Middle Row (left to right)
- Blandina of Lyons, martyr (d. 177). Blandina, a frail slave girl, died along with her younger brother Ponticus, a boy of about 15, in the persecution of Marcus Aurelius in 177, twenty-five years after Christianity was first brought to Gaul. The persecution began with a ban on Christians entering private houses, baths, and markets, and then escalated to torture. Her mistress, also a Christian, initially feared that Blandina lacked the strength to endure, but she survived repeated tortures and seeing her brother die. Tied in a net, she was gored to death by a bull. The martyrs’ bodies were left to rot for a week, then burnt, and their ashes thrown into the Rhone. A letter from some survivors, later quoted by the historian Eusebius, says that Blandina ignored the pain because of “her hope and firm hold upon what had been entrusted to her.” Here she is depicted with the martyrs’ crown and carrying a palm of victory.
- Joan of Arc, visionary (1412-1431). The daughter of peasant farmers, Joan was born in Domrémy near the border of Burgundy toward the end of the Hundred Years War, a dynastic conflict over whether the English Plantagenets or the French Valois were to rule France. From the age of 13, Joan reported visions of Michael the archangel and then of Catherine of Alexandria and Margaret of Antioch. They eventually directed her to travel to Chinon to see the Dauphin (the impoverished Charles VII, who had not yet been crowned) in order to inspire his armies to clear the way to Reims for his coronation. Her father refused to let her go but her friends found her a horse and boy’s clothing. As a test, the Dauphin disguised a courtier as king, but Joan went directly to the true king and greeted him. After months of doubt and indecision, the Dauphin gathered an army for Joan to lead. White butterflies were said to follow Joan wherever she rode with her unfurled battle banner with two angels supporting the arms of France. When the army moved to the besieged city of Orleans, the 17 year old Joan’s presence inspired the soldiers with confidence, and she so harassed the English that they withdrew. Her army entered Reims on July 16, 1429, and the next day the Dauphin was crowned as Joan stood by. Over the next year, he refused to take her advice to press his military advantage and, when she attempted to recapture Paris from the English, he denied her adequate support and the attempt failed. During a sortie on May 23, 1430, she was captured by the Burgundians, who sold her to their English allies for 10,000 pounds. Charles made no effort to save her. The English wanted her condemned by a French ecclesiastical court, and the Burgundian-controlled University of Paris provided the charges of heresy and witchcraft. After months of imprisonment in chains and threats of torture, she was tried at Rouen. Asked why she refused to do woman’s work, she replied, “There are plenty of other women to do it.”
On May 23, 1431, she was condemned to be burned unless she recanted. She eventually did recant and her death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, but the commutation enraged the English, and soon she was accused of relapsing. On May 30, 1431, the 19 year-old Joan was turned over to civil authority, taken barefoot to the Rouen marketplace and burned at the stake. After the French eventually prevailed, Charles VII pressured the church to review the verdict against Joan, and in 1456 a papal court annulled the judgment against her. Eventually she came to be regarded as a French national hero and the patron of soldiers. In 1920 the Roman Catholic Church proclaimed her a saint.
Joan has been called the first Protestant because she insisted on the primacy of her individual experience and singlemindedly refused to submit the validity of her “voices” to the church fathers who judged her. In all her complexity, she has inspired plays by Schiller and Shaw, operas by Verdi and Tchaikovsky, oratorios by Gounod and Honneger, a ballet by Martha Graham, a 1928 film by Carl Dreyer, and even a novel by Mark Twain. “Ardent, impatient, boastful, resistant, implacable, she is like all great saints, a personality of genius, . . . the patroness of the vivid life, prized not for military victories but for the gift of passionate action taken against ridiculous odds, for the grace of holding nothing back” (Mary Gordon).
