourishing area.

— Judith Lieu

Ecclesiastical History

A required reading for anyone who studies and teaches on this problem from the past that remains distressingly present.

— Chris Frilingos

Religious Studies Review

Castelli succeeds brilliantly in her aim to reveal the way martyrdom constructed a new ideology... that subverted Roman notions.

— Kimberly B. Stratton

Biblical Theology Bulletin

A required reading for anyone who studies and teaches on this problem from the past that remains distressingly present.

Chris Frilingos

Castelli has written a masterful book about the way early Christians used martyrdom to construct a collective memory of religious suffering.

Choice