Living Martyrs in Late Antiquity and Beyond: Surviving Martyrdom by Diane Shane Fruchtman (review)

beliefs. Proctor sees these uses of the demonic as evidence of antiquity’s “dark ecologies,” a term Proctor draws from theorist Timothy Morton. Like other object-oriented ontologies, Morton’s dark ecologies use metaphors of enmeshment, entanglement, and interconnection, but Morton emphasizes ecosystems whose intimacies are threatening or harmful to the humans who inhabit them (8–9). Even so, Morton urges a radically different ethic with his dark ecologies: “Love the inhuman” (175). It is here where I was most tantalized by Proctor’s work yet ultimately unsatisfied. In Proctor’s early Christianities, demons and humans are antagonistic, even as they are mutually constituting. There are occasional moments of deeper ambivalence: Proctor frames demons as impaired in Chapter One and abject outsiders in Chapter Five. But I would have liked to see more. What would “loving the demonic” look like in early Christianity—or in early Christian studies? What unorthodox relations are revealed and fostered in lingering so long over the origins of the enemy, the vulnerabilities of the flesh, the intimate arts of disentanglement? Sarah F. Porter, Gonzaga University