This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Vibia Perpetua was a young married noblewoman of about twenty two, still nursing an infant son, arrested as a catechumen preparing for baptism during a persecution under the emperor Septimius Severus, a documented social standing distinct from a woman of low status with no family position to set aside. While imprisoned awaiting execution she kept an account of her own visions and her ordeal, a documented act of first person composition distinct from a story told about her entirely by others after her death.
Scholars widely regard the surviving first person portions of the Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis as her own words, framed by an editor's account of her final day in the arena, a documented scholarly judgment distinct from a text uniformly credited to a later anonymous author throughout. That judgment makes her account one of the earliest surviving texts by a named Christian woman, a documented historical rarity distinct from the anonymous or male authored testimony that dominates the period's surviving record.
That a noblewoman facing execution used her time in prison to set down her own visions in her own words, in a text scholars still read as substantially hers rather than an editor's invention, marks Perpetua's account as a documented case where a named woman's own voice survived from a period that otherwise preserved almost none.