Saints Felicity and Perpetua

Queer as Fact

History

4.8 • 644 Ratings

🗓️ 15 June 2025

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today's episode is on the 3rd-century North African saints, Felicity and Perpetua! Join us to hear about queer dreams, the mysterious absence of Felicity and Perpetua's husbands, and why early Christians wanted to abolish gender. Read the 3rd century Passion of Saints Felicity and Perpetua, discussed in the episode, here. Check out our website, where you can find our sources, as well as everything there is to know about Queer as Fact. If you enjoy our content, consider supporting us on Patreon, checking out our merch, and following us on Instagram, Tumblr and Bluesky. [Image: Mosaic of Felicity and Perpetua, Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Washington DC, USA]

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Queer as Fact, the podcast bringing you queer history from around the world
0:03.8	and throughout time. I'm Alice. I'm Irene. And I'm Eli. And today we're talking about the 3rd
0:08.9	century North African Saints, Felicity and Perpetua.
0:19.6	Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge the Banerang-Bunurang people as the traditional owners of the land on which we record this podcast and pay my respects to their elders past and present.
0:28.8	They're the custodians of an oral history tradition far older than this podcast.
0:32.3	We have some content warnings for this episode.
0:33.7	This episode will include discussions of imprisonment, attempted execution by wild beast and execution with a sword. It will include discussions for historic and modern
0:41.0	queer phobia, especially in the context of Christianity. It will include discussions of
0:44.6	historical sexism, mentions of death from cancer, non-explicit discussions of sex, including
0:49.4	historic sex negativity, and a brief mention of HIV AIDS. If any of that is something you don't want to hear, feel free to skip this podcast and
0:56.4	check out our other content.
0:57.8	So, for a little intro on sources to get us started, almost all the information we have
1:01.6	about Perpetua and Felicity comes from a text called The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity,
1:06.2	which recounts the martyrdom of Perpetua, Felicity and three other Christians in Carthage, with their death traditionally being dated to the 7th of March in the year 203 CE.
1:15.6	So, where's Carthage?
1:17.0	It's in North Africa.
1:18.4	It's in Indonesia.
1:19.3	Yeah.
1:19.7	It was destroyed.
1:21.4	Why are we...
1:22.3	So Carthage was defeated and, or the Punic Empire, which was based out of Carthage, was defeated
1:29.2	and destroyed by the Roman Empire in the mid-second century BC.
	...

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