Browse results
Abstract
The early Christian work “The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity” consists of different parts combined into a single book. Three parts are generally accepted: 1) Perpetua’s Notes, 2) Saturus’s Vision, 3) the Eyewitness story and the Prologue and Epilogue written by the same author. We argue that the Prologue plus Epilogue and the Eyewitness story had different authors and there was one more person, who was neither a participant nor a contemporary of the Carthaginian martyrdom. The results of his activity can be found in short sentences connecting the parts, as well as in violations of the structure of the narrative and a serious mistake made in the enumeration of the arrested catechumens. The authors claim also that this kind of collection as in The Passion had no analogues in ancient classical literature and followed the model of the New Testament.
Abstract
This article argues that recent scholarship on premodern composition can help to reconceptualize the presence of diverse people, including enslaved women, in scribal spaces. A brief historiographic section reviews how scholars have imagined normative Jews to be elite literate men, neglecting evidence of dictation to scribes, and thus excluded evidence of lower-class women especially from their imagining of the past. Applying Wendy Doniger’s rejection of the category of the singular male author in religious texts to Jewish texts, it proposes a heuristic tool to identify women’s presence and perspectives in ancient prose, liturgical, and ritual texts. Finally, it analyzes four incantation bowls as test-cases of this approach. For every text produced by a scribe, scholars ought to imagine a dynamic compositional environment with at least two people, and they can look for evidence of inclusion and exclusion of perspectives based on religious markers, class status, and gendered concerns.