1.1 Overview

Following six missing pages that once opened the Berlin Codex, the Gospel of Mary begins with ‘the Saviour’ (the risen Jesus) teaching his disciples. A page later, Jesus disappears and Mary takes his place. She comforts the weeping disciples named as Peter, Andrew and Levi, allaying their fears about potential persecution and reminding them that Jesus will protect them. She then recounts how ‘the Lord’ appeared to her in a vision, in which he instructed her about the ritualistic or post-mortem ascent of the soul through hostile cosmic powers. Following Mary's vision (and another four-page hiatus), Peter and Andrew challenge her words and authority. Previously silent Levi jumps in to defend her, belittling Peter and ultimately reminding them all of the Saviour's instructions to preach the gospel.

1.2 Mary: The Beloved Disciple, the Paraclete and the Apostle to the Apostles

There can be no doubt that Mary is a laudable disciple in the extant gospel. The male disciples affirm the Saviour's love for her: Peter says, ‘Sister, we know that the Saviour loved you more than the rest of womankind’ (10.1–3),Footnote ⁴ and Levi corrects Peter, reminding him that actually the Saviour loved Mary more than ‘us’ (18.15),Footnote ⁵ meaning the men in attendance. All this talk of ‘love’ has raised comparisons between Mary and the Johannine ‘Beloved Disciple’, who is the guarantor of the reliability of the gospel (John 21.24).Footnote ⁶ The Saviour himself never professes his love for her but does say that she is ‘blessed’ due to her ‘unwavering’ – a key spiritual virtue in antiquityFootnote ⁷ – when he appears in her vision (10.14–15). The vision holds the key to the disciples' salvation, rendering Mary guarantor of the true gospel.

Mary and Jesus' relationship goes beyond that of a loving teacher and disciple, such as we see in the cases of Mary, Martha and Lazarus in John 11.5, or Peter in John 21.15–17. She takes his place; she is his successor. The descriptor ‘blessed’ (, 10.14) aligns her with Jesus, who is called ‘the blessed one’ earlier in the gospel (, 8.10). They are also paralleled through their actions:

The use of exactly the same phrase, (‘greeted/said farewell to them all’), serves to parallel the two characters. Hartenstein takes this parallelism further, wondering whether ‘arose’ (), used here to denote Mary standing up, may have been employed for Jesus' resurrection in the gospel's lost beginning.Footnote ⁸ At the end of Mary's vision-recollection, we read that ‘she fell silent because the Saviour had only spoken with her to this point’ (17.8–9). The silence imitates the soul at the culmination of its ascent, and if the soul belongs to the Saviour, as Tuckett argues, then ‘there may be a sense in which the person of Mary and the person of the Saviour have become almost one’.Footnote ⁹ However, the soul may be an unidentified Christian undergoing a soteriological journey,Footnote ¹⁰ and so Mary's silence represents her own state of salvation.

We see nothing of the Mary–Jesus pairing in the opening dialogue – Mary is absent in the extant beginning, which raises the question of whether she was there at all. She only appears after Jesus' departure, and it is precisely because of Jesus' exit that Mary enters. The successive nature of the two characters points away from a likeness to the Johannine ‘Beloved Disciple’ and towards a Paraclete-type role.Footnote ¹¹ In John, the Paraclete comforts and reassures the disciples following Jesus' departure (John 15.26; 16.7–13), and reminds them of what Jesus taught (14.26). Mary comforts the disciples, inviting them to give thanks and turning their hearts ‘to the Good’ (9.14–22). Furthermore, the Paraclete will speak only what it hears and nothing on its own (John 16.13), and Mary so clearly only tells the others what she has heard from the Saviour that she stops speaking precisely because the Saviour had stopped speaking at that exact moment. She is in tandem with Jesus but always acts on his authority.

