The purpose of Tracey Sands’ study is to analyze manifestations of the veneration of St. Katherine of Alexandria in medieval Sweden and elucidate some of the meanings this cult had for the individual adherents, especially those meanings of particular significance to the society and concerns of the Swedish people rather than Europe as a whole. Sands’ book exhaustively covers the different forms of evidence of this cult, from calendars of feast days to murals, carvings, and altarpieces in medieval Swedish churches, from imagery on seals of high-ranking clergy and nobility to the dedications of churches and the naming of children (and even church-bells) after St. Katherine. The section of the study which will likely be of most interest to folklorists is that on the “Liten Karin” ballad tradition and its descent from the medieval narratives of the life of St. Katherine. One chapter is devoted to manifestations of the St. Katherine cult on the Baltic island of Gotland, which shows some unique characteristics that Sands relates to the community’s medial position—both geographically and conceptually—as a trading node for the east (Russia and by extension Byzantium), the south (the German states), and Scandinavia itself. The book is primarily organized according to the different segments of the medieval Swedish population: following a brief introduction that outlines the contours of the study, the chapters cover, in order, the earliest manifestations of St. Katherine’s cult in Sweden, the clergy, the nobility, Gotland, and the non-noble laity. A short concluding chapter summarizes the main conclusions of the previous chapters.
Most of the meanings Sands draws from the material seem well-founded, such as the connections between St. Katherine’s image in clerical seals and the scholastic achievements, especially study at the University of Paris, of the seal-bearers, or the implied allegiances of parish churches with the archiepiscopal seat in Uppsala, with which St. Katherine was associated. In a section in which Sands connects St. Katherine to the Dominican order in Sweden, she voices a particularly engaging idea, that the Dominicans’ conversion of the heathen queen Katherine into a sponsi Christi—with a mystic marriage to Christ, complete with wedding ring—can be read as an allegory for the Dominicans’ project of the conversion of Aristotelian philosophy (22). Other links Sands makes, however, seem more tenuous, as is to some extent inevitable with the paucity of the extant data (which Sands acknowledges on several occasions) and its primarily non-narrative nature. The extent of the “political resistance” potentially represented by depictions of St. Katherine and St. George together, for example, seems less profound than Sands represents (94–102). Sands’ own comments concluding this section, however, indicate the problems in interpreting this type of evidence:
“As always, these meanings in no way exclude the possibility that other meanings were implicit in the images at the same time. Nor does the use of the image of a saint by one group necessarily exclude the possibility that other groups or individuals might depict the same saint in other contexts, and for entirely different, even opposing, reasons.” (102)
By and large, however, Sands makes very good use of the available material, and she reasons her points with a learned but commonsense approach, continually making novel observations, especially connections between the different traditions and types of evidence, but rarely stretching the interpretation beyond what the evidence can bear. A characteristic example of Sands’ use of the material appears in chapter 6, in which Sands analyses the late “Liten Karin” ballad tradition and relates it to the earlier medieval narratives and images of St. Katherine’s cult. Sands discusses the replacement of the torture device intended to execute St. Katherine in the earlier narratives of her life, a “contraption of bladed, interlocking wheels,” with an entirely different device widely known in European oral folk tradition, a spiked barrel. Sands writes:
“Although the idea has never, to my knowledge, appeared in print, there is a fairly well-established assumption among people who know the Liten Karin ballad that the spiked barrel derives from a misunderstanding of the wheel that is St. Katherine’s most frequent attribute in visual images. Examination of a wide range of such images shows that there is no good basis for this assumption. Many depictions of the wheel show it in pieces, but even when the wheel is whole, it is always recognizable as a spoked wheel.” (167)
The exhaustive attention Sands has devoted to the medieval depictions of St. Katherine in previous chapters, as well as the photos of some of these images she has provided, allow readers to verify for themselves this simple (but decisive) re-evaluation of the relationship between the later ballad tradition and the earlier artistic tradition.
The appendices to Sands’ book provide several useful resources relevant to her study. The first appendix lists the medieval Swedish visual images of St. Katherine, the second lists the seals depicting her, and the third records various medieval Scandinavian calendars listing St. Katherine’s feast day and those of other selected saints. The fourth, fifth, sixth, and eighth appendices give English translations of some of the extant narratives of St. Katherine from medieval Sweden, and the seventh lists medieval church bells named after her or bearing her image. Other useful materials provided in the book are several dozen black-and-white photographs of the visual images of St. Katherine that Sands discusses in the book, as well as one or two line-drawings of the seals she discusses. One general map of medieval Sweden with half a dozen of the most important settlement sites marked has been provided in the front-matter of the volume; if any additional supporting material could be desired, it would be a few more detailed maps of the specific areas Sands refers to repeatedly throughout the book, especially the island of Gotland, which, as noted above, is singled out for special attention in its own chapter. A thorough bibliography joins with these other supplemental resources and the study as a whole to complete this invaluable resource, which must now be the starting-point for any future study of the cult of St. Katherine of Alexandria in medieval Sweden.
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[Review length: 1010 words • Review posted on June 2, 2011]