This bold literary experiment transforms the genre of the saint's life by infusing it with techniques more often associated with chronicles, mystery plays, and romances.

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

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.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1893 Edition.

"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.

Medievalists from the US and Britain examine evidence of the third- century saint's popularity across Europe throughout the Middle Ages, and suggest some reasons for it. Prominent questions they address are whether she was popular because she was powerful, or powerful because she was popular; and what made her image so much more open than that of other saints to appropriation by such a variety of medieval saints. The ten essays are from international gatherings in Kalamazoo and Leeds in 1999. Distributed in the US by The David Brown Book Company. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

In Fifteenth-Century Lives, Karen A. Winstead identifies and explores a major shift in the writing of Middle English saints’ lives. As she demonstrates, starting in the 1410s and ’20s, hagiography became more character-oriented, more morally complex, more deeply embedded in history, and more politically and socially engaged. Further, it became more self-consciously literary and began to feature women more prominently—and not only traditional virgin martyrs but also matrons and contemporary holy women. Winstead shows that this literature placed a premium on scholarship and teaching. Hagiography celebrated educators and scholars to a greater extent than ever before and became a vehicle for educating readers about Christian dogma. Focusing both on authors well known, such as John Lydgate and Margery Kempe, and on others less known, such as Osbern Bokenham and John Capgrave, Winstead argues that the values promoted by fifteenth-century hagiography helped to shape the reformist impulses that eventually produced the Reformation. Moreover, these values continued to influence post-Reformation hagiography, both Protestant and Catholic, well into the seventeenth century. In exploring these trends in fifteenth-century hagiography, identifying the factors that contributed to their emergence, and tracing their influence in later periods, Fifteenth-Century Lives marks an important contribution to revisionary scholarship on fifteenth-century literature. It will appeal to students and scholars of late medieval English literature and late medieval religion.

The cult of St Katherine of Alexandria enjoyed great popularity throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, retaining a wide appeal right up to the Reformation; she appears in a wide variety of contexts, in association with concepts of royal and civic power, by the end of the period becoming identified as a British saint, and acting as a model of the ideal lay Christian and a paradigm of femininity and young womanhood. This study, the first full-scale interdisciplinary examination of a saint's cult in late medieval England, looks at the processes by which she came to have such a prominent place in the devotions of English men and women from across the wide social scale; using written and visual narratives of Katherine's life, in combination with documentary evidence provided by wills, inventories and gild returns, the author shows how devotees perceived and responded to her, and the various religious, social and cultural roles assigned to her. Dr KATHERINE J. LEWIS teaches at the University of Huddersfield.