"Pierced by Bronze Needles": Anti-Montanist Charges of Ritual Stigmatization in Their Fourth-Century Context

“zealous imitation”: the materiality of the crusader’s marked body

“…Across the ancient Mediterranean world, for example, tattoos were frequently imposed upon the foreheads of criminals or slaves "to inscribe the violence of punishment or possession" (Burrus 2003, 404;Jones 2000;Lewy 2014, 60-62), and it has been argued with reference to the practice of punitive tattooing in the Roman empire that the forcibly-marked body was intended " [to] function as a permanently running advertisement of … guilt and subjugation" (Gustafson 2000, 24). Such punishments were in fact often appropriated and subverted by early Christians (Elm 1996;Gustafson 2000, 29-31;Burrus 2003, 404-406), who were believed to have worn their stigmata with pride in fulfilment of Galatians 6.17 ("From henceforth let no man be troublesome to me: for I bear the marks of the Lord Jesus in my body"); indeed, in Late Antiquity, similar marks were sometimes imposed upon "pagan" statues in targeted acts of confessional vandalism (Elm 1996, 436;Brown 2013, 149;Fluck, Helmecke, and O'Connell 2015, 96; Figure 4). Taking all this into consideration, and bearing in mind that, as Brent Plate has put it, "the skin is media … and it is this fleshy screen that marks our identity" (2012,164), it is therefore plausible that the crusader's scarred or branded body was intended to function as a "permanently running advertisement" of his or her devotional priorities -and, specifically, as a way of proclaiming a Christian identity and asserting a "zeal" for ideals of imitatio Christi.…”