How do we encourage students to engage actively with the primary sources that shape our understanding of the past? Oxford University Press has produced the Graphic History Series designed to address this problem, and Perpetua's Journey is latest volume in this series.
Perpetua's Journey presents the text and analysis of a diary written in 203 by a Roman North African Christian martyr. This extraordinary text was written by Perpetua herself, and it tells of her arrest, trial, and imprisonment for the crime of being a Christian during the repressive rule of Emperor Septimius Severus. The text is remarkable for several reasons: 1) it was written by a woman; 2) it reveals the development and struggles of the early Christian communities; and 3) it is a deeply personal account that describes Perpetua's dreams allowing us to glimpse the inner life of a young Roman woman. Perpetua and her companions are sentenced to the arena to be executed by wild beasts, and before entering the arena, she gives her diary to someone in the Christian community. This witness to the events in the arena finished the diary with an account of the martyrs’ death. The diary subsequently was read, treasured, and treated almost as scripture for centuries, increasing its influence. There is no question of the importance of this text in studies of the third century, and Rea and Clarke have presented it in a way that should immediately engage readers and then guide them into the historical analysis that such texts offer.
Perpetua's Journey begins with a graphic recreation of the text that takes up eighty-six pages; it is a significant portion of Rea's book, not an appendage. The illustrator, Liz Clarke, has captured the emotional component of the text that is sometimes lost in the narrative. Clarke is able to portray the range of emotions with a stroke of the pen. Through her artistic skills, we can follow the fear, pain, anger, suffering, and joy of the Christians as they undergo their ordeal. In addition, the illustrations accurately recreate the clothing, setting, and the full material life of third-century Carthage in ways a text alone cannot.
The second part of the book—the “Historical and Social Context” (89) offers a more straight-forward history of the period. Rea presents a clear summary of all the important aspects that are revealed in the text and that the source informs. As expected, Rea has sections on Roman Africa, the Emperor Septimius Severus, religion in the Roman Empire, the development of early Christianity, and various other topics. It will serve as a comprehensive and accessible guide to this period of history. Rea is even sensitive enough to an undergraduate audience to define terms that many of us take for granted—“Roman Empire,” “Christian,” and even “religion.” It is a good idea because students often will not ask and will remain confused.
While Rea quite rightly offers a clear summary of the scholarship in portraying this period of time, she brings new insights into issues of gender and power that appear in Perpetua's account. Perpetua's diary tells of a surprising incident in one of her prison dreams: Perpetua dreams she is in the arena ready to fight, and in her dream she appears naked as a man. Even Perpetua tells us she was surprised at this dream transformation. Previous scholars (including me) have struggled to understand this image in the context of Perpetua's world. Rea places it very successfully in the context of a discussion that separates gender from sex in the ancient world and shows that gender is linked to power more than it is linked to sex. If gender is defined by behavior, Perpetua can take on the image of a man when she acts as one, and remains profoundly female at the same time. This analysis should stimulate fruitful classroom discussion on sex, gender, power and cultural constructs of all these terms.
The final section of the book presents Rea's translation of the actual text of the prison diary, including a discussion of the history of the text itself. This section is a welcome addition because although the graphic portrayal is true to the text, it is still important for readers to be able to return to the diary itself to form their own analysis. The book concludes with more sections to help it be a fine classroom tool: Rea offers questions for discussion, a timeline, glossary, and a comprehensive bibliography for further reading.
Jennifer Rea and Liz Clarke have written a fine book on the martyr Perpetua and her life. I recommend it for classrooms, and indeed for anyone interested in early Christianity and the Roman Empire.
