Scott Harrower’s book aims to respond to David Wilhite’s call: ‘that the interdisciplinary use of psychological studies in historiography needs to be better thought out methodologically’ (p. 1). Harrower’s response is a neatly-organised study of three very well-known third-century North African hagiographical texts, The passion of Perpetua and Felicity, The life of Cyprian and The account of Montanus, Lucius and their companions, which he considers as ‘trauma narratives written in the wake of disaster’ (p. 1). To address Wilhite’s challenge, Harrower methodically applies psychological insights about trauma and recovery to these texts, arguing that ‘the universal human drive towards recovery from trauma [forms] a pathway to identifying the necessary elements for re-establishing a sense of safety, story, self, and community after trauma’ (p. 52). As a theologian rather than a historian, Harrower alters these four psychological elements to ‘safety with God and others, a sanctified story, a sacred sense of self, and supernatural community connections’ (p. 57) so that they conform to the religious purposes of his textual case studies. The book is divided in two main parts, with chapters i–ii presenting the main psychological and theoretical concepts used in the rest of the book, whereas chapters iii–vii apply those concepts to the three hagiographical texts mentioned. The author’s focus is on the way that these martyrological stories served to recover from the trauma of persecution and restore the community’s faith in God and the theological concepts presented in the texts themselves.

Whether or not theologians will find the book useful, for most of the theological concepts presented here are already well known and the texts well studied, historians will find much to disagree with. Indeed, the study is marred by several methodological issues that undermine its very purpose to strengthen historiography with stronger use of theoretical literature from other fields. First and foremost, the very premise of the enterprise is highly debatable, if not demonstrably misleading. Harrower assumes that it is a human impulse to recover from trauma, which the psychological studies he invokes clearly support. So far, so good. But where the issue lies is that he also assumes that early Christians and the authors of the three martyrological texts he uses as case studies shared that ‘universal’ human instinct. For a very strong case could be made – and existing scholarship has made that case, but Harrower ignores it – that these texts depict martyrs as heroes to emulate in the face of an implacably hostile enemy. In other words, rather than reading the three texts invoked here as therapeutic or meant to help with the recovery from trauma, many scholars have read them as exhorting the faithful to become martyrs themselves. That is, to embrace the trauma, rather than the recovery, and to focus on obtaining the crown of martyrs in the afterlife where they would be united with God. For Harrower, ‘recovery from trauma will essentially revolve around reclaiming a sense of safety, a story that is not dominated by trauma’ (p. 54). Yet the very survival of numerous martyrological texts commemorating the martyrs that the persecutions – the trauma – created argues for an alternative perspective. As he himself writes (p. 65), ‘For the composers of [The passion of Perpetua], these conflicts revealed the true identity of Perpetua’s father – he was an agent of the devil, sent to impede her ongoing attachment to her heavenly father, her martyrdom, and her journey to heaven (3.3).’ Indeed, attachment to her martyrdom indicates that modelling one’s behaviour on a martyr meant despising life and striving for eternal life.

This point underlines two downsides to the use of psychological insights in scholarship about ancient societies, and early Christians in particular: first, by assuming universal human behaviour in the face of trauma, it neglects the profoundly unnatural ways of thinking, for humans, that Christians adopted in glorifying death and looking forward to the afterlife over any earthly, material attachment. Second, ancient people’s psychology and their reactions to trauma might very well have differed from some modern people in one key respect, that is ancient people’s proximity to, and familiarity with violence and death. A critical question left out of the present study is therefore whether ancient people were as traumatised as modern ones would be by the same violent events or exposure to violent deaths. This is probably a very difficult question to answer decisively. But it none the less seems an important one to at least raise to ascertain whether the modern literature pertaining to psychological trauma is as relevant to early Christian hagiographical literature as the author assumes it to be, and to avoid presentism.

The lack of attention to the obvious message of hagiographical texts – that the martyr-heroes should be emulated in their disdain of physical pain and death as well as their willingness to sacrifice themselves for their faith – raises another central issue with this project: the lack of proper consideration for the historical context in which these texts were produced. First, the contextualisation of events and texts in the introduction (pp. 7–21) is unsatisfactory. Lacking awareness of local North African culture, it also leaves out an enormous amount of scholarship dedicated to these topics. For instance, Harrower contends that the Punic Wars (264–146 bce) ‘would have compounded the collective trauma experienced by the Carthaginian survivor generations, and would have led to a heightened sense of fear and threat’ (p. 14), and alludes to this distant past (over four centuries earlier than Perpetua) later on as ‘Carthage’s insecure cultural history’ (p. 63). How the Punic past meant so much to early North African Christians, however, is never explained. Dismissing the ‘crisis of the third century’ in a short paragraph, the author ignores the dynamic tension between the local North African culture and participation in the Roman imperial colonial enterprise that was a key aspect of the Carthaginian experience during the early persecutions of Christians. Engaging with the classic work of James Rives, Religion and authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine (Oxford 1995), would have been a good start in this regard. Confusion of the Roman Emperor Decius’ name – called ‘Decian’ at pp. 19–20 – as well as his characterisation of Augustine’s famous Confessions as hagiography (p. 39) do not inspire confidence either.

Second, the study suffers from a lack of contextualisation of the texts and of their context of production. Following Rebillard’s recent dating of the texts, Harrower does not address the potential editing and reworking that might have affected these documents as we have them. For instance, he cites Augustine (Sermon 313A.3) to show that listening to hagiography had a positive effect on traumatised communities (p. 40). This is precisely the issue here: Harrower considers the three hagiographical texts he studies to have been written in the immediate aftermath of the events they describe, and argues that they were written to help with recovery from the trauma of these events. Yet Augustine wrote nearly two centuries after the events described in these texts, so how can his text serve as evidence that it helped traumatised communities in regard to third-century persecutions? Maybe the texts were helpful to communities living during Augustine’s time, in different circumstances, and who did not witness the traumatic events in question. But that is not the author’s argument, for which there is no solid evidence.

Third, and surprisingly given the theological background of the author, readers are left to wonder about the intricacies of Christian Trinitarian beliefs in North Africa before the Council of Nicaea unified various local traditions. For instance, in discussing Cyprian’s relationship with God as akin to that of a patron-client relation (pp. 68–9), theological context is missing to explain the relationship of God and Christ in the thinking of the time. Given that recovering a sense of safety in God is such a key concept to Harrower’s study, contextualising the various aspects of that concept would have improved the discussion in the second half of the book.

Fourth, the argument suffers from a slippage or fuzziness between individual and community, or a lack of explanation about the role of each in this process. Indeed, Harrower contends that these trauma narratives helped with the recovery process, but is not as clear as he could be about who exactly is intended to benefit from it, and how it worked. He writes that ‘trauma narratives need to be understood as forms of community caregiving’ (p. 38). But in a society where literacy was the exception rather than the rule, additional explanations on the process by which individuals might encounter these texts or stories would have been beneficial. Should we consider the authors of these texts as motivated by a desire to help heal their community? If that is correct, would not this imply a very short lifespan for their text? Once the community was healed by the text, why the need to preserve it? The proliferation of the genre during the subsequent centuries, becoming a popular type of fiction Christian literature (Delehaye’s ‘passions épiques’), seems to point in a different direction.

At its core, Harrower’s book aimed to apply studies of trauma to early North African Christian hagiographical texts, a worthwhile enterprise to be sure. Unfortunately, for the various reasons highlighted above, the challenge to the use of psychological insights in ancient history remains standing.