Content area
Full Text
L. Stephanie Cobb Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts Gender, Theory, and Religion New York: Columbia University Press, 2008 Pp. xiii + 208.
The intersection of gender and martyrdom has drawn considerable scholarly attention in the past fifteen years. One thinks, for example, of the significant essays by Brent Shaw (JECS 4 [1996]: 269-312) and Stephen Moore and Janice Capel Anderson (JBL 117 [1998]: 249-73) or the monographs by Judith Perkins (The Suffering Self, 1995), Daniel Boyarin (Dying for God, 1998), and Elizabeth Castelli (Martyrdom and Memory, 2004). However, L. Stephanie Cobb has given us something previously lacking-a monograph dedicated exclusively to exploration of the gendered inflections of early Christian representations of martyrdom. In so doing, she has, moreover, produced a text admirable for both its lucidity and its conciseness, though each may come at some price.
Dying to Be Men opens with an invocation of the complex negotiations of identity that Cobb confronted as a college student in central Texas. What seemed a simple question-"are you a Christian?"-turned out to be merely the first stage in the elaborate yet ambiguous process of young adult identity formation, in which distinctions between Christians often mattered more than the difference between Christians and non-Christians (1f.). With this opening vignette, Cobb signals the central importance of questions of Christian identity for her book. Her argument is "that the martyr acts functioned in the Christian...