Tells the story of the martyr Saint Catherine, who ruled Alexandria as a Christian.

The fifteenth-century scholar and Augustinian friar John Capgrave took as his subject the virgin martyr Katherine of Alexandria, who was an anomalous cultural icon, a scholar, and a sovereign whose story unsettled traditional gender stereotypes yet was widely popular throughout Western Europe. Capgrave's Life of Saint Katherine of Alexandria (ca. 1445) stands out among the hundreds of surviving vernacular and Latin narrations about the saint by its intricate plotting, its moral complexity, its obtrusive Chaucerian narrator, and its attention to psychology, history, and theology. The Life of Saint Katherine is a bold literary experiment that transforms the genre of the saint's life by infusing it with conventions and techniques more often associated with chronicles, mystery plays, fabliaux, and romances. In Capgrave's hands, Katherine emerges as a sensitive and studious young woman torn between social responsibilities and personal desires. Her story unfolds in a vividly realized world of political turmoil and religious repression that, as Capgrave's readers were bound to suspect, had everything to do with the England they inhabited and its recent past. Katherine's debate with her lords anticipates arguments for and against female rule that would be made in Tudor England, when the ascensions of Mary I and then Elizabeth I made gynecocracy a political reality, while her debate with the philosophers is a daring exercise in vernacular theology that flouts the censorship then current. Winstead's translation--the first into idiomatic modern English--brings to life Capgrave's sharply drawn characters, compelling plot, and complex, unsettling moral. Its promotion of an informed, intellectualized Christianity during a period known for censorship and repression illuminates the struggle over the definition of orthodoxy that was excited by the perceived threat of Lollard heresy during the fifteenth century. This volume also includes an appendix with passages of Capgrave's original Middle English and literal translations into modern English, providing a valuable tool for teachers and students.

St Katherine of Alexandria was one of the most popular saints in both the Orthodox and Latin Churches in the later Middle Ages, yet there has been little study of how her cult developed before c. 1200. This book redresses the balance, providing a thorough examination of the way the cult spread from the Greek-speaking lands of the Eastern Mediterranean and into Western Europe. The author uses the full range of source material available, including liturgical texts, hagiographies, chronicles and iconographical evidence, bringing together these often disparate sources to map the way in which the cult of St Katherine grew from its early stages in the Byzantine Empire up to c.1100, its transmission to Italy, and the introduction and development of the cult in Normandy and England up to c.1200. The book also includes appendices listing early manuscripts containing Katherine's Passio and including key original texts on St Katherine of the period. This study will be welcomed by scholars of medieval history and the history of medieval art, and as a case-study for all those with an interest in the development of medieval saint's cults.

How and why did a medieval female saint from the Eastern Mediterranean come to be such a powerful symbol in early modern Rome? This study provides an overview of the development of the cult of Catherine of Alexandria in Renaissance Rome, and explores how her imagery was used to support the religious, political, and/or social agendas of individual patrons and religious orders.

"It was a cruel invention, this wheel. A wheel that forced submission from those beneath it..."Young Katherine, born into noble wealth with an insatiable hunger for knowledge, surpasses even her tutors when it comes to learning. But her learning counts for nothing when she meets the only man worthy of her-her heavenly Bridegroom. Trading worldly knowledge for eternal wisdom, Katherine challenges even the emperor himself-and he prepares a cruel invention to break her. Meet this great bride of Christ in the second graphic novel in the Among the Saints series-written to inspire both children and adults.

This collection presents-through the medium of translated sources-a comprehensive guide to the development of hagiography and the cult of the saints in western Christendom during the middle ages. It provides an unparalleled resource for the study of the ideals of sanctity and the practice of religion in the medieval west. Intended for the classroom, for the medieval scholar who wishes to explore sources in unfamiliar languages, and for the general reader fascinated by the saints, this collection provides the reader a chance to explore in depth a full range of writings about the saints (the term hagiography is derived from Greek roots: hagios=holy and graphe=writing). The thirty-six chapters contain sources either in their entirety or in selections of substantial length. The great majority of the texts have never previously appeared in English translation. Those which have appeared in earlier translation, are here presented in versions based on significant new textual and historical scholarship which makes them significant improvements on the earlier versions. All the translations are accompanied by introductions, notes, and suggestions for further reading in order to help guide the reader. The first selections date to the fourth century, when the ideals of Christian sanctity were evolving to meet the demands of a world in which Christianity was an accepted religion and when the public veneration of relics was growing greatly in scope. The last selections date to the period immediately prior to the Reformation, a period in which the traditional concept of sanctity and acceptability of de cult of relics was being questioned. In addition to numerous works from the clerical languages of Latin and Greek, the selections include translations from Romance, Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic vernacular languages, s well as Hebrew texts concerning the martyrdom of Jews at the hands of Christians. Originating in lands from Iceland to Hungary and from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, they are taken from a full range of the many genres which constituted hagiography: lives of the saints, collections of miracle stories, accounts of the discovery or movement of relics, liturgical books, visions, canonization inquests, and even heresy trials.