FELICITATIS
A Christian Historical Novel of Bravery and Martyrdom
Rome has ways to break a person. It has not met Felicitatis.
Rome, 164 AD. Felicitatis is a widow, a mother, and a Christian. In a city that worships many gods, she has opened her house to those who worship one — and the temples have noticed. When a temple priest brings a charge of impiety against her household, she is summoned before the Prefect and offered the simplest of exits: a single act of sacrifice, a public gesture, nothing more. She refuses. She has spent seventeen years teaching her seven sons that what the body does, the self does. She will not teach them otherwise now.
What follows is the story of a mother who watches her sons taken from her one by one — and does not break. Not because she does not grieve. She grieves completely, in her kitchen, in her garden, on her knees in the dark. But somewhere beneath the grief, something holds. Something that cannot be taken, because it was never contingent on what she had.
Told through the eyes of Felicitatis and Lydia — the freed slave who witnesses everything and writes it down so the blood is not covered — this is a novel about the cost of faith when the cost is named in full. About a mother whose love is so oriented toward eternity that she can stand in an arena, arms at her sides, and not be afraid. About the question that runs beneath the Book of Job and beneath this story: does she love God for nothing? And what it means that the answer is yes.
Christian Martyrdom, Felicitatis, Christian Historical Fiction
