The Spanish "Santa Catalina de Alejandría": The Many Lives of a Saint's Life ed. by Margaret Parker (review)

A number of new monographs and editions have been published in Europe and North America in recent years by Fernando Baños Vallejo, Andrew M. Beresford, and others, that build on earlier work by scholars like John K. Walsh and reveal a growing interest in the role of hagiographic legends and lore in medieval and early modern Spanish imaginative literature. One promising area of interest has centered on the literary depiction of individual saints whose lives and cults developed in particular ways on the Iberian Peninsula. Margaret Parker has made an important contribution to this trend with the publication of her new study and anthology of representations of Catherine of Alexandria from the medieval hagiographic collections to Golden Age theater.

The "General Introduction" (pp. 11-33) provides an overview of hagiographic writing, and considers modern scholarship on the genre. It then traces the legend of St. Catherine of Alexandria as an example of what Pierre Delooze has deemed the "constructed saint," imagined and elaborated on by "so-cial groups" (17). Parker points out that the historicity of this Catherine was called into question by early humanists, but not officially removed from liturgical calendars until after the Second Vatican Council. The introduction goes on to review theories of the saint's origins: as an Eastern martyr whose life was preserved and expanded through oral traditions, a Christianized retelling of the story of the wise Alexandrian woman Hypatia, a female Platonist, a Nestorian, or as an unnamed woman who refused to become the Emperor's mistress in Eusebius' Historia Ecclesiastica. What follows is a brief discussion of evidence attesting to the spread of devotion to the saint from East to West, in the form of relics translated from a monastery on Mount Sinai to Normandy and her entrance into the visual arts in the eighth century. This coincided with the textual translation of her legend from early Greek and Latin versions recorded in the tenth and eleventh centuries, to the more extensive narrative of the Vulgata and the later legend recorded in Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda aurea (c. 1275).

Catherine is always described as a lovely young erudite who, refusing to pay homage to Pagan gods, triumphs over fifty wise men in a philosophical debate. The sages are burned in punishment and Catherine ordered to be decapitated. Parker compares longer renditions that set the scene for the debate at the Imperial court; dwells on the saint's learning and devotion; tells how the archangel Michael appeared to her prior to the debate; and includes more dialogue between Catherine, the sages, and the Emperor over the nature of Christ. Converted by Catherine's arguments, the wise men of longer versions are miraculously baptized by the flames that usher them into the afterlife. Also, the saint is shown refusing the lusty Emperor's repeated offers of worldly honors in exchange for her submission. Prior to her beheading — complete with signs of holiness, such as the milk that flows in her veins in lieu of blood — Catherine converts the Empress and a knight named Porphyrius. She also survives a series of tortures through the help of attendant angels: starvation, mutilation, and a machine with spiked wheels. Finally, late medieval writers added a prequel vita to this amplified legend, recounting Catherine's refusal to marry, her life as a recluse, and a Marian vision and mystical encounter with Christ prior to her debate and martyrdom.

Parker outlines receptions of Catherine's life in England, France, Germany, and Italy, before presenting her anthology of Spanish literary representations of the saint. Edited texts in the first section of the book ("Castilian Manuscript Santorales," pp. 35-64) are prefaced by a discussion of the version of Catherine's legend found in a late fourteenth-century Castilian collection of saints lives known as the Libro de los huéspedes (Escoral H-I-13), recently edited...