“And I Became a Man”

In Perpetua’s famous prison narrative from the early second century CE, Perpetua fights in her own portion of the narrative with a large Egyptian and she “becomes male” (facta sum masculus). At the end of her martyrdom, however, which appears in the framing narrative, she modestly covers herself after she is thrown by the beast she faces in the amphitheater and pins up her hair. Masculus no longer, she again becomes a filia. This chapter investigates Perpetua’s transgressive behavior in this prison narrative, the relation of her behavior to the asceticism ascribed to women in this period, and the way in which the framing narrative of Perpetua’s martyr tale adds both narrative closure and closure to the gender fluidity we find in Perpetua’s own tale, and sets her back into normalized conventions of gender.