- Gertrude of Belgium, abbess and virgin (626-659). Gertrude was the daughter of Pippin the Elder, founder of the Carolingian dynasty, and because of his wealth she was vulnerable to a forced marriage. When her father made a politically-motivated choice of a husband for her, she (according to a contemporary) “lost her temper and flatly rejected him with an oath.” On Pippin’s death in 639, her mother Itta built double Benedictine monasteries for men and women at Nivelles, which both she and Gertrude joined. Gertrude became abbess when she was about age 20, and was a good administrator who was known for her hospitality to pilgrims and her encouragement of Irish missionary monks. She resigned her office at the age of 30 in favor of her niece, Gudule, and concentrated on the spiritual life until her death three years later. Gertrude was considered patron of gardeners because fine weather on her March 17 feast day meant it was time to begin spring planting. She is also patron of travelers because of the many travelers’ hospices she established; medieval pilgrims traditionally drank a toast (the Gertrudenminte) in her honor before setting out. Continuing in the same line of work, she was also popularly supposed to harbor souls on their three-day journey to paradise, with their first night under the care of St. Gertrude, and their second night protected by St. Michael the archangel. Her symbol is the mouse (shown here crawling up her abbatical crozier), since Teutonic tradition regarded mice as the emblem of souls.
- Elizabeth of Hungary, princess and philanthropist (1207-1231), was the daughter of King Andrew II of Hungary. She was betrothed at birth to the seven-year-old future Landgrave of Thuringia, Ludwig IV, and at the age of four was sent to be raised along with her future husband. Ludwig succeeded at the age of 21, when Elizabeth was 14. Their marriage lasted only six years before she was widowed, but it was renowned as a paragon of mutual happiness and produced three children. Elizabeth lived a simple, almost ascetic life, encouraged by Ludwig in her spiritual life and in her generous charities and ministries to the poor and suffering. Using her own dowry and selling her jewels, she built hospitals and orphanages, established work projects to provide employment, and personally nursed and cared for the needy. After Ludwig died of the plague, her brother-in-law Heinrich, named regent for the eldest of her three infant children, seized the throne and exiled Elizabeth, accusing her of profligate charity. She turned down an offer of marriage from the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194-1250), and instead became a Franciscan tertiary (lay associate) and ministered to lepers, the poor, and the dying – sewing to clothe the poor and fishing to feed them. She was famed for her constant cheerfulness and positive outlook until her death at the early age of 24. Here she is shown holding out one of the loaves she is distributing to the poor, while the remainder of them, gathered in her mantle, have turned to roses in the sight of her husband Ludwig, who had asked to see what she was carrying. She was declared a saint in 1235, and is patron of bakers, young brides, and widows. The numerous “St. Elizabeth’s Hospitals” throughout the world are for the most part named after her. Elizabeth is commemorated in the Episcopal Church calendar on November 19.
- Margaret of Scotland, queen (1046-1093). After William the Conqueror’s victory at Hastings in 1066, Harold’s uncrowned heir in the old royal Saxon line, Edgar Etheling, went into exile in Scotland with his sister Margaret. In 1070, Margaret married King Malcolm III (son of Duncan, who was murdered by Macbeth) and became Queen of Scotland. Her dowry was said to have included the Black Rood of Scotland – a piece of the alleged Holy Cross set in an ebony crucifix, which she is here depicted holding, and after which Scotland’s government seat, Holyrood House in Edinburgh, is named. Margaret and Malcolm had eight children, including two who became kings of Scotland, Alexander and St. David I. Margaret was a cultured woman who was highly regarded for influencing both the country and her husband for the better, softening his undisciplined and tempestuous personality. She encouraged the founding of schools, hospitals, and orphanages, and herself fed the starving, adopted orphans, ransomed English captives, and inspired her husband to feed crowds of the poor with their own hands. She revived the abbey of Iona in 1072, and founded Dunfermline Abbey as the Scottish equivalent of Westminster. She was less successful in preventing feuding among the Highland clans, and on her deathbed learned that both her husband and her son Edward had been killed in battle against William Rufus of England. She was declared a saint in 1249. Theodoric, a monk who was with her in her last illness, wrote to her daughter, “Let others admire the tokens of miracles which they see in others, I, for my part, admire much more the works of mercy which I saw in Margaret. Miracles are common to the evil and to the good, but the works of true piety and charity belong to the good alone. The former sometimes indicate holiness, but the latter are holiness itself.” She is patron of Scotland. Margaret is commemorated in the Episcopal Church calendar on November 16.
