The Hand of the Slave and the Hand of the Martyr: Pamphilus of Caesarea, Autography, and the Rise of Textual Relics

This paper analyzes a specific reconfiguration of the text as body in the framework of martyrdom and the retrieval and preservation of the Origenian textual corpus. In this context, I suggest that autographic copies and corrections (that is, textual gestures performed in one’s own hand) took on a new meaning. I will focus on the subscriptions left by Pamphilus of Caesarea and his students, and on Jerome’s notice 75 of the De uiris illustribus to trace a shift in the cultural and religious significance of autography. From the hand of the enslaved copyist at the beginning of the Roman empire to the hand of the martyr in Late Antiquity, such a shift ultimately led to a process of “relicization” in which the martyr’s handwritten text was conceptualized as a physical relic.