The fireworks Catherine wheel honours a saint who may never have lived
Catherine of Alexandria, the scholar-princess said to have out-argued 50 pagan philosophers, was one of the most revered saints of the late Middle Ages. Her spiked wheel even names a firework. Yet no written mention of her survives from before the 9th century, and many historians doubt she existed at all.
Her legend is vivid. The daughter of a governor of Alexandria, she devoted herself to study and became a Christian after a vision of the Virgin and Child, around age 14. When Emperor Maxentius began persecuting Christians she rebuked him to his face. He set 50 top philosophers and orators to debate her; she won, and some converted. Imprisoned, she was said to be fed by a dove and visited by Christ, and more than 200 visitors, including the empress, became Christians. Condemned to a spiked breaking wheel, she touched it and it shattered, so she was beheaded instead.
The earliest surviving account of her life dates from a document compiled for Emperor Basil II in 976, some six centuries after her supposed death, although her relics were reportedly rediscovered at Mount Sinai around 800, allegedly with hair still growing and healing oil flowing. Encyclopædia Britannica calls her historicity doubtful, Donald Attwater saw her as the invention of a Greek writer composing an edifying romance, and Christine Walsh suggests she may be a composite of women persecuted in 4th-century Alexandria.
One popular theory, first argued by Anna Brownell Jameson, is that her story absorbed that of Hypatia, the pagan mathematician and philosopher murdered in Alexandria about 110 years later, with the roles of Christian and pagan reversed. Others point to a woman named Dorothea, whom Eusebius described around 320 refusing to become an emperor's mistress. The Catholic Encyclopedia rejects most of the legend's details as later inventions while stopping short of denying her.
Her cult was enormous regardless. She was ranked among the Fourteen Holy Helpers, held up as a model for young women by writers such as Christine de Pizan, and honoured as patron of learning; St Catharine's College, Cambridge, was founded on her feast day in 1473. The Catholic Church dropped her feast from its general calendar in 1969 and restored it in 2002 as optional.
Source: Catherine of Alexandria