Mary's authority is repeatedly linked to her gender. Her womanhood is specified three times (in a text of which just over eight pages are preserved). The first time, Peter only acknowledges her esteemed status in terms of her gender, ‘more than the rest of womankind’ (10.2–3, quoted above). The second time, Peter refuses to believe that the Saviour would speak privately with a woman and asks if the men are supposed to listen to her (17.18–22, quoted below). On the third occasion, Levi refers to her as ‘this woman’ (18.9), pointing to her gender rather than her individual identity.Footnote ¹² Mary's vindication as well as the opposition, discussed below, is formed in reference to her femaleness.

Mary Magdalene was already called an ‘apostle’ by Hippolytus (In Cant. 25), perhaps inspiring contemporary women to follow in her footsteps. She plays a significant role in the Gospel of Thomas, the Sophia of Jesus Christ, the Dialogue of the Saviour and the Pistis Sophia, as well as conversing with the freshly resurrected Jesus in John 20. Whether or not the Gospel of Mary itself inspired women of ancient Christian communities is unanswerable but likely. Although no patristic source mentions the text, the three extant fragments show that it was significant enough to be circulated and translated. Clearly it was read and used. This gospel, the gospel attributed to a woman, must have had some influence in ancient Christian communities. It has certainly been given a voice in modern scholarship and allowed Mary Magdalene to be honoured with titles such as ‘apostle to the apostles’,Footnote ¹³ ‘the first apostle’Footnote ¹⁴ and ‘the first woman apostle’.Footnote ¹⁵

1.3 Mad, Bad and Unable to Preach

In the Gospel of Mary, Mary's unequivocal prowess and authority do not free her from being constructed firmly on her side of the pervading male/female dichotomy. Her revelation and character are continuously gendered and, in some instances, such gendering raises questions about the extent to which Mary should be seen as an ideal of early Christian women.

The Saviour's revelation to Mary is problematic in a number of ways. It is secretive, it is a vision, and it contains strange teachings – all of which Peter and Andrew challenge:

The first problem is the possibility that Mary is lying or mad. Visions can always be challenged. There were acceptable modes of prophesying associated with rationality; otherwise, it was considered madnessFootnote ¹⁶ and Andrew clearly thinks Mary's matches the latter. Mary is well aware of the subtext of his challenge, asking him: ‘Do you think that I have made this up or that I am lying about the Saviour?’ (18.3–5). By implicitly questioning her sanity Andrew might as well have called her a ‘hysterical female’, as Celsus understood Mary Magdalene to have been when she claimed that she saw the risen Jesus (Cels. 2.55). Hysteria, madness and irrationality were common gendered insults, as well as belonging in the private sphere as opposed to the public male world of rationality.Footnote ¹⁷ Having Andrew employ this precise rhetorical offence accentuates Mary's femaleness.

Second, Andrew refuses to believe Mary on grounds of the content of the revelation: he claims that the ascent of the soul is alien to Jesus' teachings. The evangelist is self-consciously presenting Mary as ‘proto-heretical’ and therefore the text aligns her with the gendered rhetoric of the heresiologists who write of hysterical, easily seduced women succumbing to heresies. Irenaeus even says that heretical leaders who indulge female prophecy fuel the deception of such ‘silly women’ (Haer. 1.13.4–6). In the end, Levi defends Mary's authority and she does win the battle; but why raise these questions at all? Is the evangelist not fuelling second-century anxieties?

Third, the female character succumbs to emotion. Mary weeps (18.1). Of course, weeping is not always negative or female (Jesus wept!), but her previous steadfastness was in juxtaposition with the weeping of the male disciples. She even told them off for crying (9.14). Although the men weep in fear and Mary weeps that they deny their salvation (or that they attack her person), the effect of making the once-steadfast woman weep is that, as Tuckett writes, ‘Mary herself is here showing the fallibility and weakness displayed by the other (male) disciples earlier’.Footnote ¹⁸ The emotional distress leads to Levi standing up to defend her and consequently having the last word. King argues that Mary is ‘keeping to the traditional role of female modesty and passivity’.Footnote ¹⁹ Her silence is womanly. Tuckett takes this further, reckoning Mary's meekness a problem:

We cannot get away from the fact that Mary – having taught the disciples, having reached soteriological silence and having broken her silence by weeping and asking Peter and Andrew why they do not believe her – here becomes the meek mute that women were expected to be.

