The Learned Virgin

Catherine as the type of the learned virgin — the woman whose holiness is bound up with her intellect, the one great virgin-martyr defined by wisdom and argument rather than by endurance alone. This file reflects on what the legend made of her learning, what it meant in the medieval imagination, and how the source-critical reading holds the literary type and the venerated saint together per METHODOLOGY §3.5.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great-Martyr)

A Different Kind of Virgin-Martyr

The great virgin-martyrs of the early Church — Agnes, Lucy, Barbara, Margaret, Agatha — are remembered above all for their virginity and their endurance: young women who refused marriage and apostasy and bore appalling tortures rather than yield. Catherine belongs to their company, but she stands apart within it, and the difference is the key to her cult. What distinguishes Catherine is her learning. She is not only the virgin who endures; she is the virgin who argues — who meets the power of the empire not with silence and patience alone but with the whole armory of philosophy, and wins. Anke Bernau, in the standard scholarly collection on the cult, makes exactly this point: it is Catherine’s learning that sets her apart from the other virgin-martyrs and gives her cult its particular character (Bernau, in Jenkins and Lewis, St Katherine of Alexandria: Texts and Contexts, Brepols, 2003).

This is so from the very first datable text. The spare Menologion of Basil II, which knows nothing of the wheel or the empress, already makes her learning central: she “learned Greek grammar and became wise,” and her wisdom is what brings her before the emperor and into the debate with the sages (Menologion of Basil II, trans. in Çetinbaş, Comparative Saints’ Cults, CEU, 2020). The learning is not a late ornament but part of the kernel; whatever else the legend added, it began with the learned virgin.

The Meaning of Her Learning in the Medieval Imagination

What did the medieval West make of a saint whose holiness was bound up with her intellect? A great deal, and in several directions. For the schools and universities she was the patron of learning itself, the proof that Christian truth could defeat pagan philosophy on philosophy’s own ground (see Patron of Philosophers and Students). For preachers and apologists she was the model of the Christian who could give a reason for the faith. But her learning was also read in subtler and sometimes uneasy ways, and the modern scholarship has traced these.

Sherry Reames has shown that the clerical breviary versions of her life made her an “active, learned” figure offered for the imitation of men — a virgin whose intellectual combat could be held up to male religious as a model, with the more sexual and violent elements of the legend muted (Reames, in Jenkins and Lewis, Texts and Contexts, Brepols, 2003). Karen Winstead has noted that Catherine’s unusual iconography — sometimes shown with short hair — was read as a kind of “gender-bending,” the learned virgin partaking of an intellectual authority the age coded as masculine (Winstead, in the same volume). And the learning that made her a model could also make her a problem: the Welsh lay tradition studied by Jane Cartwright actually downplayed her learning, preferring her as a marriage-broker and healer, while the humanists studied by Alison Frazier worried over the historical authenticity of so learned a saint (Cartwright and Frazier, in Texts and Contexts, Brepols, 2003). The figure of the learned virgin was, in short, endlessly adaptable — which is precisely the modern scholarship’s central finding about the cult as a whole (see Modern Scholarship).

The Learned Virgin and the Source Problem

There is a particular irony in Catherine’s learning that the source-critical reading must hold honestly. The saint celebrated above all others for her command of fact and argument is the saint whose own legend will not bear the scrutiny of fact and argument. The virgin who confounded the philosophers is herself, on the verdict of modern scholarship, a constructed figure with no documented historical existence (see The Absence of Early Evidence). The Renaissance humanists felt the sting of this directly — the very learning they admired in Catherine made them uneasy about the unhistorical legend in which it was set (Frazier, in Texts and Contexts, Brepols, 2003).

The collection does not resolve the irony by choosing one side of it. The learned virgin is at once a literary type of great power and beauty — the Christian wisdom triumphant over pagan philosophy, dramatized in a single unforgettable figure — and a saint genuinely venerated by the Church as the Great-Martyr Catherine. The type is a construction of the hagiographers; the veneration is real and received. As the repository’s flagship treatment of the thinly-sourced saint argues, the Church in venerating Catherine receives a cult, not a curriculum vitae, and the theological content of the figure — that the wisdom of God confounds the wisdom of the world, dramatized in a woman who out-thought the sages — is no less true for the legend’s want of history (see the Xenia methodology). What St. Paul wrote, the learned virgin enacts: “Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?” (1 Corinthians 1:20). That the enactment is legend does not make the truth it carries less.

Patron of Women’s Learning

A final note belongs to the place of the learned virgin in the history of women and the Church. Catherine became, in the later Middle Ages, a model held up to women — sometimes to keep them in their place (the breviary versions for men, the Welsh tradition’s preference for the marriage-broker over the philosopher), but sometimes, too, as a rare image of female intellectual authority. Tracey Sands has shown how Swedish aristocratic women cultivated her devotion, her royalty and her mystic marriage raising her status as a model for noblewomen (Sands, in Texts and Contexts, Brepols, 2003); and across Europe the figure of a woman who out-argued fifty male philosophers was available, however the clerks framed it, as a witness that wisdom is no respecter of sex. The Orthodox tradition, which keeps her as the Great-Martyr and the patroness of the Sinai of John Climacus, holds her in the long company of holy women whose lives have nourished the Church (see the Orthodoxy guide on women in Orthodoxy). The learned virgin is, among much else, one of Christianity’s enduring images of the sanctified woman of mind.

See Also

• Patron of Philosophers and Students — the patronages that flowed from her learning
• The Debate with the Philosophers — the legend of the learned virgin in action
• The Absence of Early Evidence — the irony of the unhistorical learned saint
• Modern Scholarship — the adaptability of the learned-virgin figure
• Orthodoxy Guide: Women in Orthodoxy — holy women in the Orthodox tradition
• The Xenia Methodology Flagship — the theology of the cult versus the biography

References

• 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.)
• Reames, Sherry L. Essay on the breviary lives, in St Katherine of Alexandria: Texts and Contexts, ed. Jenkins and Lewis. Brepols, 2003. (The “active, learned” Catherine offered for male imitation.)
• Winstead, Karen A. Essay in Texts and Contexts, ed. Jenkins and Lewis. Brepols, 2003. (Catherine’s “gender-bending” iconography.)
• Cartwright, Jane; Frazier, Alison; Sands, Tracey. Essays in St Katherine of Alexandria: Texts and Contexts, ed. Jenkins and Lewis. Brepols, 2003. (The Welsh cult; the humanist anxiety; the Swedish aristocratic devotion.)
• Menologion of Basil II (Synaxarion), Vat. gr. 1613, c. 976–1000. (“Learned Greek grammar and became wise”; cited via Çetinbaş, 2020.)
• The Holy Bible, 1 Corinthians 1:20. (The wisdom of the world confounded.)