Catherine of Alexandria
Egyptian missionary, saint depicted with a wheel
b. 287 · d. 305
Catherine of Alexandria, also spelled Katherine, was, according to tradition, a Christian virgin and martyr, who suffered martyrdom in the early 4th century at the hands of the emperor Maxentius. According to her hagiography, she was both a princess and a noted scholar who became a Christian around age 14 and converted hundreds of people to Christianity.
Related people
Events
Commemorated
Places
- Alexandria death
How we know
A figure the record marks as legend — kept, and marked. Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints: an Introduction to Hagiography — p. 111, ch. IV — the classification of texts
- On the Deaths of the Persecutors (De Mortibus Persecutorum) 1 claim — Great Persecution
- Roman Martyrology 1 claim — The martyrdom of Catherine of Alexandria
Written about
Glosses
- How a passion gets written A martyr’s story is rarely a report and usually a composition, and Delehaye — a Bollandist, writing about the corpus his own order had spent three centuries editing — set out how the composing works. The first move is…