The final scene raises an astonishing question: was Mary ever supposed to preach? At the end of the text a difference between the Greek and Coptic versions has the potential to change the gospel's entire message. Although the Greek MS is fragmentary, it is unlikely that it read anything different from:

The manuscript is damaged but as the singular verb ἤρχεν matches ὁ Λευείς, it is safe to assume that Levi preaches alone. The Coptic, on the other hand, reads:

The plural is unmistakable, (‘they began’) corresponds to (‘they preach’), producing a striking difference from the Greek fragment. But who are ‘they’? Do Peter and Andrew follow Levi and decide to accept Mary's teaching? Or are they left behind as Mary and Levi go out, causing a permanent breach between the parties? Or is it just the men that preach, leaving weeping Mary behind? Does the Coptic text make for a greater reconciliation or rule it out altogether? Does it allow for an egalitarian view of apostleship? Tuckett writes of being left in a ‘textual limbo’ over whether the rift is healed,Footnote ²¹ and the same limbo applies to Mary's status.

The Greek text most definitely undermines Mary's authority. Levi preaches alone. Peter and Andrew refuse to accept Mary's teaching and/or Mary is not invited to evangelise. Perhaps Mary never received the Saviour's command to preach – in her Paraclete-type role, she appeared after he had left.Footnote ²² In both the Coptic and Greek versions, it is quite possible that, in the end, the woman stays at home.

Even if Mary's revelation is ‘strange’, it comes with the authority of the Saviour. The Saviour appeared to her, loved her and entrusted to her the highest soteriological teaching. However, her gender is an issue. A mere mention of Mary's femaleness would already highlight gender (in)equality; but instead we see an excessive preoccupation with it. Each argument against her is infused with gendered rhetoric. In the end, Mary is not just a disciple, she is a female disciple and it is left unclear whether her femaleness is an issue in her capacity to become an apostle. Mary is presented within the cultural gender dynamics of her time; by trying to overcome them, the author reinscribes them. Certainly the evangelist has egalitarian intentions yet cannot prevent a fetishization of her gender.

2.1 Overview

Thecla is a high-born woman, the ‘first of the Iconians’ (4.1), who falls in love with Paul's teachings.Footnote ²³ Converted by his ascetic message, she spurns her fiancé and pursues Paul. Her new life of chastity threatens the city's social norms, and so she is condemned to the stake. But, as the pyre is lit, God opens the heavens and heavy rain quenches the fire. Thecla escapes and finds Paul, who refuses to baptise her but takes her to Antioch. In Antioch, a man named Alexander desires her and gropes her. Thecla does not feel that this is appropriate and tells him so in no uncertain words. Alexander is not happy and condemns her to face wild animals in the arena. The women of the city call this an ‘evil judgement’ (4.2). At this point, Queen Tryphaena enters the story – a powerful woman who has lost her husband and daughter and is keen to help Thecla and preserve her virginity. Her late daughter appears to her in a dream asking her to protect Thecla, who has the power to free her from proto-purgatory. In the arena, a fearsome lioness befriends Thecla, failing to do her murderous duty, so that Thecla must enter the arena a second time to ensure her martyrdom. Lions and bears enter; the lioness kills the bear and battles with the male lion, leading to both their deaths. Other animals enter, at which point Thecla ‘turned and saw a great ditch full of water’ (4.9) filled with voracious seals. She dives into the ditch baptising herself, and, due to a flash of fiery light, her nudity is concealed and the seals die. More animals enter, and the female spectators throw their scented possessions into the arena knocking them all unconscious. Thecla's legs are then strapped to raging bulls, but the rope burns and she is set free. Due to all the excitement, Queen Tryphaena passes out – at which point the games must stop, and Thecla is released. She meets again with Paul, who, although surprised to see her, finally stops underestimating her and allows her to teach the Christian message. She is then said to bring ‘light to many by the Word of God’ (4.18) before dying.

