The project collaborator, associate professor Saša Potočnjak Ph.D. (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka), participated in the conference Cantieri dell’agiografia (VIII edizione), which was held in Rome from 21 to 23 January 2025, organized by the Italian society AISSCA (L’Associazione italiana per lo studio della santità, dei culti e dell’agiografia).

The presentation The Femicide of the Martyr: “Bondage and Torment Found Her Undefeated” was part of the panel discussion The Martyrdom of a Female Saint: Femicide in Image, Text, and Sacred Remains (RiMah).

The presentation focused on medieval and early modern Glagolitic sources about female martyrs, and the discussion demonstrated that there are images of violence against women in the Glagolitic manuscripts and visual sources, images of individual violence, collective violence, as well as violence directed against oneself. Motifs of gouging out the eyes, cutting hands, pulling out the entrails with iron hooks, starvation, or whipping are used. Such violence is rhetorical (e.g., poena sensus in literary sources), legal (e.g., in statutes and notarial documents), or ritual (e.g., Iudicum Dei). The presentation has shown some of the social practices of torturing and venerating the bodies of female saints.

The summary of her presentation is as follows:

The femicide of the martyr: »Bondage and torment found her undefeated«

They are images of violence against women in manuscripts and visual sources, images of individual violence, collective violence, as well as violence directed against oneself. Motifs of gouging out the eyes, cutting hands, pulling out the entrails with iron hooks, starvation, or whipping are used. Such violence is rhetorical (e.g., poena sensus in literary sources), legal (e.g., in statutes and notarial documents), or ritual (e.g., Iudicum Dei). This paper aims to analyse the social practice of torturing and venerating the bodies of female saints, which is considered a necessary hagiographic procedure for their later beatification. The paper will mainly focus on medieval and early modern Glagolitic sources about female martyrs. Depicting the process of how a mortal body could become a saintly body reveals a common ritual practice in hagiography that is considered “necessary” violence.