I was in graduate school when Judith Perkins's first book, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (Routledge, 1995), came out and struck us all like a thunderbolt. Twenty-five years later, it is difficult to convey the impact it has had on the field of early Christian studies. Perkins brought together Greek novels, Apocryphal Acts, Roman oratory, medical and philosophical treatises, and saints’ lives to argue for a sea change in bodily subjectivity from the period of Augustus to Augustine: the emergence of a self empowered through suffering. It was ambitious and provocative; it remains foundational reading in late ancient and early Christian studies.

This diverse collection of essays published in Perkins's honor shares her desire to grapple with the limits and shifts in subjectivity—the sense of personhood that is shaped by and reacts to the social, cultural, political, and religious structures—through special attention to narrative. As Perkins argued in Suffering Self and her other essays and second book, narrative is an instrument of social expression and of social change. These essays take as their point of departure Perkins's appreciation for the social force of narrative subjectivity.

In a brief introduction, Janet Spittler lays out Perkins's enormous influence, both intellectually and professionally, as she has served as a cherished interlocutor and mentor for untold numbers of scholars (among whom I include myself). Spittler also includes an anecdote about how Perkins, a classicist specializing in Silver Age Latin poetry at a small college in Connecticut, became interested in early Christian social history. I will not spoil the story, but suffice to say it evokes the same themes of class, gender, family, and status that enliven Perkins's work and the essays in the volume.

Given that the essays share a focus on narrative subjectivity, Spittler has wisely chosen not to force them into an artificial organizational scheme but rather presents them alphabetically by author. As a result, the first essay, by Jo-Ann Brant, gives us a sense of how far Perkins's insights into rhetorical subjectivity will stretch as we encounter a comparison between early Christian texts and Buddhist discourses of sexual “aversion.” Later essays take us to a modern Catholic martyr's festival in Italy (Nicola Denzy Lewis) and the court of King Abgar VIII in third-century Edessa (Ilaria Ramelli), with stops along the way to engage with Euripides's Bacchae (Dennis MacDonald), James Cone's Black liberation theology (Shelly Matthews), and the wonder-working skin of the Apostle Thomas (Spittler).

The essays are uniformly written in clear and lively prose and are mostly brief, delving quickly into a topic in order to make suggestive and creative arguments. Some of these brief engagements will be less persuasive to scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity, such as David Konstan's “radical redefinition of Jesus's conception of sin” to mean “trust in Jesus’ capacity to perform miracles” (121), a definition that must gloss over, for one, the writings of Paul. (Konstan promises this argument will be more fully elaborated in a forthcoming work.)

Other essays benefit from the brevity of form, such as Matthews's compelling call to scholars to resist Luke's cruel, pro-Roman logic of crucifixion and guilt in his passion account, or Jeannie Sellick's insightful contextualization of a single wedding scene from the Acts of Thomas in the larger early Christian debates over “spiritual marriage.” In just over seven remarkable pages, Virginia Burrus brings together the talking ass from the Acts of Thomas (explored in Judith Perkins's “Animal Voices,” Religion & Theology 12 [2005]: 385–396) with a fourth-century letter that cites a different talking ass to promote ascetic silence: “There remains only the marvel of the spontaneous yet intricately choreographed dance of creatures carrying each other, forming each other, beholding each other in their animal eyes” (32).

The transformation of self and others suffuses the volume. In one of the longer and most rewarding essays, Meira Kensky argues that the Acts of Timothy mobilizes textuality to conjure pilgrim bodies and revitalize the landscape of late ancient Ephesus. (Kensky is also the first early Christian studies author I have seen cite lyrics from the Broadway musical Hamilton.) Denzey Lewis likewise links festivals, bodies, and rewritten narratives in the modern commemoration of the late ancient saint Cristina in the Italian city of Bolsena, a raucous festival that at once tames the “unruly” (66) woman saint but uses her martyrdom in the service of “competing power, exuberant sexuality, and subversive play” (69).

Both Jennifer Glancy and Spittler deal in very different ways with the split subjectivity of the Apostle Thomas (Jesus's twin in the Acts of Thomas and other Thomas literature). Glancy's meditation on the problem of identity (that is, singular selfhood) plots the alienation of a secure self across multiple social vectors: geography, gender, family, sex, status, and race. In Spittler's essay, the split identity of Thomas in the “Acts of Thomas and his Wonder-Working Skin” is a bit more literal, as Thomas is flayed under torture and, at the behest of Jesus, goes on to perform astonishing miracles with his own separated skin. Both Glancy and Spittler show that pain and suffering open up the self to identification with an “other,” an ethical possibility raised in Perkins's work. Pain as an instrument of social critique and transformation also animates Kate Cooper's study of a martyred schoolteacher in Prudentius's Peristephanon.

Because of Perkins's own clear and consistent methodological and theoretical interests, this diverse collection of topics holds together very well (one exception is Dennis MacDonald's “mimetic reading” of the book of Judith, which neither treats early Christian texts nor engages in explorations of narrative subjectivity). These essays not only share in Perkins's creative and comparative approach to history but also her insistence that stories have the power to create new and, one can only hope, better worlds.