2.2 ‘Exemplum Theclae’: Autonomous Teacher, Baptiser and Apostle

Thecla is an exceptional woman: the governor ‘wept and marvelled at the power that was in her’ (3.22), she makes a mockery of the powerful Alexander and is not harmed by the flames at the stake or the deadly lioness, ravenous seals or any of the other beasts. The control that Thecla exerts over her own body by refusing to marry, relentlessly preserving her virginity and welcoming various forms of potential death is seen as an escape from the social and sexual domination of the patriarchy.Footnote ²⁴ Her chosen path presents such a challenge to the status quo that her own mother sentences her as a means to preserve the social order (3.20). God appears to support Thecla's decisions as divine intervention is consistently in her favour and it is through God's agency that she baptises herself. After her baptism, Paul accepts her as a worthy teacher and invites her to ‘teach the word of God’ (4.16). Essentially, Thecla becomes an apostle.

Thecla became an exemplum for women in early Christian communities. Tertullian tells us:

There might be a radical ascetic message in the Acts of Thecla, but it could not be condemned for heretical reasons, rendering it a much greater threat to Tertullian's hierarchical expectations. As Hylen writes, ‘if Thecla is a book embraced by heretical, active women, and if the orthodox church eliminates such leadership by women, it would be reasonable to expect that Thecla's story would quickly die out in the church’.Footnote ²⁷ Instead, she became extremely popular. Tertullian is the only early Christian writer who actively opposes the Acts of Thecla, while Origen quotes it and the Cappadocian Fathers laud Thecla as an exemplary virgin and martyr.Footnote ²⁸ Likewise, Thecla has been a prominent character in the feminist scholarship of early Christianity.Footnote ²⁹ Studies have focused on Thecla as a woman's storyFootnote ³⁰ and employed Tertullian to demonstrate that women were using her ‘as a means of resisting an all-male sacerdotal institution’.Footnote ³¹

2.3 The Sexualized Subordinate

Despite the dominant feminist reading of Thecla, there are a few scholars who have picked up on the less respectable ways in which the woman is presented in this text. Ratcliffe argues that the text is ‘highly androcentric and marginalising in its treatment of Thecla’,Footnote ³² and Boughton raises concerns about modern readings of Thecla being ‘feminist fantasy’.Footnote ³³ Throughout the text, Thecla is constructed as a sexual object and continually presented as subordinate to Paul.

Thecla's gender allows the Acts of Thecla to be called a ‘romantic novel’,Footnote ³⁴ and as such it employs double entendre in depicting the chaste romance between Paul and Thecla. The text is couched in innuendo: Thecla wants to ‘go in’ to Paul (3.7), and her ‘virginal modesty’ is being ‘burdened painfully’ (3.8).Footnote ³⁵ She takes off her jewellery (removes items of clothing) and kisses Paul's bonds (3.18). They are ‘united by means of love’ (3.19). She wants to cut her hair to appear more masculine but Paul replies that she should not do so, as she is ‘beautiful’ (εὔμορφος, 3.25).Footnote ³⁶ This is a strange response as Paul should not have any feelings towards Thecla's attractiveness. But we are assured that a sexual relationship is not the case: Thecla falls in love with Paul's teachings. And to ensure that she has the willpower to keep her hands off Paul, he is described as short, bald and bow-legged (3.3).Footnote ³⁷

