St. Catherine of Alexandria

SO um... I love the Oxford English Dictionary. Sometimes I think access to it is the only thing keeping me in school. There are certain problems with it, though. I generally don't have a problem with this but... it was conceived in the mid 19th century by white Christian men. So here is their definition of "Catherine":

[F. Catherine, mod.L. Catharina, earlier Katerina, repr. Gr. Αίκατερίνα name of the saint, subseq. assimilated in spelling to καθαρός pure.]

The name of a legendary Saint and Martyr of Alexandria; whence a female Christian name.

St. Catherine of Alexandria's name... thus... a name? Kind of tenuous.

However, something helpful from this can be found if I look at the quote I posted yesterday from that rinkydink name site. Aικια (aikia) is the Greek word for torture. That is definitely there, in the Greek bit of the etymology. Right? So. Here is St. Catherine.

Please don't take me to be any sort of authority on St. Catherine but I can give you an idea of her story.

She was born pagan but converted to Christianity. She thought the Roman Emperor Maxentius (who ruled from 306-312) was horrifyingly cruel and took him on in a debate, which he lost due to his shaky pagan reasoning. He called for (I believe the story goes) 50 philosophers to argue her, and they all admitted that her reasoning was superior. They were executed. Maxentius offered to have Catherine as his consort, which she refused. She was sent to prison. While in prison she converted some important people. They were killed, and she was sentenced to be tortured to death on a spiked wheel, which we now call a Catherine wheel (the firework was named after the torture device.) When she was strapped onto the wheel, it miraculously broke, and they had to kill her some other way.

For a while, Catherine was a REALLY popular saint. Wikipedia pointed me to the Catholic Encyclopedia, which says that her feast (November 25) was often given more attention than those of the apostles... and that she is second only in holiness/awesomeness to the Virgin Mary. The word "cult" is used to describe worship of her.

At some point it was decided that even though the story is great, there isn't really... much... proof for it! She was actually taken off their calendar for a time.

It's a fantastic, overblown story, which I consider very much in the European folkloric tradition. Which leads me, a hopeless heathen, to believe that the story is older. Boisterous, intelligent, learned chick takes on powerful ruler, wins overwhelmingly... and is executed. (YES it is the Katherine story, thank you for paying attention.) A guy like Maxentius comes around and it grows a fixed point in time and suddenly she's a saint. Very interesting stuff.