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Ancient Lives
Perpetua: The Woman, the Martyr
An intimate and human portrait of Perpetua, a third-century woman author who was idealized as a Christian martyr
On March 7, 203, in the monumental amphitheater at Carthage, Vibia Perpetua was one of five Christians who met their deaths after refusing to venerate the Roman emperor Septimius Severus and his son. Perpetua stood out from the other four, and in fact from all the other martyrs of her era and before: she was an aristocratic married woman with an infant son, and she is the first female prose author whose work survives.
Offering a probing new translation of Perpetua’s extraordinary prison diary and situating the life behind that diary within the turbulent late Roman Empire, Sarah Ruden tells the story of Perpetua’s remarkable feat of self‑invention as a martyr. As she builds on Perpetua’s own words and integrates them into their religious and historical contexts, Ruden shines a light on Perpetua’s disarming candidness, her brashness, and her naïvété. In contrast to traditional portrayals of the saint as a brave but submissive young woman, Ruden’s narrative reveals a complex individual who flaunts a vivid public persona as a martyr while at the same time navigating the emotions of a mother, daughter, sister, and friend approaching death.
On March 7, 203, in the monumental amphitheater at Carthage, Vibia Perpetua was one of five Christians who met their deaths after refusing to venerate the Roman emperor Septimius Severus and his son. Perpetua stood out from the other four, and in fact from all the other martyrs of her era and before: she was an aristocratic married woman with an infant son, and she is the first female prose author whose work survives.
Offering a probing new translation of Perpetua’s extraordinary prison diary and situating the life behind that diary within the turbulent late Roman Empire, Sarah Ruden tells the story of Perpetua’s remarkable feat of self‑invention as a martyr. As she builds on Perpetua’s own words and integrates them into their religious and historical contexts, Ruden shines a light on Perpetua’s disarming candidness, her brashness, and her naïvété. In contrast to traditional portrayals of the saint as a brave but submissive young woman, Ruden’s narrative reveals a complex individual who flaunts a vivid public persona as a martyr while at the same time navigating the emotions of a mother, daughter, sister, and friend approaching death.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published September 2, 2025
About the author
Sarah Ruden
25 books120 followersSarah Elizabeth Ruden is an American writer of poetry, essays, translations of Classic literature, and popularizations of Biblical philology, religious criticism and interpretation.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 11, 2026
A Life of Vidia Perpetua
A review of the Yale University Press - Ancient Lives series hardcover (September 5, 2025) with reference to the eBook edition.
So I was pleased to read a further volume in the series with Perpetua: The Woman, The Martyr, which incorporates a biography with Ruden's translation of Passio sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis (c. 203 AD), usually translated as The Passion of the Saints Perpetua and Felicity.
As with her earlier biography of the otherwise little known life of Vergil, Ruden had to extrapolate on the life of Vidia Perpetua (c. 182 AD-c. 203 AD) from the clues in the Passion text and from the lives of people in Ancient Rome and Carthage. Spread throughout the book are various interesting asides that range from the lives of people living in those times to the later historical fiction books which also portrayed the lives of early Christian martyrs. I had the book from the library but found so many passages worth highlighting that I added an eBook for that convenience. You can read those here.
The extraordinary thing about the imprisonment portion (which includes the description of four visions) of the Passion text is that its tone and character really does come across as being written by (or more likely narrated to and written down by a scribe) the actual woman. This is so much so that Ruden even says that "she appears to be the first female prose author in Western history whose work we still possess." The introductory text and the description of the later martyrdom in the arena is of course written by a so-called redactor.
Trivia and Links
Perpetua: A Woman, A Martyr is part of Yale University Press's Ancient Lives series which also has a Goodreads series listing here (2022 - 2026 ongoing).
Sarah Ruden's next book to be published will be Reproductive Wrongs: A Short History of Bad Ideas About Women (expected March 3, 2026). It is described as:
A review of the Yale University Press - Ancient Lives series hardcover (September 5, 2025) with reference to the eBook edition.
I saw a bronze ladder, amazingly long, and reaching all the way to the sky, but narrow, so that people could go up it only one at a time. And on the sides of the ladder iron gear of all kinds was stuck in. ... And below this ladder a snake was lying, amazingly big, waiting in ambush.- Excerpt from The Suffering of the Holy Perpetua and Felicitas, translated from the Latin language original by Sarah Ruden.I've become a fan of classicist Sarah Ruden and her sometimes unorthodox translations which attempt to capture the nuances of ancient Greek and Roman vernacular. This was particularly striking in her version of The Gospels: A New Translation (2021) where lines such as John 19:5's "Behold the man!" became "Look at this guy!" I've since read several of her other works including an earlier book in the Ancient Lives series Vergil: The Poets Life (2023).
