Medieval martyrdom narratives could carry erotic fantasy content

Evidence

In the same work, Eulogius later remarks how Flora had shown him her neck, wounded from a lashing by Muslim authorities, “touching it gently with my hand—because I did not think I ought to caress the wound with kisses—I departed from you and for a long time I sighed thinking about it.” (21, CSM 472, trans. Wolf, Christian Martyrs, 66). All this suggests an element of twisted sexual fantasy behind the imagined rape of Flora. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1630

Categorization

• XREF: Runs parallel to the vault’s findings on how moral-panic and purity discourse gets freighted with displaced sexual anxiety — Tolan finds this inside a medieval martyr account.
• QUESTION: Pattern worth chasing: when purity/anxiety regimes get encoded in martyrology, does erotic displacement recur as a constant across the anachronistic-genealogy sources?