Living in a martyrial world: Living martyrs and the creation of martyrial consciousness in the late antique Latin west

This dissertation demonstrates the necessity of recognizing that, in Christian traditions, martyrdom does not always require death. Challenging the current scholarly custom of marking death as a criterion of martyrdom, I investigate the attempts of early fifth-century Latin authors to make martyrdom accessible to the masses (despite the end of official persecution in the fourth century) by creating new paradigms of martyrdom that did not demand the martyr's death. Prudentius, Paulinus of Nola, and Augustine of Hippo each championed "living martyrs"---martyrs who earned their status by some other means than dying in persecution---and through rhetorical techniques, biblical realism, and outright exhortation each author sought to extend that martyrdom to their audiences, allowing their contemporaries to develop martyrdom-based worldviews to reinforce their identities as Christians.;This case study proves that the concept of martyrdom is historically contingent, that it is broader than can be appreciated if we establish death as its necessary component, and that it has vast potential for deployment in self-fashioning, identity construction, and community-creation. We therefore need to attend to and be aware of the precise constructions of martyrdom that our authors offer, and we cannot do this properly if we are blinded by a definition that hinges on death.;I have therefore, based on my explorations of these late antique texts, developed a new, more inclusive definition of martyrdom. This definition, which retrieves Prudentius, Paulinus, and Augustine's emphasis on "witness" (the original Greek meaning of the term "martyr"), does not privilege death but instead focuses on the work that would-be culture-makers sought to do with their constructions of martyrdom. On my definition, a martyr is an individual who, by virtue of suffering, willingness to suffer, mimetic identification with an exemplary sufferer, and/or death, is employed by an author or community to serve as witness to some communally-accessible truth. Martyrdom, then, is the way that an author configures his or her subject as accomplishing this witness. This definition is neither emic nor exhaustive, but is rather intended to facilitate better recognition of when and how martyrdom-discourse is being used.