Abstract: ((Auto)biographical Landmarks in Early Christian Hagiography) Early Christian martyr-texts (acta, passiones), narrating the arrest, trial, and death of the respective martyrs, often display (auto)biographical passages. A prominent example is the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis, which integrates the journal that Perpetua, a Christian of aristocratic background martyred in Africa at the beginning of the third century, kept in prison. More frequently, one encounters biographical indications of limited span (from a sentence to a paragraph), either in the guise of comments made by the narrator or as statements uttered by the martyrs themselves. In this paper we shall explore, on the basis of selected case-studies, the significance of such (auto)biographical landmarks for the shaping of martyrial identity from a theological and exemplary perspective. We shall include narratives dedicated both to members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy as well as “laity.” We start from the premise that early Christian hagiography is an intentional discourse with edifying character, which renders the martyr an emblematic figure not only on account of his / her death, but also on account of his / her eminently Christian conduct in life. Against this background, our analysis seeks to shed light on how the afore-mentioned biographical indications contributed to outline the ideal of imitatio martyrum. Imitating the martyrs offered a more accessible model of imitatio Christi through adopting a genuinely Christian lifestyle. The biographical indications in texts that narrate the story of early Christian martyrs represent as many auctorial strategies to offer guidelines and landmarks for the spiritual development of their prospective imitators, contributing thus to the formation of Christian identity.