Thecla gives up everything for Paul yet he continually dismisses and deserts her. At the same time as prohibiting her hair cutting, Paul refuses to baptise Thecla, despite her pleas. He tells her that the time is not right (3.25). As Wehn writes, ‘[t]he Paul of the Acts of Thecla sees in Thecla primarily a beautiful woman … [A]s a woman susceptible to seduction … he does not trust her.’Footnote ³⁸ Not only will he not baptise her, he repeatedly abandons her. At her condemnation to the stake, a terrifying ordeal for a young woman, she ‘was as a lamb in the desert looking around for the shepherd, so she sought for Paul’ (3.21). But Paul is not there.Footnote ³⁹ After entrapping her into a quasi-sexual relationship, after her renunciation of everything that she once held dear, after her subsequent conviction to the stake, Paul has dumped her. We later find out that Paul has been ‘moaning’ for Thecla (3.23–4), but that does not sweeten the bad taste left by the previous chapters – and Paul is not a changed man. When Alexander wants Thecla, Paul tells him ‘I do not know the woman of whom you speak, nor is she mine’ (4.1). On understanding Thecla to be single, Alexander thinks he will take his chances and approaches her forcefully. Essentially, Paul leaves her to be raped!Footnote ⁴⁰ Thecla attacks Alexander in return, saving herself, but Alexander retaliates by condemning her to death in the arena. Could Paul have prevented this? He doesn't even stick around to see the outcome – he is nowhere to be seen in the arena scenes.

After baptising herself, Thecla finds Paul again and he is surprised to see her and considers ‘whether some other temptation might be upon her’ (4.15). Barrier writes:

This is not just an ‘anticlimactic’ point; it is a crushing point. Paul still cannot bring himself to trust Thecla. The end of the scene appears more positive with Paul telling her to teach the word of God (4.16). MacDonald writes that Paul ‘ordains her to teach’,Footnote ⁴² but Wehn has shown that this is not quite accurate, arguing that Thecla has confronted Paul with ‘a fait accompli when she says “I am going to Iconium”; Paul's reply [to “Go and teach the word”] … can be understood only as a belated assent to something that Thecla has already done – for we must assume that she has founded a community in Tryphaena's house’.Footnote ⁴³

This raises the question of just how authoritative Thecla actually is. Thecla baptises only herself, and she is not a formal teacher.Footnote ⁴⁴ Boughton argues that

Ratcliffe understands this portrayal of Thecla in light of the text's creation ‘for love of Paul’, as Tertullian tells us. This is ‘not a love of Thecla’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Thecla chiefly serves to demonstrate the greater status of Paul. Thus: ‘The exemplum Theclae that Tertullian mentions is not one that is presented in the text, but rather is found in a wider Thecla tradition, one that the APTh alludes to, but does not wholly represent.’Footnote ⁴⁷ The Paul–Thecla relationship is a reflection of the makeup of the Acts – the Acts of Thecla is simply a supplementary part of the Acts of Paul.

It is not only in her pseudo-romance with Paul that Thecla's gender is accentuated. Sexual language does not recede when her lover is absent – the imagery in the near-martyrdom scenes is just as full on, if not more so. Naked, young, beautiful Thecla is put to the stake (3.22) and on entering the arena, she ‘was stripped and received an undergarment and was cast into the stadium’ (4.8). Bremmer tries to downplay the eroticism underlying Thecla's nakedness: ‘Undoubtedly, there is a sexual aspect to this particular treatment, but it is sometimes overlooked that males as well were executed naked.’Footnote ⁴⁸ But there is an uncanny amount of description concerning what Thecla is, or is not, wearing. Ratcliffe is right to note that the text ‘presents a woman's body in what is essentially a voyeuristic and, indeed, pornographic, way [that] assumes a male gaze at variance with a female view of a woman who is seen to be empowered and liberated’,Footnote ⁴⁹ and in a culture of honour and shame ‘Thecla bears the ultimate humiliation through the continued exposure of her body’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The covering of Thecla at her baptism makes clear that nakedness was an undesirable state: ‘there was a cloud of fire around her, so that neither the beasts could touch her, nor could they see her naked’ (4.9). Yet even baptism does not save her from objectification. It is after her baptism that the most pornographic episode is narrated: Alexander, her ‘admirer’, binds her feet to two bulls and places hot iron under their genitals so that they might rip her legs apart (4.10). Thankfully God intervenes and the binding is incinerated.

