In recent years several notable studies—including those by Judith Perkins, Daniel Boyarin, and Elizabeth Castelli—have assessed the importance of martyrdom and suffering in constructions of ancient Christian identity. This essay takes as its starting point the observation by Perkins that in early Christian communities, the threat of suffering (whether real or perceived) worked to create a particular kind of self. In Perkins's view, many ancient Christians came to believe that “to be a Christian was to suffer.” Christian martyr acts, when understood as textual vehicles for the construction of culture and the articulation of Christian identities, emerge as one mechanism by which such selves were constructed. In the pages that follow I will explore how the reading and hearing of narratives about martyrdom constituted an exercise derived from Greek philosophy, adapted to inspire a largely nonliterate audience. This exercise not only trained early Christians to be ready for death and the world to come, but also worked to shape their perceptions of the Christian way of life in this world.

On July 15, 1318, a twenty-six-year-old laywoman named Aude Fauré was called before the Inquisition tribunal at the diocesan seat of Pamiers in southern France and immediately confessed to having temporarily doubted both the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the transubstantiation of bread and wine into Christ's body and blood; her doubt, she explained, had been cured by intervention from the Blessed Virgin. Less than a month later, Aude abjured her errors by the usual formula and was sentenced to a series of pilgrimages and fasts stretching over the next three years. Aude's multiple confessions, along with depositions from her family, friends, and neighbors, take up a mere six folio pages in the famously detailed Register kept by Bishop Jacques Fournier, head of the Pamiers tribunal, and preserved in the Vatican Library after Fournier became Pope Benedict XII. This relatively quick-moving and insignificant case seems unrelated to the best-known activity of Fournier's tribunal, namely, the extinction of the last vestiges of Occitan Catharism. Yet Aude's case has gleaned several mentions in recent historiographic works, and these mentions are striking for their focus on the protagonist's psyche: she has been variously diagnosed as hypersensitive, neurotic, masochistic, morbid, hysterical, obsessive, afflicted with atheism, prone to fantasy, tormented by guilt, suffering from postpartum depression, and simply deviant.

Despite the continuing “discovery of southern religious history” and the growing scholarly fascination with southern intellectual and cultural history, historians of the South have devoted all too little attention to the origins of southern evangelicalism in the colonial period. Over the past thirty years or so, they have generally tended to follow the lead of Samuel S. Hill, Jr., arguably the single most important and influential southern religious historian, who concluded in an interpretive survey article that “the history of religion in the South before it was the South … is, in all candor, not very impressive.” In his pioneering Religion in the Old South, for instance, Donald G. Mathews paid but scant attention to the origins of popular Protestantism in the South during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. What is more, he focused almost exclusively on colonial Virginia.

Healing—whether via medical or miraculous means—has increasingly caught the attention of scholars of North American Protestantism within the past decade. Recent studies have convincingly argued that healing was at the heart of Protestant identity, especially in turn-of-the-twentieth-century United States and Canada. Loosely defined as the restoring of physical or emotional well-being with recourse to medical, symbolic, or religious means, healing is often distinguished from curing as a therapeutic approach with more “ho-listic” goals than the cessation of particular physical ailments. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century groups known for their commitment to divine healing and their antipathy to biomedicine, such as Christian Scientists and Pentecostals, are readily fit within this paradigm of healing, but so too are groups often thought to have disparaged faith healing in their embrace of biomedicine, such as mainstream Anglo-Protestants. Through foreign and domestic medical missions, establishing hospitals and medical schools, and initiating deaconess orders, mainstream Protestant groups, including Anglicans and Methodists, made healing central to their public identity and daily practice. In the process, they faced the tricky negotiation of embracing epistemologies of scientific medicine without surrendering their own theologies of God's omnipotent love, all the while living in an increasingly “therapeutic culture.” Complicating their task was their persistent encounter with different, often competing versions of religious healing, whether in the encounter with natives in colonial missions or in the challenge of rival therapeutic theologies such as those of Christian Science. Making their way through this era of increasing medicalization (and increasing contestation of medicalization), mainstream Protestants developed a strain of Christian healing that was unabashedly medicalized and modern, and they testified to its power in print and in practice.

In June 1924, Christian Neff, president of the Conference of South German Mennonites, sent an invitation to “all of the major Mennonite bodies around the world,” to participate in a world conference that would commemorate the 400th anniversary of the first Anabaptist rebaptisms. The meeting was to be held in Basel and Zurich, Switzerland. Whether or not the one hundred or so attendees at the June 1925 conference thought of themselves as pilgrims, the combination of the date and the locations defined this gathering in a way that at least subconsciously reflected the idea of pilgrimage. As both early and contemporary Christians have been fascinated with and have desired to visit places associated with biblical characters, and especially with Jesus, descendants of the sixteenth-century Anabaptists who planned the 1925 gathering were clearly reflecting on the importance of place to their faith. If they had not, they could have held the meeting solely in Basel, which met their need for a centrally located and easily accessible city to European Mennonites. Instead, they added Zurich, the place of the first Anabaptist rebaptisms in January 1525 and one of the earliest sites of Anabaptist martyrdom, to their meeting schedule.