- Hilda of Whitby, abbess and educator (614-680). Hilda (known to contemporaries as “Hild”) was orphaned at 13 and went to live with her granduncle King Edwin of the Angles kingdom of Northumbria. They were baptized together at Easter, 627. At the age of 33 she joined her sister Hereswitha as a nun in France, but returned to Northumbria at the request of St. Aidan, bishop of Lindisfarne, to become abbess at Hartlepool. She later founded and served as abbess of a highly regarded double monastery (a community of men and another of women, with a chapel in between) on a high cliff overlooking the North Sea in Yorkshire. She knew it in Saxon as Streanschalch, “Beacon Bay”; two centuries later Danish invaders renamed it Whitby. It was a beacon of culture and learning for both men and women, where Hilda promoted the study of the Scriptures and thorough education for the clergy. Her nuns were highly sought out as teachers, and five of the monks were later bishops. She also encouraged the poetic leanings of one of her stable-boys, Caedmon, who composed religious poems in Anglo-Saxon and is considered the first poet of the English language. Eventually the English Church had to choose between the old Celtic liturgical customs and the Roman customs that missionaries had brought with them. Hilda herself greatly preferred traditional Celtic customs, but when the Synod that she hosted at Whitby in 664 to determine the matter decided on Roman usages, she accepted them and used her influence to obtain their peaceful acceptance. Though she lived the last six years of her life in constant fever, she continued her duties as abbess and died at the age of 66. Only a century later, Charlemagne prohibited monastic women from teaching due to “the weakness of her sex and the instability of her mind.” Here Hilda is depicted crowned and carrying a church model of the Whitby monastery in her hands. She is commemorated in the Episcopal Church calendar on November 18.
- Ethelreda of Ely, abbess and queen (640-679). Daughter of the King of East Anglia and a niece of Hilda of Whitby, the princess Ethelreda (known as Audrey), married the boy-prince Egfrid and became queen of Northumbria for reasons of state, but refused to consummate the marriage because she had taken a vow of virginity. Twelve years later, her frustrated husband, grown to manhood, tried to bribe the local archbishop, Wilfrid of York, to release her vow, but Wilfred instead released her from the marriage and aided her flight south to the Benedictine abbey of Coldingham. Her husband pursued but gave up after they were separated by a miraculous high tide that was reported to have lasted seven days. Audrey became a Benedictine nun, and in 672 founded and became abbess over a great double abbey for men and women where the present Ely Cathedral now stands. Seven years later, after suffering from neck cancer, she died of the plague. Because of the many miracles attributed to her intercession, she was the most revered of all Anglo-Saxon women saints and Ely became an important pilgrimage site. Throughout the Middle Ages, an annual fair was held at Ely on her June 23 feast day, and the shodiness of the cheap necklaces that were sold there to cure illnesses of the throat led to the coining of the word “tawdry” (a corruption of “St. Audrey”). The English historian, the Venerable Bede, wrote a long hymn in her praise. She is patron of Cambridge University, and of those suffering from throat and neck ailments. Here she is depicted crowned and holding her abbatical crozier and a prayer book.