It is difficult to decide whether the text subverts Thecla despite its attempt at autonomising her or whether irony is its intention. Thecla succeeds at freeing herself from her fiancé but becomes captured by Paul. In fact, the catalyst for the entire plot is Thecla's obsessive desire for this man. She teaches women, baptises herself, defeats Satan and is favoured by God but never holds real power over any male. Even after she defeats Alexander, he asserts his dominance by condemning her to death. Even after she has baptised herself, Paul is still wary of her. As Ratcliffe writes, ‘despite her rebellion against family and marriage … eventually achieving some level of autonomy and freedom, Thecla in reality never disrupts the pattern of male power and dominance in speech, action or characterization’.Footnote ⁵¹ At the end of the day, she is a lovesick girl and an objectified, naked body with spread legs.

3.1 Overview

Vibia Perpetua is a 22-year-old, high-born, well-educated woman – a wife, a beloved daughter, a sister and a mother with ‘an infant son still at the breast’ (2.2).Footnote ⁵⁴ She disregards her father's pleas and her child's needs (when her father says, ‘Think about your son who will not be able to live without you’, 5.4) by asserting her commitment to martyrdom. In prison, Perpetua has a series of visions: one of a treacherous climb up a ladder where she steps on a serpent's head in order to be greeted by a white-haired man with the words ‘You are welcome here, child’ (4.9); one of her late brother in proto-purgatory; one of his salvation; and another of her defeating an Egyptian in the amphitheatre. In the final vision, we read, ‘I was stripped naked, and I became a man’ (10.7), which allows her to engage in physical combat. On awaking, Perpetua realises that martyrdom is not a battle with beasts but a defeat of ‘the devil’ (10.14).

A prevalent subject in Perpetua's diary is her father. He often visits her, begging her to change her mind. His character evokes both cruelty and compassion: he is angered at the name Christian (3.3), his pleas are called ‘the arguments of the devil’ (3.3) and he refuses to hand over her baby to feed (6.8), yet he is also ‘worn with worry’ (5.1; 9.2), feels ‘great sadness’ (5.6), and he speaks ‘out of love for [her]’ (5.5) with ‘such words … as might move creation itself’ (9.2).

Perpetua is martyred alongside another woman, a slave named Felicitas. There is no hint of her presence outside the narrator's prose – neither Perpetua nor Saturus mention her. Felicitas is pregnant when detained, and, as pregnant women cannot be publicly punished, she is concerned that she will not die with her friends. But, thanks to their prayers, Felicitas delivers three days before the execution. Perpetua's motherly concerns are narrated – she worries for her son, his hunger and who will raise him. For Felicitas, the narrator recounts a painful labour, but in what follows all we read is that ‘she gave birth to a baby girl, whom a certain sister brought up as her own daughter’ (15.7). Both Perpetua and the narrator refer to the women's post-partum bodies: Perpetua writes of her experience of weaning, and the narrator refers to Felicitas' leaking milk.

In the arena, the Christians are divided by sex: the women protest against being dressed as priestesses of Ceres (and the men, the priests of Saturn), and the women stand side-by-side to face a savage female cow (ferocissima vacca, 20.1), whereas the men face a leopard and boar. In the end, Perpetua, on awakening from an ecstatic trance, guides the gladiator's trembling hand to slit her own throat. The narrator writes: ‘Perhaps such a woman, feared as she was by the unclean spirit, could not have been killed unless she herself had willed it’ (21.10).

