The saints were at once the superheroes and the celebrities of medieval Europe. Recent scholarship has rehabilitated hagiography, once dismissed as too crude and too stereotypical to be truly artistic or historically informative. Historical records of saints' cults--of dedications, processions, shrines, and pilgrimages--have proved to be invaluable sources for cultural historians, and sophisticated literary and art-historical analyses of their texts and artefacts have appeared. This collection of essays provides multi-disciplinary perspectives on the Lives and cult of St Katherine of Alexandria. It is fitting that Katherine, the patron saint of scholars, should be a prime subject of a relatively new scholarly activity, the mapping of individual cults. Katherine J. Lewis, the co-editor of this collection, named Katherine a "supersaint" in a previous monograph (The Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in Late Medieval England, D. S. Brewer, 2000), because her cult was both unique and exemplary: she was a universal saint, an auxiliary with automatic powers and an extremely diverse set of devotees. Though entirely fictive, and as such removed from the calendar in 1969, Katherine was enormously popular throughout medieval Europe. Her Life which survives in numerous variants, combined the standard virgin martyr narrative--the beautiful young Christian virgin menaced, tortured, and finally executed by leering pagans--with some additional elements, such as the saint's classical learning and her position as a ruling queen.
The editors' Introduction insists on the variety of representations and invocations of the saint to the extent of risking dismantling the volume's object in the argument that "there was no one, solely defined medieval cult of St Katherine" (3). They summarize the basic elements of Katherine's legend, giving useful detail about her historical prototypes, and making the important point that, as virgin martyr narratives go, hers is neither particularly violent nor particularly sexualized. They review current scholarship on hagiography and sanctity, and in particular engage with the feminist analyses which have led the revival of interest in the virgin martyr legend, sensibly resisting the false dichotomy between seeing the virgin martyr as exemplary either of women's oppression or of their resistance to it.
Christine Walsh assembles fragmentary evidence to provide a history of Katherine's early cult in Normandy and England. The first centre of Katherine's cult in Western Europe was the monastery of the Holy Trinity in Rouen, its claims resting upon three finger relics of dubious provenance acquired during the 1030s. For such relics to have any value, Katherine must have already been culted in the area, though evidence of such activity is lacking. In this incarnation Katherine was a demanding healer: insufficiently grateful recipients of miraculous cures were liable to suffer relapses. Walsh demonstrates that Katherine's cult, with its spiritual, wonder-working, and prestigious aspects, was multi-faceted from its beginnings.
Katherine J. Lewis's chapter on pilgrimage is a revised version of one which appeared in the collection Pilgrimage Explored, ed. J. Stopford (York Medieval Press, 1999). Katherine was unusual amongst virgin martyrs in having a prestigious shrine, but this, on Mount Sinai, was accessible only to the most intrepid male travelers. Though several English abbeys and cathedrals held Katherine's relics, pilgrimages to her were most often to cult images in hilltop sites which replicated Sinai. A combination of literary and historical evidence reveals, again, variations in devotions to the saint, who was adapted to unexpected purposes. She was represented to elite women as a model household manager, while non-elite girls treated the virgin as a marriage broker who could help them to find good husbands.
Jane Cartwright makes a thorough overview of the Welsh cult of Katherine, surveying documentary, literary and visual evidence. Katherine was a late arrival to Wales, where she became popular from the fourteenth century, possibly displacing native saints in some dedications. Once arrived she was, as elsewhere, culted, pictured, and written in such a way as to appeal to a variety of worshippers. Manuscript evidence indicates that her Welsh cult was laity-led, and the Welsh Life, like some of the English ones, adapts the saint into a model for laywomen, omitting the mystic marriage, downplaying her education, and introducing the motif of breasts flowing with oil, a metaphor for generous hospitality.
Tracey R. Sands discusses Katherine's cult amongst the medieval Swedish aristocracy. As Sweden's Reformation destroyed many religious manuscripts and artefacts, Sands's analysis is based on other kinds of sources, primarily seals, naming patterns, and records of donations. These suggest that devotion to Katherine ran in families for the Swedish nobility, including that of St Bridget of Sweden, and though they cannot tell us much about the subjective experience of such devotion, Sands speculates plausibly that Katherine's royalty and mystic marriage may have made her appear to be the top-ranking virgin martyr.
