1. References to Tertullian are to these editions, abbreviated as follows. Against the Jews: Adversus Judaeos, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954); On the Soul: De Anima, ed. and Italian trans. Martino Menghi (Venice: Marsilio, 1988); On Baptism: Tertullian’s Homily on Baptism, ed. Ernest Evans (London: S.P.C.K., 1964); Against Heretics: Traité de la prescription contre les hérétiques, ed. R. F. Refoulé, Sources Chrétiennes 46 (Paris: Cerf, 1957); Veiling of Virgins: Le Voile des Vierges: De virginibus velandis, ed. Eva Schultz-Flügel, French trans. Paul Mattei, Sources Chrétiennes 424 (Paris: Cerf, 1997).
2. On Carthage and its rhetorical culture, see René Braun, “Aux origines de la Chrétienneté d’Afrique: un homme de combat, Tertullien” in Approches de Tertullien (Paris: Institut d’Etudes Augustiniennes, 1992), pp. 1–10; Elaine Fantham, Roman Literary Culture from Cicero to Apuleius (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 252–63.
3. On gender and late antique rhetoric, see Amy Richlin, “Gender and Rhetoric: Producing Manhood in the Schools” in Roman Eloquence: Rhetoric in Society and Literature, ed. William J. Dominik (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 90–110, and especially Maud W. Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). For Tertullian as a product of classic Roman rhetorical training, see Robert Dick Sider, Ancient Rhetoric and the Art of Tertullian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).
4. Tertullian, Homily on Baptism, ed. Ernest Evans (London: S.P.C.K., 1964), 1. This passage has been the subject of a good deal of debate, much of it concerning whether the “writings ascribed to Paul” should be identified with the Acts of Paul or some other early and apocryphal Pauline texts; see Stevan L. Davies, “Women, Tertullian and the Acts of Paul” and the “Response” by Thomas W. MacKay in Semeia 38: The Apocryphal Acts of Apostles (Decatur, GA: Scholars Press, 1986). Dennis Ronald MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983) takes it for granted that Tertullian was familiar with some version of the Acts of Paul but insists that the people he was writing against may have been citing oral tradition rather than any written text (pp. 17–18). I am less concerned with the question of which text Tertullian may have known than with his reaction to the figure of Thecla in general.
5. Wilhelm Schneemelcher, ed., Acts of Paul, trans. R. Wilson (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 1991), p. 393n3.