Medieval Mondays: Saint Lucy with her eyes on a plate

Perhaps it's because I wasn't raised Catholic, but I still do a double take at some of the images of saints. Take Saint Lucy, for instance, who is commonly portrayed holding a pair of eyes on a plate, as you can see in this Spanish painting from the late 15th or early 16th century.

They're actually her eyes, despite the fact that in this picture she has a pair of perfectly good ones in her head. Hey, she's a saint, she can do that sort of thing.

Saint Lucy or Lucia was a Christian martyr who lived from 283-304 and was killed during the great persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Diocletian. Like many Christian martyrs, she was killed after refusing to make sacrifices to the Imperial cult.

She was said to have been killed by a sword, but a much later tradition grew up that she had her eyes gouged out first. In another story, she took out her own eyes because they were so pretty they were attracting unwanted attention for this woman who taken a vow of chastity. Today Saint Lucy is venerated as the protector of good sight.

Medieval Mondays: St Catherine: the saint saved from the wheels

Hello again! As I mentioned before, I've been busy writing The Maze of Mist, my fantasy novel set in the same world as Roots Run Deep. Now that that's in edits, I can get back to blogging.

This fine alabaster carving from London's Victoria & Albert Museum was made in England in the 15th century. It shows angels releasing St Catherine from certain death on the spiked wheel, a particularly nasty form of medieval execution. According to legend the wheel shattered and the flying pieces killed her executioners and the people who had gathered around to watch.

Of course she ends up martyred when another group of executions behead her. This is a common element in saints' stories. The evildoers are punished, but since it's God's will that the saint be martyred, the saint eventually gets killed.

Small alabaster plaques like these were common in churches and private homes during this period. What's unusual with this image is that St. Catherine is shown half naked.

Medieval Mondays: Abortionist saints in Medieval Ireland

While abortion has been considered a sin by the Catholic Church for many centuries, the history of the Church's views on it aren't completely straightforward. A new article in the Journal of the the History of Sexuality tackles the unusual topic of saints who performed abortions.

Dr. Maeve B. Callan found references to four early medieval Irish saints who performed miraculous abortions. Callan writes, “these accounts celebrate saints who perform abortions, restore female fornicators to a virginal state, contemplate infanticide, and result from incest and other ‘illegitimate’ sexual unions. Moreover, the texts themselves generally reflect a remarkably permissive attitude toward these traditionally taboo acts, an attitude also found in Irish penitentials and law codes.”

All four saints--Ciarán of Saigir, Áed mac Bricc, Cainnech of Aghaboe, and Brigid of Kildare--lived in the fifth and sixth centuries but like other saints, tales of their deeds survived long after that.

Saint Ciarán helped out a nun who had been raped by the local king: “Ciarán, despising the enormity of such a crime and wishing to apply a cure, went to the house of sacrilege to seek the girl from there. . .Then the man of God, led by the zeal of justice, not wishing the serpent’s seed to quicken, pressed down on her womb with the sign of the cross and forced her womb to be emptied.”

The other saints' stories are similar. An interesting detail is that in later versions of this tale, Saint Ciarán only blessed the nun's womb. The act of pressing down on it (a primitive and dangerous abortion technique) was left out.

Callan hasn't found any evidence for abortionist saints in other medieval cultures. It would be interesting if other scholars probed deeper into the hagiographies of their regions to see if any similar stories exist.