Anke Bernau's subtle analysis of representations of the body in Katherine's Middle English Lives opens by insisting that Katherine's learning separates her from other virgin martyrs. Bernau links a chain of metaphors: learning as building, body as building, body as text, text as body to argue that Katherine's body is represented as "the site on which faith, knowledge, or power manifest themselves" (117), and that her wheel is a sign of learning as well as of violence. Katherine thus functions as a sign of Latin Christian knowledge, set against deliberately conflated heretics or pagans of the East.
Emily C. Francomano studies a Castilian version of Katherine's life in the context of its manuscript, a "pro-feminine" collection of hagiographies and pious romances, which form a catalogue of good women. These narratives rehearse misogynist hostility to female speech in order to confound it, setting up exemplary Christian heroines. In this context, Katherine functions as a model for pious laywomen, as Lewis and Cartwright have demonstrated that she did in England and Wales. Francomano cites critics who read virgin martyr legends as subversive of patriarchal assumptions, but argues that the heroines of this codex are instead "positive agents within patriarchal order" (151).
Jacqueline Jenkins concentrates on the Middle English prose life of Katherine, a text which has been largely neglected despite its widespread survival, and in particular on the version in BL MS Harley 4012, a devotional miscellany which belonged to Anne Wingfield of East Harling. Once more, Katherine is placed in the context of lay piety, for this version of the legend introduces her as a model of affective contemplation on Christ's sufferings. The unique Prohemium to the Life of St. Katherine and a description of the manuscript are included as appendices to the chapter.
Karen A. Winstead makes one of the sharpest arguments in the collection in its most narrowly defined chapter, on "St. Katherine's Hair"--or, as it turns out, St Katherine's hair in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century northern European Books of Hours. She argues persuasively that apparently tiny differences in the iconography of virgin martyrs were significant: in particular, that it is significant that Katherine is often depicted with shorter hair than her fellow saints. Since long hair was associated with virgins, brides, and queens, and Katherine was all of these, this tradition is surprising. A short-haired Katherine, especially when wearing signs of royalty and carrying a sword, emphasizes the gender-bending potential of her legend, in contrast to the demure and ladylike Katherines of the contemporary narratives, though Winstead cautions that the convention probably had multiple meanings.
Sherry L. Reames introduces a new class of devotees of Katherine, the clergy, arguing that clerical interest in Katherine was in some respects distinct from that of the laity. Examining the saint's appearance in late medieval English breviaries, Reames concludes that clerics downplayed Katherine's intercessionary powers and muted the sexual and violent aspects of her legend. Although breviaries, like other contemporary narratives, made other virgin martyrs meeker and more feminine, Katherine was instead turned into an active, learned figure who could be imitated by men. This analysis warns against generalizations about hagiography by demonstrating the different ways in which a single saint could be culted.
In the final chapter, Alison Frazier examines Katherine's presence in fifteenth-century Italian humanist writing. She offers a detailed textual survey of Antonio degli Agli's collection of saints' lives, which aimed at historical accuracy and arranged the saints by chronological order rather than by liturgical year. For the first time in this collection, Katherine's lack of historicity causes anxiety.
This collection breaks new ground in its attention to the international dimensions of Katherine's cult and in its combination of disciplines. As all saint-fanciers know, the saints were manifest in an enormous range of forms and sites: liturgies, hymns, and songs; dramatic performances; literary media ranging from the crudest to the most elaborate; sculpture, painting, fabrics and furnishings; bodily and contact relics; landscapes; dedications and devotions both popular and learned. Studying saints thus demands inter-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary approaches, and as it is impossible for any individual to be expert in all the relevant disciplines, multi-authored collections such as this one are an ideal format for the study of a cult. This collection does not offer systematic coverage of Katherine's cult, but is shaped by the contributors' interests. They offer several kinds of analysis: synthesizing historical surveys the cult in a certain time and place; literary interpretations of several narratives; analyses of a particular kind of source. The variety of approaches enables documentation of the multiplicity of the cult, as instances of devotion are complemented by more speculative meditations on what such devotions might have meant. At times the collection risks repetition, as variations in iconography and texts tend to be on a smaller scale than variations in devotional practice. Repetition, however, points to aspects of the saint's appeal which were consistent across various times and places. Several contributors remark on Katherine's multi-functionality and adaptability: only comparative studies of other saints will show whether this is peculiar to Katherine or a trait of all successful cults. Many more saints could benefit from such concentrated and multi-disciplinary analysis.