It was a Jewish friend who introduced me to The Penguin Dictionary of Saints. I promptly picked up my own copy, and have spent many happy hours reading through the listings, which are by no means exhaustive. He thought some of the entries and connections were hilarious.
One that particularly stood out was that Saint Agatha, for instance, is the patron saint of bell founders. The reason is interesting - she was supposedly tortured and martyred by having her breasts cut off. So, in medieval art, she was depicted holding her breasts on a plate. The illiterate being instructed by these images took them for bells.
She’s not the only saint who got her association through misinterpreted artwork. Sant Erasmus (also known as St. Elmo) is the patron saint of mariners because he was depicted with a ship’s wheel. Well, it looked like a ship’s wheel. It was really the windlass that was used to wind out his intestined when he was tortured by being eviscerated. He ended up as the one after whom St. Elmo’s Fire – the electrostatic discharge also known as the corposant, seen on the tips of spars and masts of a ship in appropriate weather conditions – was named, all because he attributes were misinterpreted.
My favorite of these is Saint Wilgefortis, who is depicted with a beard. The legend is that she was slated to marry a pagan prince, and prayed to God to somehow prevent the marriage. God, who evidently has a bizarre sense of humor, miraculously gave her a beard, which put off the prince so that he refused. And her father had her crucified. The legend is thought to have grown up around church artwork depicting Jesus crucified in a long gown, rather than the usual loincloth. This caused the uninitiated , mistaking the gown for a woman’s dress, to ask why a bearded woman was being crucified. Hence the legend.
She, and other saints with the same legend , was prayed to by women who wanted to avoid unwanted marriages, like the British St. Oncomber/Uncumber, whose name is pretty obviously derived from “unencumber”
Then there’s the story of Saints Barlaam and Josaphat, which is pretty obviously a Christian retelling of the story of Gautama Siddartha the Buddha.
One more weird type of saint – the Cephalophore, or Saint Who Caries His Own Head (After It’s Been Cut Off). St. Denis, the patron saint of Paris, is one of these. So is Nicasius of Rheims and Aphrodisius of Alexandria.
I’ve long had a feeling that these legends were inspired by artwork, too – but broken artwork, in this case. There’s a very high bas relief in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum here in Boston that depicts Salome with the head of John the Baptist on a “charger” (a big plate, basically). But another character in the scene has had his head broken off – the relief is so high that individual heads and arms and the like protrude vulnerably from the surface. The head of this character finally succumbed to the odds and broke off.
And there you had a headles figure, still upright, and figureless head on a plate. It’s not a big step from there to the figure taking the head from the plate and walking off with it. I don’t say that this particular carving inspired the legend, but I do suggest that one like it might have.
I remember St. Wilgefortis from one of Robertson Davies’ novels. He had a character who was an expert in little-known saints and this story is the one that stuck in my brain.
(Bear in mind that this is folklore, and the stories of these saints get adapted to whatever purpose the tellers want) Saint Audrey was a princess who became a nun, yet still wore her necklace under wimple. God, being rather demanding as fathers in-law go, hit her with cancer where it rested on her body (either throat or breast). Rejecting prideful bling, her order became lacemakers, and so cheap fabric and later cheap anything including behavior was called “tawdry” from St. Audrey.
St. Erasmus (St. Elmo’s Fire). Quite the story with this one. He was tortured & chained in prison, but an angel helped him escape. He went on to baptize a lot of people. He was then rolled down a hill in a barrel filled with spikes, it didn’t kill him. Apparently he was then coated in pitch and lit on fire. I guess at that point, he was saying, really, that’s all you’ve got? Well, they finally got him when his abdomen was slit open. He is patron of stomach aches, stomach issues and labor pains.
His feast was only a few days ago (Groundhog’s Day). It’s tradition on that day (or the nearest Sunday) for the priest (and nowadays, a few lay volunteers) to bless the members of the congregation by holding a crossed pair of candles to each’s throat and saying “Through the intercession of St. Blaise, bishop and martyr, may God shield you from every disease of the throat, and every other ailment”.
Lacemaking was also a tradition among the sisters of the Congregation of St. Joseph. It was one of the few “respectable” professions open to women at the time, and so was taught by the nuns to the widows and orphans they cared for. They’d also sit around lacemaking in the evenings after their daily rounds, while talking about their days.
Malverde probably didn’t exist, but then, it’s not like that’s unusual among saints. Christopher probably didn’t exist, either, and Brigid is probably just a pre-Christian Celtic goddess with the serial numbers filed off. And Veronica probably did exist, at least if the Gospels are considered definitive, but there’s no canonical record of the miracle she’s named for, and just playing the odds, her name was probably Mary.
Right, exactly. The Gospels tell us that “one of the women” wiped Jesus’s face. They don’t tell us which of the women, but an awful lot of the women in Jesus’s inner circle seem to have been named “Mary”, so it was probably one of them. Tradition (i.e., not the Gospels) tell us that, when whoever-it-was wiped his face, an image of his face was left on the cloth. And since this would be the only true image of Jesus, not influenced by some mortal artist’s interpretation, the woman who did the wiping is referred to as “Veronica”, even though that’s almost certainly not what her friends called her.
