This impressive and exciting collection of essays grew out of a 2017 international workshop on spatial and temporal approaches to early Christian martyrology at the University of Erfurt: ‘Martyrs in Space and Time/Die Raumzeitlichkeit des Martyriums’. The editors must be commended for the quality and coherence of the essays, which together offer a substantive sense of the tremendous insights spatio-temporal approaches can offer to historians of Christianity. All but one of the papers focuses on early Christian/late ancient milieux within Roman imperial boundaries, but the methods they employ will be helpful to any scholar interested in how martyr stories build on or serve as venues for (re)negotiating understandings of time and space.
The introduction deftly orients the reader to spatial and temporal lenses, concluding that spatio-temporal consideration of martyr stories offers a way of locating and teasing out the persuasive functions of martyrial desire – i.e., both the desire individuals might have to become martyrs and the desire communities might harbour for martyrs of their own (p. 5). Hence the title of the book. The subsequent summary of contributions (pp. 6–11) is lucid, thorough and helpful.
The first essay, ‘Sacral meals and post-traumatic places: revision and coherence in the Epistle to the Hebrews’, by Michael Thate, uses insights from trauma studies – specifically Jill Stouffer's Ethical loneliness – to highlight how the Epistle reconfigures Christ's shameful absence as a saving presence (p. 19) by cultivating in the reading community a therapeutic desire for martyrdom that utilises visions of a repaired future to imagine a perfected past and present.
Harry Maier's essay, ‘“Who are these clothed in white robes and whence have they come?”: the Book of Revelation and the spatiotemporal creation of trauma’, also centres on trauma – here the way that Revelation's author narratively produces an experience of trauma for his too-complacent contemporaries by crafting two disparate chronotopes – the idolater and the worshipper – that the reader must choose between desiring.
Christopher Frilingos uses his contribution, ‘Murder at the temple: space, time, and concealment in the Proto-gospel of James’, to reconsider his own previous work on this text, which understood Zacharias's death as a martyrdom. But considering spatial and temporal features of the account alongside the discourse of desire illuminates that Zacharias's death is not configured as a martyrdom, but as the heroic death of a man who desires the earthly safety of his wife and son.
Jan Bremmer's essay (‘Roman judge vs. Christian bishop: the trial of Phileas during the Great Persecution’) was newly crafted for this volume, and the disconnect is noticeable; considerations of time and space seem an afterthought. Additionally, while the essay is delightful in its clear and erudite exposition of the Acts of Phileas and its text-history, it is marred by a perplexing insistence on Phileas's historicity being verifiable through the available manuscripts. Bremmer seems to think that scholars who emphasise the literary nature of all martyrdom accounts are claiming the complete fictionality of those accounts, and expends much energy arguing against this straw man only to come up with precisely the same end-product as those he critiques – the realisation that surviving texts (like all historical accounts) are mediated by technologies of communication and the literary sensibilities of reception communities.
Eric Smith's ‘Pure bread of Christ: imperial necropolitics and the eucharistic martyrdom of Ignatius’ compellingly re-reads Ignatius' Letter to the Romans through the decolonising lens of Achille Mbembe's notion of necropolitics, which understands colonial power as imposing upon the colonised a generalised instrumentalisation of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations (pp. 121, 124). Smith sidesteps questions of historicity and dating to illuminate the centre-periphery dynamic that would have coloured the composition of the letter; within this context, Ignatius’ letters articulate resistance to imperial necropolitics and a reclaiming of death as something the subject, not the empire, can define.
From ‘Prison to palace: the carcer as heterotopia in North African martyr accounts’, Stephanie Cobb's contribution, is enormously helpful – Cobb concretely establishes what Roman prison conditions were like and what Roman perceptions of prison were, which in turn restores the re-imaginings of prison in North African martyr texts to their original revolutionary force. Cobb uses Foucault's notion of heterotopia to underscore the significance of this reimagination as generating a distinct Christian perception of space and time – prison becomes radically reimagined as a space where the future joy of heaven can be experienced in the present.
In her essay, ‘Bones ground by wild beast's teeth: late ancient imaginations of the death of Ignatius of Antioch’, Nicole Hartmann brilliantly uncovers and compares competing configurations of space-time present in the two independent narratives of Ignatius’ death, expanding the ways we can understand the late antique cultural battleground of the cult of saints (p. 172).
Co-editor Katarina Waldner offers yet another example of how much is to be gained from employing a spatio-temporal heuristic in ‘When the city cries: the spacetime of persecution in Eusebius’ Martyrs of Palestine’. Eusebius' writing takes on a whole new worldview-constructing dimension when we realise how he has fashioned individual trauma as universally Christian by manipulating temporality and location.
Finally, Jennifer Otto, in ‘Making martyrs Mennonite’, looks at the ways in which seventeenth-century Anabaptists selectively retold early Christian martyrdom accounts so as to bolster their own understanding of their denomination's place in Christian history. By noting (but not emphasising) dates and by vetting each early Christian martyrdom story through Mennonite doctrines, the Martyrs Mirror helps give the impression of a singular, Mennonite, Christian reality.
One remarkable feature of these essays is the skill, fruitfulness and (generally speaking) clarity that each displays – not only does each essay have unique subject matter to introduce, each must also quadrangulate time, space, desire and martyrdom. For as complex as these articles’ concepts are, each essay manages to be eminently readable and thought-provoking. There are significant typographical and grammatical errors that occasionally obscure the authors’ intended meaning (Hartmann's essay suffers most) but aside from that small quibble, this is ultimately a tremendously valuable book which I suspect every martyrdom scholar will delight in.
