Three Persian Martyr Acts is a quality contribution to the Persian Martyr Acts series from Gorgias Press. In line with the aims of the series, the volume offers clear and learned English translations of three Syriac hagiographies of martyrdoms that took place in the Sasanian Empire. The main binding feature of the three hagiographies collected here is their shared temporal setting in the reign of the Sasanian king Shapur II (309–379 CE). In the following, I will highlight select themes from each hagiography that deserve further attention in future scholarship. The following notes should be read as complementary to the contributors’ rich and insightful discussions provided in both the volume’s introduction and footnotes.

The volume’s first hagiography is The Acts of Miles (BHO 772). Judging by the remarkable textual consistency by which the work has been preserved in its manuscript tradition, whose earliest witnesses trace to the fifth century, The Acts of Miles is one of the oldest surviving Syriac hagiographies we have. Although a brief work, it seems to me that the text provided foundational hagiographical models on which later Syriac hagiographies would rely. To highlight just a few notable elements that are repeated in later Syriac hagiographies, consider Miles’s travel account to Jerusalem and Egypt (§5), the emphasis on Jacob of Nisibis’s venerable status (§6), the miracle of Miles walking on a river’s water (§12), and the sequences of seemingly unrelated healing miracles performed during Miles’s travels (§7–12). The second hagiography is The Martyrdom of Zebina and His Companions (BHO 531), another early work whose oldest manuscript witness dates to the sixth century. Although again we deal with a brief text, a peculiar aspect of it is the discrepancy between the hagiography’s title, which promises to recount the martyrdom of Zebina and his companions (who are nevertheless mentioned solely in the work’s opening rubric and in a brief note in §3), and the work’s narratives that focus exclusively on the martyrdom of two monks, Yawnan and Brikishoʿ. This discrepancy opens the possibility of an editorial intervention in the work, which complicates its textual history. The volume’s third hagiography is The Forty Martyrs (BHO 5). As opposed to the introduction’s suggestion that the compositions of all three hagiographies dates to the fifth century based on the earliest manuscripts in which they are transmitted (p. 1), The Forty Martyrs seems like a later work, particularly due to the dating of its oldest manuscript witness to the ninth century (p. 16). A clarification of the work’s fifth-century dating by the contributors would have therefore been welcomed. Next to the uncertain dating of its composition, among the more notable features of the work is its lengthy prologue (§2–5), which is almost as long as the hagiography’s narratives, as well as the repeated accusation against the future martyrs that they acted as spies for the Roman Empire (a charge which they deny in §10).

Three Persian Martyr Acts would be particularly useful to scholars interested in late antique hagiographies, Roman-Sasanian relations, and Mesopotamian Christianity more broadly. The volume’s translations are printed facing the original Syriac from Paul Bedjan’s 1891 edition and are annotated with valuable literary, historical, and philological insights. As mentioned, the contributors of this volume also included a detailed introduction to the three hagiographies, as well as brief outlines of each, a bibliography, and an index.