Perpetua's Journey: Faith, Gender, and Power in the Roman Empire

In the early third century, two young mothers—a noblewoman, Perpetua, and an enslaved person, Felicity—met their deaths in a gladitorial arena in Roman North Africa. Two of the many Christians who died because of their refusal to obey Roman social mores, they are unusually well-known because of the account which Perpetua wrote while imprisoned. This became the core of the narrative known as the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, and both women were acclaimed as martyrs and came to be regarded as saints by the Catholic Church.

Rea and Clarke do a good job here of using historically accurate visuals to create immediate context for students and to explicate some of the text's more obscure passages. The graphic novel part of the book is show more accompanied by analyses which help to explain broader social and historical contexts, and to discuss the various methods by which a historian might fruitfully approach a text in this genre, as well as by an up-to-date translation of the full text from the Latin. I might have liked a little more engagement on Rea's part with the ways in which religious faith (or lack thereof) can inform our readings of a hagiographic work, but she may rightfully have felt that was too sensitive a topic to be able to navigate well within such a small space.

Still, I think Perpetua's Journey is a text that's likely to go over well in the classroom, especially since I've known students to bounce hard off the Passion in the past when dealing with older translations. show less