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Trust and Violence

Trust and Violence 20:1 © 2013 by Duke University Press volume as a whole is overstated, since twenty or thirty years ago Brent Shaw, Mieke Bal, and Peter Dronke, among others, were already treating Perpetua's words as literature, not bits of historical evidence, and proposing quite radical interpretations. I and my fellow instructors taught the text as part of the required syllabus in Columbia University's western civilization course in the mid-1990s. Nothing is more canonical than the syllabus of a western civ. course. Moreover, the best essays in the volume--which include Sigrid Weigel on sacrifice, Craig Williams on gendered language, Christoph Markschies on Montanist echoes, Walter Ameling on education, Joseph Farrell on the question of canonization (in several senses of the word), and Marco Formisano himself on marginality--are not the most experimental. Those that leap to strained analogies-- for example, the effort to shed light through an awkward use of Carl Schmitt's exegesis of Hamlet, and the several comparisons to Greek texts such as Plato's Phaedo or Xenophon's Ephesiaca, which Perpetua is alleged to have "perhaps read" (although she almost certainly could not read Greek)--weaken the volume's plea that we need revolutions in method. Indeed, a few of the more far-fetched http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Common Knowledge Duke University Press

Trust and Violence

Neiman, S.
Common Knowledge , Volume 20 (1) – Dec 21, 2014
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright © Duke Univ Press
ISSN
0961-754X
eISSN
1538-4578
DOI
10.1215/0961754X-2374979
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Abstract

20:1 © 2013 by Duke University Press volume as a whole is overstated, since twenty or thirty years ago Brent Shaw, Mieke Bal, and Peter Dronke, among others, were already treating Perpetua's words as literature, not bits of historical evidence, and proposing quite radical interpretations. I and my fellow instructors taught the text as part of the required syllabus in Columbia University's western civilization course in the mid-1990s. Nothing is more canonical than the syllabus of a western civ. course. Moreover, the best essays in the volume--which include Sigrid Weigel on sacrifice, Craig Williams on gendered language, Christoph Markschies on Montanist echoes, Walter Ameling on education, Joseph Farrell on the question of canonization (in several senses of the word), and Marco Formisano himself on marginality--are not the most experimental. Those that leap to strained analogies-- for example, the effort to shed light through an awkward use of Carl Schmitt's exegesis of Hamlet, and the several comparisons to Greek texts such as Plato's Phaedo or Xenophon's Ephesiaca, which Perpetua is alleged to have "perhaps read" (although she almost certainly could not read Greek)--weaken the volume's plea that we need revolutions in method. Indeed, a few of the more far-fetched

Journal

Common Knowledge – Duke University Press

Published: Dec 21, 2014

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