Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (Gender, Theory, and Religion) by Elizabeth Castelli (PDF)

Description

Martyrs are produced, Elizabeth Castelli suggests, not by the lived experience of particular historical individuals but by the stories that are later told about them. And the formulaic character of stories about past suffering paradoxically serves specific theological, cultural, or political ends in the present. Martyrdom and Memory explores the central role of persecution in the early development of Christian ideas, institutions, and cultural forms and shows how the legacy of Christian martyrdom plays out in today’s world. In the pre-Constantinian imperial period, the conflict between Roman imperial powers and the subject Christian population hinged on competing interpretations of power, submission, resistance, and victory. This book highlights how both Roman and Christian notions of law and piety deployed the same forms of censure and critique, each accusing the other of deviations from governing conventions of gender, reason, and religion. Using Maurice Halbwachs’s theoretical framework of collective memory and a wide range of Christian sources—autobiographical writings, martyrologies and saints’lives, sermons, art objects, pilgrimage souvenirs, and polemics about spectacle—Castelli shows that the writings of early Christians aimed to create public and ideologically potent accounts of martyrdom. The martyr’s story becomes a “usable past” and a “living tradition” for Christian communities and an especially effective vehicle for transmitting ideas about gender, power, and sanctity. An unlikely legacy of early Christian martyrdom is the emergence of modern “martyr cults” in the wake of the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School. Focusing specifically on the martyr cult associated with one of the victims, Martyrdom and Memory argues that the Columbine story dramatically expresses the ongoing power of collective memory constructed around a process of rendering tragic suffering redemptive and meaningful. In the wake of Columbine and other contemporary legacies of martyrdom’s ethical ambivalence, the global impact of Christian culture making in the early twenty-first century cannot be ignored. For as the last century’s secularist hypothesis sits in the wings, “religion” returns to center stage with one of this drama’s most contentious yet riveting stars: the martyr.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Elizabeth Castelli’s work is very strong by the most high standards. It is not only deep in developing the main topic of study – making of attractive and contagious myth of martyrdom out of primitive sacrificial theology rooted in Judaism, and quite utilitarian reasoning of the endured personal existence in the collective memory, strengthening of the cult, and creating spectacle which would please God.The research has an extended, encyclopedic overview of the related areas of the study: theory of collective memory, Roman views on Christians, nature of the Roman religion, function of Roman spectacles, history of Christian persecution in context of the general development of Later Empire. The reference material is so rich in presenting the key, first-grade source studies, that it makes me recommend this book over many others which claim specialization in the topics mentioned above.

⭐Though Castelli has much good to say r.e. martyrdom and how the concepts of martyrdom are shaped by the cultures in which the martyrs live and die, the kindle version makes life difficult for me!That is, I am trying to cite the book for a paper I am writing, and the location numbers for the pages keep changing. I am trying to google the book to see if I can match up page numbers to the google book, but the page numbered book and the Kindle again, do not go together well because the kindle pages keep changing.If I had known this in advance, I would have purchased the actual book copy at that time. As it is, I am purchasing it now.

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