ABSTRACT
The spread of Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries across the Mediterranean basin was not merely the geographical diffusion of a new faith. A remarkable phenomenon, too often unconsidered, was the Christianization of time itself. The Romans had a variety of ways to reckon time on a diurnal scale—for example, astrological time through the passage of the sun through the lunar months, seasonal time connected to agriculture, or festal time connected to the celebration of principal gods or civic anniversaries. The most significant reckoning of time, however, came principally through counting years of imperial and consular reign. Time, then, was tied to Empire, made flesh, in a sense, through the male elite body and the wielding of political power. Christians rejected imperial time, replacing it, by the fourth century CE, with a new festal calendar based on commemoration of the martyrs. Remarkably, a number of these martyrs in the earliest martyrological calendars were female. What did it mean to have time now reckoned through the human body and its violent death? And how did this differ when it was a female body, tortured, broken and dead, that newly marked Christian time?