- Ursula of Cologne and companions. Saint Ursula’s Church in Cologne has an ancient stone plaque indicating that it stands on the site of an earlier basilica built to honor a group of virgins who had been martyred there, perhaps during the persecution of Diocletian (303-311). Almost surely they numbered 11 rather than the traditional figure of 11,000, an exaggeration probably caused by a misreading of Roman numerals. In the 8th or 9th centuries these meager facts were elaborated into two pious fables. One of these, recounted in the Golden Legend (1275), claimed that Ursula was the daughter of a 5th century Christian king of Britain, who was granted a three year postponement of a marriage she did not wish to a pagan prince, set sail to Switzerland with 10 companions (each of whom traveled with 1,000 ladies in waiting), and then crossed the Alps to Rome. On their way back, the leader of the Huns fell in love with her, was spurned, and massacred both Ursula and her 11,000 companions. In the other legend, King Dionotus of Cornwall sent his daughter Ursula to marry Cynan Meiriadog, the Roman general who became the first King of Brittany (ca. 383), along with 11,000 noble maidens as wives for his other colonizers. Their fleet was shipwrecked and all the women were enslaved or murdered. Since Ursula is often (although not here) depicted holding an arrow, these pious fictions may be a conflation of Ursula with the old Teutonic myth of Urschel, the moon goddess who carried a bow and arrow and sailed the Rhine in a ship full of maidens. Ursula is here depicted with her 11 companions under the spread of her cloak.
- Bridget of Sweden, reformer, abbess and educator (1303-1373). Birgitta Birgerstotter was the daughter of the Swedish prince Birger, governor of the province of Upland, and of Ingeburdis, a descendent of the Gothic kings. In obedience to her father, at the age of 16 she married Prince Ulfo Gundarsson, son of the governor of the province of West Gothland, by whom she had eight children. In 1335 she became chief lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Sweden. In 1341, she and her husband made a pilgrimage to the shrine of the apostle James at Compostela in Spain, and on the return trip Ulfo fell ill and died. Birgitta renounced her rank of princess and adopted a more ascetic life. As a child, she had dreams about the suffering of Christ, and now her dreams and visions grew more frequent and vivid, and became the focus of her life. She devoted her life to prayer, to assisting the poor, and to speaking plainly to those in power. She mediated between warring rulers, and warned the Pope at Avignon that it was his duty to return to Rome. In 1351 she founded an order of both monks and nuns, to be governed by an abbess, and with a rule adapted from that of Augustine of Hippo. Popularly called the Brigittines, the order spread through Europe, and was an important educational influence. She was declared a saint in 1391 and is patron of Sweden. Here she is represented crowned and holding a prayer book, and with her traditional emblems, the red spots symbolic of Jesus’ five wounds in the bands over her veil, Jesus’ crown of thorns, and the crucifixion nails.
- Christina of Bolsena, martyr (3d century). Christina of Bolsena, in Tuscany, was probably a real martyr during Diocletian’s persecution (303-311), but her legend has been imported from an Eastern fable of another 3rd or 4th century martyr, Christina of Tyre, and adapted to local Tuscan conditions. Both legends are narratives of ordeals endured and of miraculous occurrences, but are without any historical value. Here she carries a palm of victory, and nearby is her traditional emblem, the millstone to which she was allegedly tied and thrown into the Lake of Bolsena by her pagan father. The legend is that she was saved by an angel, which caused her father to die of spite.
- Clare of Assisi, abbess (1194-1253). At the age of 18, Clare Offreduccio, the daughter of a merchant class family of Assisi in Umbria, heard Francis of Assisi, the 30-year-old Il Poverello (“little poor man”), preach, and was moved to follow his example and commit herself to a simple life. On Palm Sunday, 1212 she remained immobile during the traditional coming-out ceremony when the gowned daughters of the town’s elite received their palm fronds from the bishop. That same night she slipped out of the house through “the door of the dead” (a small side door traditionally opened only to carry out a corpse) and went to Francis, who eventually established her and several similarly-minded women in a small house at San Damiano outside Assisi. Eventually known as the Poor Ladies or Poor Clares, they shared Francis’ new spirituality – its evangelical passion, and its rejection of elaborate ritual and handsome buildings in favor of corporate as well as personal poverty, devoting themselves to prayer, nursing the sick, and works of mercy. Clare refused for three years to assume the role of abbess until (as one of the sisters reported) Francis “almost forced her.” She rebuffed a papal attempt to endow her order with land and buildings, and eventually gained approval to live entirely by the work of their hands and by asking for alms, without any kind of endowments – then a shockingly unorthodox economic arrangement for women. When in 1241 the looting army of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II threatened Assisi, she had herself carried to the convent wall clutching the Holy Eucharist and asked the Lord to “protect these Sisters whom I cannot protect now,” when a voice seemed to answer, “I will keep them always in my care” and the soldiers fled. For that reason, she is traditionally pictured (as here) holding a eucharistic paten. In 1250, defying the almost universal proscription against women speaking outside of the personal context, as well as the Fourth Lateran Council’s 1215 ban on the establishment of new religious orders, she became the first woman to write a rule for monastics. It has an assured and tender tone, provides for decentralized governance and anticipates good sense rather than control. In spite of a personal tendency toward ascetic excesses and 28 years of continual illness, often confined to her bed, Clare wrote of moving through life “with swift pace, light step, and unswerving feet.” She finally received papal approval of her rule, and died the next day. On her deathbed, she was heard to murmur, “Go calmly in peace, for you will have a good escort. The one who created you has sent you the Holy Spirit and has always protected you as a mother does her child who loves her.” Asked to whom she was speaking, she answered, “To my soul.” Clare is commemorated in the Episcopal Church calendar on August 11.
