Speaker: Kylie Crabbe, Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, Australian Catholic University – Academia.edu, ORCID

Abstract: »Either I'll have you as a wife, as I had you before, or you must die!” (63). So the second-century Acts of John relates “very many people” reporting on the words of Andronicus, when he had locked Drusiana in a tomb with intent to rape her following her commitment to sexual abstinence. The words, and their uncomfortable resonance with contemporary examples of intimate partner violence, begin a pericope in the Greek novel in which Drusiana is subjected to yet another violent man, the ironically named Callimachus. She chooses death over his advances, before the episode takes an even darker turn as Callimachus makes arrangements to rape her corpse—though things are not to turn out as he planned. Like other Greek novels, narrow escapes from threats to chastity feature in the Apocryphal Acts, though it is confirmation of celibacy and not marriage with which the stories resolve. This paper will consider the Acts of John’s portraits of Andronicus, Callimachus, and Andronicus’s steward, Fortunatus, in the face of the text’s conflation of sexual violence and desire. In conversation with recent treatments of domestic violence in antiquity, it considers the masculinities at work in the pericope, with reference also to issues of genre, emotional scripts, representations of agency, and intersections with social status. In analysing the text’s critique of the male characters who conspire to commit these offences, the paper will connect the passage to the larger dynamics in the novel’s portrait of desire, uncovering a complex interplay of characters’ agency and violence (even wrought against oneself), and the celibacy to which the text draws the audience’s attention.« (Source: Online Program)

Wikipedia: Ancient history: Ancient Rome / Roman Empire | Bible: New Testament apocrypha / Acts of John | Sex and the law: Rape / History of rape