Reading Notes: Women Saints, Part A






Saint Christine. Engraving by N. Mellini after V. Pizzoli. Web source: Wikimedia Commons.



Today's notes are going to be all about Women Saints! More specifically, I am going to focus on Saint Christine of Italy.

Saint Christine


-Christine was a beautiful woman, born in Tyre, Italy. She was so beautiful in fact, that her father kept her locked away in a tower. All of the men wanted to marry her, but Christine's father was adamant on her maintaining her virginity (a little creepy in my opinion) so as a way to worship the gods.

- The girl was not on board with these sacrifices and tried to avoid doing them if at all possible. Christine refuses to sacrifice to multiple gods, so her father gets very mad and chains her up (again, really weird).

- So basically she is tortured because she refuses to worship all of these other gods. Her dad tries to set her on fire and instead of her being burnt, 500 other men are burned. Christine's father claims that this means that she is a witch but she says that she simply has the grace of Christ (like her name, Christine).

- Her father demands that Christine be beheaded and then he just...dies.

-This cycle of men rulers trying to set Christine on fire continues over and over and the men keep dying until Julianus, who has Christine killed as a martyr.

-All of these men tried to take away her freedom of faith, as well as her femininity, but she was stronger than them.

My thoughts:

I think that the story of Saint Christine is really interesting and offers a lot of insight into how women were regarded at the time. Christine is not taken seriously by her father, and it ultimately punished for her faith in God. I'm not going to lie, parts of this story (especially the torture of Christine) was hard to read. I think that her experience represents an extreme version of how many women were treated for having decanting beliefs in ancient times. I think a feminist retelling of this story would be really cool to explore, so I might tackle that later this week. Stay tuned!

Bibliography

The Golden Legend edited by F.S. Ellis. Web source: UnTextbook.

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