- Catherine of Siena, reformer and spiritual teacher (1347-1380). Catherine di Benincasa was the second youngest of 25 children of a prosperous wool dyer in Siena, in northern Italy. She started having mystical visions when she was only six, and the death of her favorite older sister sealed her determination to resist an arranged marriage and to devote herself to Christ as a virgin. Her family retaliated by forcing her to work as the family servant, until her father came upon her praying and saw a white dove above her head, when he dropped his opposition. At 16, she joined a tertiary order of Dominicans, the mantellata, mostly widows who lived in their own homes and cared for the poor and the sick. She spent her first three years at home, living as a hermit in silence and prayer, after which she had an intense mystical experience in which Jesus positioned himself outside her door and told her to come out, too, and serve the poor and sick. She did so, working as a nurse and caring for patients with leprosy, advanced cancer, and plague. Though she urged other women not to follow her example, she was a lifelong anorexic and given to extreme forms of self-mortification (she thought of herself as “a mirror of human weakness”).
She was also a person of extraordinary personal charm and insight (a modern writer calls her “one of God’s own show-offs”) and began to acquire a reputation as a spiritual advisor to all sorts of people. She developed an astonishing public life for a woman of the late Middle Ages – preaching to thousands in public squares, and becoming a renowned mediator in Siena and then in other Tuscan cities, healing the wounds of faction and civil war. “It is through silence that the world is lost,” she explained. She corresponded with men and women of all sorts, including the princes and republics of Italy, and the new pope, Gregory XI, whom she implored to reform the clergy and the administration of the Papal States and to leave Avignon, where popes had been under the political control of the kings of France since 1303. “Don’t make it necessary for me to complain about you to Christ crucified,” she cajoled the pope. On a less happy note, she also ardently threw herself into Gregory’s unrealized plans for a crusade against the Muslims, in hopes of becoming a martyr, and of restoring peace to Italy by putting the wandering companies of mercenaries to other use. In June 1376 she went to Avignon as ambassador of Florence, which was at war with the Papal States. Though unable to make peace, she so influenced Gregory that he returned to Rome in January 1377, over the opposition of almost all his cardinals and the French king. Catherine then became the pope’s own ambassador to Florence, narrowly escaping an enraged mob’s attempt on her life, until peace was signed in August 1378.
