The Cult of St. Katherine of Alexandria in Early Medieval Europe (review)

St. Katherine of Alexandria belongs to that select group of martyrs whose fame is in inverse proportion to their historicity, such as Ss. George, Margaret, or Cosmas and Damian. In this book, however, Walsh charts the gradual emergence of a virgin martyr of great beauty, intellect, and nobility before her period of great popularity. Her focus is not on the transformation of narratives about Katherine, but rather on the evidence, of all kinds, for a cult of some sort prior to c. 1200. Starting from the first known mention of the saint in a seventh-century Syriac litany, Walsh moves through an exploration of Byzantine hymns; manuscripts of Katherine’s Greek passio (here dated to c. 570 to c. 800); paintings of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, in order to map the spread of her cult into southern and central Italy, and to Mount Sinai, a diffusion that culminated in its appearance in Rouen (Normandy) by 1047. She then deploys a wide range of sources including church dedications, wills, ecclesiastical calendars, and miracle stories to track the growth in Katherine’s popularity in Normandy and England. Her argument resists efforts to push the origins of Katherine’s cult back to the fourth century and instead suggests that Katherine only gradually “emerged” as a composite textual and liturgical figure who lacked both grave and relics, possibly in Constantinople. Then, in proposing that the “discovery” of Katherine’s body on Sinai took place c. 1000, Walsh postulates a somewhat earlier shift from textual to corporeal manifestations of cult than scholars have hitherto supposed, but leaves oblique the relationship, if any, between the relic cults in Rouen and the Sinai.

Walsh thus draws on very disparate material from many different subfields. Some of this evidence has been the object of little or no recent scholarly study; it is likely that specialists in each subfield may dispute details of dating or interpretation proposed by Walsh. For example, Walsh’s remarks on the earliest Latin manuscript reference to Katherine (Clm 4554) could have been refined by consulting Codices Latini Antiquiores and the bibliography cited there. Nevertheless, even if some chronological fine-tuning remains to be done, the overall outline that emerges from Walsh’s analysis is surely valid. The great value of this study is in opening up Katherine’s early cult for further study.

Future work will need to do two things. The first is to situate Katherine’s passio firmly within the context of other early Byzantine Greek martyr romances and, in particular, within the clutch of legends concerning Alexandrian martyrs. Recent work on the late martyr romances (in Latin) from Rome has shown how fruitful such an approach can be. The second is to situate her within the context of other cults that lacked corporeal relics for many centuries, not only Mary but also other legendary martyrs, for Katherine offers a valuable test case for reconsidering the materialization of the holy in the Middle Ages. Walsh has done a great service by bringing such a complex saintly dossier to scholarly attention, and it is to be hoped that her work will stimulate others to address the challenges that it still contains.