Patron of Philosophers and Students

Catherine as the patron of philosophers, scholars, students, teachers, and the university — claimed by the University of Paris and the Sorbonne theology faculty — and the wheel as her emblem, lending its name to the firework and the torture-device. This file sets out the patronages that flowed from the debate-legend, with firm claims distinguished from unverified detail per METHODOLOGY §3.5.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great-Martyr)

Patroness of the Mind

Of all the patronages attached to the saints, few are as fitting to their legend as Catherine’s patronage of learning. The whole of it flows from a single episode — the virgin who out-argued and converted the fifty philosophers the emperor sent to refute her (see The Debate with the Philosophers). Because her distinction in the legend is her mind — she is, as the scholarship notes, the one great virgin-martyr defined by learning rather than only by virginity and endurance (Bernau, in Jenkins and Lewis, St Katherine of Alexandria: Texts and Contexts, Brepols, 2003) — she became, in the medieval West above all, the heavenly patron of everyone whose life is the life of the mind.

Her patronage extends across the whole world of learning and letters: philosophers, theologians, apologists, and preachers; scholars, students, and schoolchildren; teachers and educators; jurists and lawyers; and the keepers and makers of books — librarians, archivists, scribes, secretaries, and stenographers (the last fittingly, since the legend’s own narrator poses as her stenographer). The list, gathered from the medieval dedications, amounts to a portrait of the literate professions of Christian Europe placing themselves under the protection of the virgin who defeated the philosophers (en.wikipedia.org, “Catherine of Alexandria”).

The University and the Sorbonne

Catherine’s most prestigious patronage was of the university itself, the institution that the High Middle Ages invented and that made learning a corporate and sacred enterprise. The University of Paris — the queen of medieval universities and the center of scholastic theology — took her as a patroness, and the theology faculty associated with the Sorbonne claimed her especially, on the strength of her forensic and intellectual skill: who better to patronize the disputations of the schools than the virgin who had won the greatest disputation of all? She was likewise patron of colleges elsewhere — Balliol College, Oxford, has been associated with her since the thirteenth century, its tradition recalling that she “confounded the scholars of Emperor Maximinus with her learning and eloquence” (Balliol College; en.wikipedia.org, “Catherine of Alexandria”).

Some of the more specific ceremonial claims attached to this patronage should be reported with caution.

[Disputed: Catherine’s general patronage of the University of Paris and of the Sorbonne theology faculty is well attested, as is her patronage of Balliol College, Oxford. More specific ceremonial details sometimes attached to the Sorbonne patronage (e.g., a particular faculty procession on her feast) could not be corroborated from a primary description and are not asserted here (en.wikipedia.org, “Catherine of Alexandria”; Balliol College).]

The bond between Catherine and the university outlasted the Middle Ages, and it furnished one of the speculated reasons for the Roman Catholic Church’s restoration of her feast in 2002 under John Paul II — himself a trained philosopher restoring the patron of philosophers (see The Medieval Popularity).

The Wheel as Emblem

If the debate gave Catherine her patronage of the mind, the wheel gave her her emblem — and a second family of patronages besides. The spiked wheel that shattered before her (see The Breaking Wheel) became her invariable attribute in art, the sign by which she is known in glass and panel across Europe (see Iconography). From it she became patron of the trades of the wheel — wheelwrights above all, and by extension spinners, millers, potters, and others whose work turns on a wheel (en.wikipedia.org, “Catherine of Alexandria”).

The wheel also left its mark on the language. The “Catherine wheel” is the name of the spinning pinwheel firework, whose whirling sparks recall the wheel of her legend; and “breaking on the wheel,” the European judicial torture of later centuries, took its name and its instrument from the same source — a grim irony, that the engine which the legend has fail to harm the saint should have lent its name to a real and terrible punishment (en.wikipedia.org, “Catherine wheel (firework)”). The collection notes that the date at which the firework acquired its name is not documented and is not asserted here.

The Catherinettes

A distinctive social custom grew from Catherine’s patronage of unmarried young women, of which she was also patron. In France a Catherinette was an unmarried woman who reached the age of twenty-five still single by St Catherine’s day, 25 November. The custom arose from the practice by which unmarried young women would re-dress the headdress on St Catherine’s statue in church each year on her feast; a woman left the company of the Catherinettes when she married, so that the idiom coiffer Sainte-Catherine (“to cap St Catherine”) came to mean to remain unmarried at twenty-five. The statue-capping custom is dated to roughly the sixteenth century, though the feast itself is far older; it survived longest in the Parisian haute-couture and millinery trades, where Catherinettes wore specially made green-and-yellow hats — green for wisdom, yellow for faith — to a ball on the saint’s day (en.wikipedia.org, “Catherinette”). The custom is a charming late flowering of the cult, well removed from the legend itself, and it is reported here as the social-historical fact it is.

See Also

References

  • “Catherine of Alexandria.” Wikipedia. (The list of patronages: philosophers, scholars, students, teachers, theologians, apologists, jurists, librarians, scribes; the University of Paris; wheelwrights, spinners, millers; unmarried women.)
  • Bernau, Anke. “A Christian Corpus: Virginity, Violence, and Knowledge in the Life of St Katherine of Alexandria.” In St Katherine of Alexandria: Texts and Contexts in Western Medieval Europe, ed. Jacqueline Jenkins and Katherine J. Lewis, 109–130. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003. (Catherine’s learning as her distinguishing mark.)
  • Balliol College, Oxford. (The college’s association with Catherine since the 13th c.; “confounded the scholars of Emperor Maximinus.”)
  • “Catherinette.” Wikipedia. (The Catherinettes; coiffer Sainte-Catherine; the statue-capping custom; the green-and-yellow hats.)
  • “Catherine wheel (firework).” Wikipedia. (The firework named for the breaking wheel.)
  • Foley, Michael P. “The Life and Afterlife of St. Catherine of Alexandria.” New Liturgical Movement, 24 November 2021. (Catherine as patron of philosophers; the 2002 restoration and John Paul II.)