Lidwina was born in Holland in 1380, the daughter of a nobleman and a peasant woman. At an early age she’d already decided to join a convent and lead a holy life, which like I keep saying on this blog, wasn’t such a terrible choice when your options are a) spend all day praying or [...]
Posts Tagged ‘saints’
St. Lidwina of Schiedam
Posted in Obscure Saint Blogging, Religion, tagged Catholicism, maidens, martyrs, medieval saints, Roman Catholicism, saints on July 3, 2011 | 1 Comment »
Blessed Columba of Rieti
Posted in Obscure Saint Blogging, Religion, tagged anorexia mirabilis, Catholicism, holy anorexia, maidens, renaissance saints, saints on December 2, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Technically, Columbia of Rieti is not a saint. Technically she gets the title “Blessed,” which is one rung below sainthood on the Catholic Ladder of Holiness. The process of beatification is simultaneously quite thorough and totally haphazard, as best as I can tell, and anyway her technically non-beatified status doesn’t make her any less interesting. [...]
St. Florian
Posted in Obscure Saint Blogging, tagged antiquity, Catholicism, Diocletian, Roman Empire, saints on September 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
This post is about penance. Well, sort of, though that would imply that this is somehow punishment rather than something awesome. Last week at the local pub quiz, there was FINALLY a question about a saint–who is the patron saint of firefighters and chimney sweeps? Well, dear reader, I had absolutely no idea. Naturally this [...]
St. Irene of Athens
Posted in Obscure Saint Blogging, Religion, Uncategorized, tagged antiquity, byzantine empire, debunked saints, Eastern Orthodoxy, saints, women emperors on July 13, 2009 | 1 Comment »
I owe this episode of Obscure Saint Blogging to Twelve Byzantine Rulers, a podcast I’ve been listening to on my runs lately and enjoying the crap out of. As a half-assed classicist, my understanding of Roman history goes something like: lots of detail, names and dates up through about 69 CE; something about Trajan and [...]
St. Apollonia
Posted in Obscure Saint Blogging, Religion, tagged Egyptian saints, maidens, martyrs, persecution, Roman Empire, saints, virgins on July 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Way before a dude named Prince was making Purple Rain, there was a martyr in Alexandria, Egypt, named Apollonia. Nothing, apparently, is known of her life, besides the fact that she was a Christian virgin who lived in Alexandria. Some sources say she was an older lady, but other sources say that’s a mistranslation, and [...]
St. Vincent de Paul
Posted in Obscure Saint Blogging, Religion, tagged douchebags in the name of God, France, Richmond, saints, slaves, the poor, the South on June 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Since I’m at my parents’ house right now, in lovely Spotsylvania, Virginia where I grew up, I thought I’d do a Southern-type saint. There’s no patron saint of the Civil War that I can find. I did, however, see someone call the Civil War the “War of Southern Liberation” for the first time in my [...]
St. Expeditus
Posted in Obscure Saint Blogging, Religion, tagged hackers, historical confusion, martyrs, nerds, procrastination makes it happen, saints on May 30, 2008 | 15 Comments »
Patron saint of procrastinators, and one who generally hurries things along. The story of Expeditus is extraordinarily confused, and ends with the Catholic church basically admitting that this guy never lived. He starts showing up in martyrologies–big lists of martyrs–in the eighteenth century in Italy, well before 1781. Unfortunately what the martyrology said was that [...]
St. Aldegundis
Posted in Obscure Saint Blogging, Religion, tagged Belgium, Catholicism, maidens, medieval, nuns, saints, Satan, visionaries on April 25, 2008 | 1 Comment »
St. Aldegundis, also known as Aldegonde, Aldegund, or Adelgondis, was born in Flanders in 639 CE, in the county of Hainaut, which straddled the borders of modern Belgium and France. Her parents, Walbert and Bertilia, and her sister, Waldetrudis, are also all saints. In fact, her nieces and nephews by Waldetrudis: also all saints. They [...]