3.2 ‘Fortissima’ Perpetua

Martyr narratives are sites for ethical cultivation, and Perpetua is a martyr exemplum. Yet Perpetua and Felicitas are not typical martyr exempla; they are female martyr exempla. Perpetua's magna dignatio (‘great status’) is recognised by the prison official (9.1), and her brother and father address her as Domina (‘Lady’).Footnote ⁵⁵ She receives divine endorsements; like Mary, she communicates with the Lord through visions, and as with Thecla, the power of prayer saves Perpetua's brother (comparable to Tryphaena's daughter), as well as bringing on Felicitas’ labour and allowing Perpetua to transcend the arena. Moreover, God allows Perpetua's baby to self-wean, her not to suffer inflammation, and miraculously eradicates any hint of post-partum anxiety as Perpetua claims that she is ‘not … tormented by worry for my child’ (6.8). Felicitas too is almost certainly over the moon following her newborn daughter's adoption.

Perpetua throws traditional gender roles into disarray. She sacrifices her old life, of Roman values, family, pietas and worldly ties, for Christ. Perpetua's decisive triumph over the patriarchal system is demonstrated by her father when he kisses her hands and throws himself at her feet,Footnote ⁵⁶ no longer calling her ‘daughter’ but Domina (5.5); and on a later visit, he ‘began to tear out his beard and to throw it on the ground’ (9.2), emasculating himself.Footnote ⁵⁷ Her grey-haired father is replaced by the grey-haired heavenly father.

As a Christian willing to die for her beliefs, Perpetua became a role model. Again, we meet Tertullian, a contemporary of Perpetua, who calls her the ‘most heroic martyr’ (De anima, 55.4–5).Footnote ⁵⁸ He generally takes a more dismal view of the opposite sex but has one word to characterise Perpetua: fortissima. Her heroism was celebrated throughout North Africa with annual re-enactments of her vision.Footnote ⁵⁹ And Augustine invites men to ‘admire’ Perpetua and Felicitas with the justification that their ‘masculine mind’ conceals their female flesh (Sermo 280).

3.3 Two Lactating Mothers; One Mistress of God

Perpetua and Felicitas are continuously cast in gendered roles through both the language and events.Footnote ⁶⁰ There is a solitary point in the text where Perpetua is not characterised by her familial relationships or her female body – the point at which she loses that body. In her final vision, she writes, ‘I was stripped naked, and I became a man’ (10.7). Exegetes read this gender-inversion as Perpetua renouncing her womanhood to be martyred, but in actuality it is a single, unique instance in a world of accentuated feminisation.Footnote ⁶¹ Read in light of the surrounding text, it only serves to stress that Perpetua is indeed a woman.

Perpetua sees herself as a mother; the narrator does not. Instead he invents another woman to take on this role. That Felicitas is nowhere mentioned in Perpetua's diary – strange considering they would be in similar situations – suggests that she was a later invention, included to accentuate the model of mother turned martyr. Footnote ⁶² Perpetua's post-partum body is removed from her and put onto Felicitas, giving way to a different characterisation of Perpetua – a characterisation that would not be appropriate for a slave – as an object of attraction. In the end, the composite text has not just one lactating mother, but two. Two mothers give up their infant for Christ.

The exaggerated exemplum of ‘sacrificing mother’ is both admired and undesirable. Birthing, breastfeeding and other performances of motherhood are women's experiences, impressive as such for male readers but also reifying women as ‘other’. The endurance of labour is commendable and, in Felicitas’ case, the birth is excruciatingly painful.Footnote ⁶³ Her stamina is impressive. Both women's willingness to abandon young, nursing infants (merely days old in the case of Felicitas) for Christianity may be seen as the ultimate sacrificial act, before martyrdom of course.Footnote ⁶⁴ Stressing the mothering roles of the women also stresses their ability to transcend typical weaknesses of their gender. They are not defined by labour pain or their children. The text substantiates Augustine's praise of their ‘masculine minds’.