So I was pleased to read a further volume in the series with Perpetua: The Woman, The Martyr, which incorporates a biography with Ruden's translation of Passio sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis (c. 203 AD), usually translated as The Passion of the Saints Perpetua and Felicity.
As with her earlier biography of the otherwise little known life of Vergil, Ruden had to extrapolate on the life of Vidia Perpetua (c. 182 AD-c. 203 AD) from the clues in the Passion text and from the lives of people in Ancient Rome and Carthage. Spread throughout the book are various interesting asides that range from the lives of people living in those times to the later historical fiction books which also portrayed the lives of early Christian martyrs. I had the book from the library but found so many passages worth highlighting that I added an eBook for that convenience. You can read those here.
The extraordinary thing about the imprisonment portion (which includes the description of four visions) of the Passion text is that its tone and character really does come across as being written by (or more likely narrated to and written down by a scribe) the actual woman. This is so much so that Ruden even says that "she appears to be the first female prose author in Western history whose work we still possess." The introductory text and the description of the later martyrdom in the arena is of course written by a so-called redactor.
Trivia and Links
Perpetua: A Woman, A Martyr is part of Yale University Press's Ancient Lives series which also has a Goodreads series listing here (2022 - 2026 ongoing).
Sarah Ruden's next book to be published will be Reproductive Wrongs: A Short History of Bad Ideas About Women (expected March 3, 2026). It is described as:
In Reproductive Wrongs, acclaimed translator and cultural historian Sarah Ruden exposes how ideologies that oppress women and families in the service of power took hold. Ruden traces a sweeping history through her trenchant analysis of seven pieces of literature that, she argues, marked key inflection points across two thousand years. From propagandistic poetry written by Ovid in the early Roman Empire to the biography of an evangelical American “abortion survivor,” Ruden lays bare how doctrines of control over women were invented and propagated.
March 3, 2026
Perpetually Seeking St. Perpetua’s Story
Sarah Ruden’s Perpetua: The Woman. The Martyr introduced me to the life and prison diary of Vibia Perpetua, executed in Carthage with Felicity in 203 CE. Ruden promises a biography that “rescues” the saint from forces in the church and culture who misrepresented and even exploited her life and story, but the book never quite fulfills that aim. Instead, Perpetua disappears behind dense linguistic analysis—at one point, a page and a half is spent on her use of the pronoun “I.”
What does stand out is Ruden’s new translation of Perpetua’s extraordinary diary, the earliest surviving prose text by a woman in Western history. Her voice is vivid, her faith unwavering, and her inspiration deeply human as she recounts visions, faith, and her transformation from young mother (who even weaned her infant while in prison) to martyr: “I understood that I wasn’t going to fight the wild animals but the devil.”
The translation alone makes the book worthwhile, but Perpetua deserves a fuller, more accessible biography. Jennifer Rea and Liz Clarke’s Perpetua’s Journey offered me a far more engaging and comprehensive portrait.
Sarah Ruden’s Perpetua: The Woman. The Martyr introduced me to the life and prison diary of Vibia Perpetua, executed in Carthage with Felicity in 203 CE. Ruden promises a biography that “rescues” the saint from forces in the church and culture who misrepresented and even exploited her life and story, but the book never quite fulfills that aim. Instead, Perpetua disappears behind dense linguistic analysis—at one point, a page and a half is spent on her use of the pronoun “I.”
What does stand out is Ruden’s new translation of Perpetua’s extraordinary diary, the earliest surviving prose text by a woman in Western history. Her voice is vivid, her faith unwavering, and her inspiration deeply human as she recounts visions, faith, and her transformation from young mother (who even weaned her infant while in prison) to martyr: “I understood that I wasn’t going to fight the wild animals but the devil.”
The translation alone makes the book worthwhile, but Perpetua deserves a fuller, more accessible biography. Jennifer Rea and Liz Clarke’s Perpetua’s Journey offered me a far more engaging and comprehensive portrait.
April 3, 2026
This had a poetic flair, a beautiful biography.
It was the right kind of feminism, both subject and biographer — historical, intellectual, irenic, uncompromising, humanizing (hagiography free) — the ideals of which skirt modern, foul-tempered protests and grievances, but uphold the ennobling testimony of Christian saints, of which we can all be jubilant celebrants.
It was the right kind of feminism, both subject and biographer — historical, intellectual, irenic, uncompromising, humanizing (hagiography free) — the ideals of which skirt modern, foul-tempered protests and grievances, but uphold the ennobling testimony of Christian saints, of which we can all be jubilant celebrants.
January 5, 2026
.I was frustrated by this book. It was not what I was looking for
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews