Season 1 Episode 3: Acceptable Suffering and Grievable Lives

In this episode, the question is posed, How have we become comfortable with the suffering of certain bodies? This question is explored through a 3rd century story of martyrdom and white American women’s true crime obsession.

Please take care: this is a heavy episode. I recommend you give yourself more than 25 minutes to listen. Take breaks. Move around. But do try to engage.

[02:59] 🔔 Image 1: An early text of Sts. Perpetua and Felicitas 

[03:54] 🔔 Image 2: A mosaic of St. Perpetua

[04:30] Septimius Severus was the Roman Empire’s first African Emperor. There’s an important historical rabbit hole we could go down by tracing North Africa’s influence on the Roman Empire and the young Christian church.

[06:21] 🔔 Image 3: A painting of St. Perpetua and her father and child 

[08:08] 🔔 Image 4: The wild beasts in the coliseum

[12:38] 🔔 Image 5: Sts. Perpetua and Felicitas’s shrine

[12:39] See more portrayals of female martyrs in this pretty cool virtual tour of the Chapel of Saints Perpetua and Felicity.

[14:53] My true crime portion was influenced by the Elisabeth T. Vasko and Lyndsie Ferrara’s True Crime and the Justice of God: Ethics, Media, and Forensic Science . It was also considered in light of Rebecca McKanna’s brilliant debut novel, Don’t Forget the Girl. 

[15:58] This quote is from Vasko and Ferrara, pp. xiv, xv.

[19:16] 🔔 Image 6: An Icon of Sts. Perpetua and Felicitas

[19:32] If you are intrigued by this topic, I recommend Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? It would be an excellent additional reading for this course. A shorter blog version of the book is accessible here. 

[20:24] 🔔 Image 7: Edwina Sandys’s The Christa

[21:06] 🔔 Images 8-12: Variations on the Pietà (You may want to pause the podcast.)

[21:17] 🔔Images 13-14: Michelangelo’s Pietà

[23:29] 🔔Image 15: Jesus crucified . . . .

My hodgepodge telling of The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity was from Margaret Miles’s Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (pp. 49-63); this succinct but a little melodramatic blog post by Brian O’Neel; and the primary source itself).

Fun fact: Did you know Perpetua and Felicity are the patron saints of same-sex couples?