Torture and truth in late antique martyrology

Abstract

This article looks at descriptions of torture in hagiographical texts, analysing the significance of representations of violence and suffering in late antique Christian discourse. Seemingly redundant descriptions of torture in texts such as Prudentius's Peristephanon can be contextualized within a broader late antique concern with violence and pain. These descriptions should also be seen as playing a central role in constructing the power of the martyr, and that of his or her church. Close readings of several martyr acts show how the torture process (the quaestio) was rewritten to suit the needs of a new era: that of the Church Triumphant._ I have purposely refrained from describing the particular sufferings and deaths of the Christian martyrs. It would have been an easy task, from the history of Eusebius, from the declamations of Lactantius, from the most ancient acts, to collect a long series of horrid and disgustful pictures, and to fill many pages with racks and scourges, with iron hooks, and red-hot beds, and with all the variety of tortures which fire and steel, savage beasts and more savage executioners, could inflict on the human body. 1

‘The tribunals of Christ and of man’: law and the making of martyrs in early modern England

“…Nevertheless, if the legality of quaestio per tormenta -or interrogation by tortureallowed for the use of torture in treason cases, the emphasis that martyrologists placed on its use also served to expose the violence that underlay all worldly law (Foucault, 1977, pp. 33-35;Grig, 2002;Pollen, 1908, 1:287).…”

Disfigurement, Authority and the Law

“…She comments, "The Catholic church asserted its authority through narrative, through the power of the story, as much as by any other means." 7 Her acute observation has a broader application, well beyond the late antique martyrologies that she was using as examples. Randall Collins has commented, in an influential and much-cited essay on cruelty, that our job as researchers is not so much to judge and justify the violence of an age, but to try to gain access to the discernible patterns and meaning of that violence.…”