Perpetual Adjustment: The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity and the Entailments of Authenticity

Abstract:The words attributed to Perpetua in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, like any other first-person account, impose a choice on readers from the very start: should they be taken as authentic or not? Scholars who focus on her account have tended to begin from the assumption of authenticity. This essay examines the benefits gained by that approach; it then details the constraints that authenticity creates. Judging the constraints to be graver than the benefits are good, I propose reading Perpetua's account without first committing to its authenticity, which allows for the text to be historical evidence of a different kind. When read this way, Perpetua's words align with a tradition of late ancient writers ventriloquizing women renowned and honored, but for whom no words had been previously recorded. The creation of her account is thus one more act in a well-documented project of perpetual adjustment, in which late ancient Christians invented in their present abundant textual and material evidence to represent the past as they imagined it.