Yet these actions are still firmly in the female realm, and thus ‘other’, and so it must be shown that their action is not comparable to male action. In the Passion, motherhood and particularly birth are contrasted with martyrdom. Felicitas rejoices in ‘advancing from blood to blood, from the midwife to a net-bearing gladiator – now to be washed after childbirth in a second baptism’ (18.3). Also, the conversation between the guard and Felicitas links the two:

It is the second ‘blood’ that is likened to baptism, and only in the second blood will Felicitas not feel pain because Christ will be within her (although she also has ‘another inside her’ during labour). There is nothing remotely sacred about the first blood: Felicitas says that she will suffer alone in pain, and she must be washed afterwards. Martyrdom and birth are paralleled with the aim of showing birth as utterly inferior to martyrdom – it is grotesque, it epitomises the absence of the (masculine) divine.

Yet it is not breastfeeding or birthing that most genders the female characters – it is how they are portrayed in the arena. At the hands of the narrator, Perpetua is typecast as a fierce young woman, a type of semi-divinity with a formidable ‘shining face’ (18.2). Perpetua is the maiden whereas Felicitas is the mother:

In this contrasting picture of the two women, Perpetua adopts an image of a rich, young, unmarried girl – a virgin – becoming a passive object of attraction, whereas Felicitas the slave is the woman with the tired eyes, saggy belly and leaking breasts.

There are a number of more subtle ways in which Perpetua's and Felicitas’ gender is accentuated in this scene. The act of being stripped and covered with restraining nets is not mentioned in the narrative of their male companions, making it somewhat more salacious. Vierow likens the nakedness to Thecla's, writing that ‘[v]oyeurism seems to be built into the genre’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Their assassin is a vacca, matching beast with gender.Footnote ⁶⁶ Perpetua suddenly becomes concerned to cover herself, noticing that ‘her tunic was ripped on the side, and so she drew it up to cover her thigh, more mindful of her modesty than her suffering’ (20.4), which was followed by a request for a pin for her ‘dishevelled hair’ (20.5). As Kitzler argues:

In the words chosen to affirm Perpetua's status as an audacious demi-goddess, so powerful that mere humans must avert their eyes, the narrator actually does more to reaffirm her subordinate gender and subvert her to male (although divine) sexual domination:

By deeming Perpetua a wife of Christ the narrator places her within the social structure of the household and right back into the husband–wife construction from which the Passion had helped its protagonist escape.Footnote ⁶⁸ But she is not just Christ's wife; she is God's ‘darling’. In Perpetua's own understanding, she renounced her earthly father and gained a heavenly father. However, Sigismund-Nielsen argues that the narrator had a different perception of her relationship to the divine: ‘[N]ow she has become matrona Christi and dei delicata, the bride of Christ and the whore of God’.Footnote ⁶⁹ The ‘whore’ translation may be too strong here but ‘darling’ is too virtuous. Delicata has erotic connotations, and it is used twice of Perpetua, once as a ‘delicate young girl’ and the other as the ‘darling of God’. She is attractive, and she is God's favourite. The entire picture of her in this scene is erotically charged: she is naked and covered with nets, her hair flowing, her ripped tunic exposing her young body. Perhaps not a shameful ‘whore’ but certainly not a virtuous ‘darling’, Perpetua is cast as God's delicata, his mistress, his ‘bit-on-the-side’.

In the Passion, Perpetua is thought of highly, being described as sanctissima Perpetua (16.1) and tanta femina (21.10); yet her privilege, like Thecla's, lies within the ‘normative construct of male authority’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Perpetua might liberate herself from her role as daughter and mother but she remains entrapped in a world of male control. Fighting against the patriarchal system, she remains the subject of voyeuristic language. The narrator commends her autonomy and her decisions yet cannot help himself from imprisoning her within the weaker side of the gender dichotomy.Footnote ⁷¹ The rhetoric used transforms two already female martyrs into exaggerated images of femininity. In spite of the strong female voice within the text, the Passion depicts (and invents) women in a way that ultimately fetishizes their gender.