St Katherine of Alexandria: Texts and Contexts in Western Europe (review)

This book is no. 8 (but the sixth to be published), in the Brepols series Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts. This series has now provided a number of collections of essays that deal with women as producers and users of texts, and of useful editions and translations of texts themselves. The collection of ten essays on aspects of the cult of Katherine of Alexandria in England, Wales, Sweden, Spain, Italy (and books of hours produced in Flanders for English customers) has its origin in sessions sponsored by Hagiography Soc. at Kalamazoo and Leeds in 1999 (Lewis's article is an expanded adaptation of a chapter published in J. Stopford (ed.) Pilgrimage Restored).

The editors' introduction provides an overview of the development of the cult of Katherine and of its narrative and iconographic features in Western Europe, and draws out a number of themes in the articles that point to different ways the collection may be read: geographic and social context, text-based, images, clerical use, 'critical readings' i.e. use by women; construction of masculinity. Two central questions identified by the editors that run through the collection are the relation between Katherine's power and her popularity, and what 'rendered her image so open to appropriation by a wide range of devotees?

The first four essays look at the development of the cult of Katherine in particular geographic and chronological settings, using a variety of evidence. Christine Walsh looks at the role of the Normans in the development of the saint's cult in Western Europe, from its origins in the acquisition of her relics by the newly-founded abbey of Holy Trinity in Rouen in the 1030s, surveying its early development in Normandy and England. She notes that from the beginning different facets of Katherine appealed to different groups. Katherine Lewis writes about pilgrimage to St Katherine's shrines in England, and the way in which this made pilgrimage accessible to people who had no chance of travelling farther afield. She discusses the symbolic function of the shrine, and evidence for St Katherine as a patron for lower-status women seeking husbands. Jane Cartwright's essay discusses a text – the Medieval Welsh Buchedd Catrin – in the context of the development of her cult in Wales, surveying the evidence from the visual arts and church dedications, and in the context of its manuscript transmission, which indicates that it was popular with a secular audience. Tracey Sands examines the veneration of St. Katherine among the nobility in Sweden, looking at naming practices and seals, and some church dedications and wall paintings.

The next four essays are centered on textual representations of Katherine, although in the case of Karen Winstead's study these representations are pictorial rather than verbal. Anke Bernau focuses on the aspect of Katherine's intellectual prowess, and the connections between virginity, knowledge and violence, drawing on four English narratives: the early thirteenth-century Seinte Katerine, the South English Legendary version, Capgrave's Life of St. Katherine, and Caxton's Golden Legend version. This is a broadly thematic study, which takes examples from texts that span almost three centuries, but gives little sense of the particularity of each telling in relation to the theme. The next two studies are examples of a whole-manuscript approach that fruitfully brings together textual details from the saint's life, from other texts in the manuscript, and information about manuscript ownership and use. Emily Francomano examines a Spanish manuscript (Escorial h-I-13) that contains a life of St Katherine along with other prose romance and hagiographic texts advice for married laywomen.

Jacqueline Jenkins' essay on Harley MS 4021 relates information about the owner of the manuscript, Anne Wyngefield, to the way the legend is presented in this manuscript, and the other devotional texts that surround it. Karen Winstead, in the only study that deals...