She then returned home and dictated her Dialogue, the book of her meditations and revelations which is considered a classic of the Italian language, written in the concrete, earthy Tuscan vernacular of the 14th century. The keynote of her writing is that all of us, whether in the cloister or in the world, must ever abide in the cell of self-knowledge where the traveler from time to eternity is born. At the request of Gregory’s successor, Urban VI, the last two years of her life were spent in Rome, working for the reformation of the church and the end of the Great Schism (1378-1417), which saw three competing claimants to the papacy. She supported Urban, the Roman claimant, but her letters urging him to curb his own arrogance are uncompromising; one historian says that she perfected the art of kissing the pope’s feet while simultaneously twisting his arm. Brokenhearted over her inability to end the schism, one day while praying before a mosaic in old St. Peter’s Basilica, she felt Peter’s fishing boat (a symbol of the church) leave the mosaic and land on her shoulder, crushing her to the ground. She had to be carried home, and was virtually paralyzed and in great pain for three months until immediately before her death when, a priest in attendance reported, “her tearful and clouded eyes became serene and joyous, like one saved from a deep sea.” She died on April 29, 1380, at the age of 33. Catherine was declared a saint in 1461. She has been called a social mystic, and is patron of Italy, and a fit patron for those who feel crushed by religious institutions. Here she carries her usual emblems of a lily and the book of her Dialogue. Catherine is commemorated in the Episcopal Church calendar on April 29.
- Agatha of Catania, martyr. Agatha was born and martyred in the city of Catania in Sicily, probably during the persecution of Decius (250-253). There are no reliable details about her death, but the Golden Legend (1275) recounted that after she refused the sexual advances of a judge, Quintian, he had her imprisoned in a brothel, where she was assaulted for a month. She was then repeatedly tortured and denied medical attention before her death. One of these tortures was to have her breasts cut off, the instrument of which she is depicted holding in her right hand, while she reads a prayer book held in her left. She is patron against diseases of the breast and (because her intercession was thought to have prevented an eruption of Mt. Etna shortly after her death) against fire.
- Lucy of Syracuse, martyr and virgin (ca. 283-304). Little is known of Lucy except that she lived in Syracuse in Sicily, and probably died around 304 in the persecution of Diocletian (303-311). One story, found in the Golden Legend (1275), is that her rejected pagan fiancee denounced Lucy as a Christian after she vowed her life to the service of Christ. Her name, which means “light,” probably accounts for the story that her eyes were put out and her eyesight miraculously restored. In Scandinavian countries, her feast day is observed by having a daughter wearing a crown of lighted candles go from room to room singing to awaken the family and offering them St. Lucy’s Cakes. As patron of the blind, she here carries a lamp as her emblem, along with a palm of victory.
- Monnica of Hippo (331-387). Monnica was the mother of Augustine of Hippo (354-430), a major Christian writer and “the son of so many tears,” as he admits in his Confessions. She was born to moderately wealthy Christian parents in North Africa, in what is now Algeria. She was married to Patricius, who became a Christian a year before his death in 371. The marriage is thought to have been an abusive one, and it appears that both were heavy drinkers. Monnica early realized her son Augustine’s intellectual gifts and natural leadership skills, and initially had strong ambitions for his success in a secular career. But when the young Augustine scorned his mother’s Christianity and shopped among pagan philosophies for clues to the meaning of life, she focused all her hopes on his spiritual life. When, as an orator and teacher of rhetoric, he moved to Milan, the widowed Monnica followed him. She attended the church pastored by Ambrose of Milan (340-397), from whom Augustine eventually discovered that Christianity could be intellectually respectable. He was baptized on Easter Eve in 387. Monnica died that same year at the age of 56, when they were about to depart from Rome’s port of Ostia to return to North Africa. Augustine reports that she told him, “Nothing is far from God, and I have no fear that God will not know where to find me, when he comes to raise me to life.” In his Confessions Augustine looked back on his life and recognized the centrality of his mother’s perseverance to his own spirituality and ministry. She is pictured here with hands raised in prayer, the model of unswerving entreaty. Monnica is commemorated in the Episcopal Church calendar on May 4.
- Julia of Corsica, martyr (d. c. 616-620). According to legend, Julia was of a noble Carthaginian family and, when the Vandal king Genseric (c. 389-477) captured Carthage in 439, was sold as a slave to a Syrian merchant. While on the way to Gaul, her ship stopped at Corsica. When Julia refused to participate in a pagan festival that was being held there, the governor of the island, Felix, had her tortured and crucified. She is patron of Corsica.
|
