Crispina of Thagaste

Life and Ministry

Crispina was a married woman of property from the town of Thagora near Thagaste (the same Numidian region that produced Augustine a generation later), a mother of children of her own household. The Acta Crispinae, a court-record-style Passio preserved nearly verbatim, gives her appearance before the proconsul Anullinus at Theveste on 5 December AD 304, during the third year of the Diocletian persecution and the year of the most aggressive enforcement of the imperial sacrifice edict in North Africa.

Circumstances of Death

The exchange recorded between Crispina and Anullinus is one of the most direct in the martyr literature. The proconsul asks repeatedly whether she will sacrifice; she answers, repeatedly, that she will not. He warns her of the law; she answers that she keeps a higher law. He orders her hair shaved off in public disgrace — a humiliation reserved for women of station — and she does not break. He pronounces the death sentence: that Crispina, refusing to obey the sacred ordinances of our lords, be punished by the sword. She is recorded as answering with thanks to Christ before the sentence is even fully read. She is beheaded on the same day.

Legacy

Augustine, who knew the African Christian community Crispina belonged to, preached on her feast and called her death a glory of the African church. His sermon includes her words and uses her example to exhort his Hippo congregation: she was a mother, she had property, she had the love of life — and she did not consider any of these enough to take incense in her hand. Her witness is the witness of the married woman, the householder, the mother — that the call to confess Christ is not reserved for the consecrated virgin or the bishop but reaches every state of life. She is, with Perpetua, one of the two great North African mother-martyrs whose names the church remembered.