Saint Marina the Great Martyr. An illustration in her hagiography printed in Greece depicting her beating a demon with a hammer. Date on the picture: 1858.
She was reputed to have promised very powerful indulgences to those who wrote or read her life, or invoked her intercessions; these no doubt helped the spread of her following.[2]
According to a 9th-century martyrology of Rabanus Maurus, she suffered at Antioch in Pisidia (in what is now Turkey) in around 304, during the Diocletianic persecution. She was the daughter of a pagan priest named Aedesius. Her mother having died soon after her birth, Margaret was nursed by a Christian woman five or six leagues (15 to 18 miles (24 to 29 km)) from Antioch. Having embraced Christianity and consecrated her virginity to God, Margaret was disowned by her father, adopted by her nurse, and lived in the country keeping sheep with her foster mother.[3][4] Olybrius, Governor of the Roman Diocese of the East, asked to marry her, but with the demand that she renounceChristianity. Upon her refusal, she was cruelly tortured, during which various miraculous incidents are reported to have occurred.
One of these involved being swallowed by Satan in the shape of a dragon, from which she escaped alive when the cross she carried irritated the dragon's innards. Eventually, she was decapitated.
Doubts about her story are not new: already in the Middle Ages, hagiographerJacobus de Voragine (author of the well-known Golden Legend) considered her martyrology to be too fantastic and remarked that the part where she is eaten by the dragon was to be considered a legend.[7]
The Greek Marina came from Antioch in Pisidia (as opposed to AntiochofSyria), but this distinction was lost in the West. From the east her veneration spread towards England, France, and Germany, in the eleventh century, during the Crusades.
She was recognised as a saint by the Catholic Church, being listed as such in the Roman Martyrology for 20 July.[10]
She was also included from the 12th to the 20th century among the saints to be commemorated wherever the Roman Rite was celebrated,[11] but was then removed from the general calendar along with a number of other European saints through the apostolic letter Mysterii Paschalis.[12]
Every year on Epip 23 the Coptic Orthodox church celebrates her martyrdom day, and on Hathor 23 the Coptic church celebrates the dedication of a church to her name.
Saint Mary church in Cairo holds a relic believed to be Margaret's right hand, previously moved from the Angel Michael Church (modernly known as Haret Al Gawayna) following its destruction in the 13th century AD.
In art, she is often represented as a shepherdess, or pictured escaping from, or standing above, a dragon. While Western iconography typically depicts St. Margaret emerging from the dragon, Eastern Byzantine iconography tends to focus on her battle with the demon in her cell and depicts her grabbing him by his hair and swinging a copper hammer at his face.[15]
Saint Margaret and the Dragon, alabaster with traces of gilding, Toulouse (c. 1475). (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Reliquary Bust of Saint Margaret of Antioch. Attributed to Nikolaus Gerhaert (active in Germany, 1462–73).
Saint Margaret of Antioch, limestone with paint and gilding, Burgos (c. 1275–1325). (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Margaret the Virgin on a painting in the Novacella Abbey, Neustift, South Tyrol, Italy.
Margaret the Virgin in the coat of arms of Vehmaa.
Barna da Siena. Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine. Boston MFA. This mid fourteenth century Byzantine-inspired Sienese painting depicts St. Margaret fighting the demon with a hammer in the bottom left panel.
^"Margaret of Antioch". The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. David Hugh Farmer. Oxford University Press, 2003. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed 16 June 2007
^See: Lois Drewer, "Margaret of Antioch the Demon-Slayer, East and West: The Iconography of the Predella of the Boston Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine,” Gesta, 32:1 (1993): p. 11-20.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Delehaye, Hippolyte (1911). "Margaret, St". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 17 (11th ed.). p. 700.
