ABSTRACT
We have no ‘formal’ Christian burial liturgy until about the year 900, though there are pieces of one in various forms (Paxton 1990; Rowell 1977). The activities and deaths of the martyrs are well chronicled, and provide the dramatic orchestration of and crescendo to more routine concerns. As Peter Brown puts it:
The cult of the martyrs was the only form of popular devotion in the Early Church: and, in Africa, the accounts of how these ‘prize-fighters of the Lord’ had snubbed raging governors were read from the altar on innumerable anniversaries.
