Sarah James: “The Friar, the Saint, and the Miraculous Image”

In the 1440s the Norfolk-based Austin Friar John Capgrave completed his Life of St Katherine of Alexandria. Unlike earlier English versions of the Katharine legend, Capgrave’s 8624-line poem gives extensive coverage to the saint’s childhood, education and mystical marriage before providing a lengthy account of her passio, and provides us with a level of detail which was almost unprecedented in English hagiography. In 1450 a series of wall paintings was commissioned for St Peter’s and St Paul’s Church in Pickering, North Yorkshire; the decorative scheme, completed in the following decade, remains one of the most complete sets of wall paintings preserved in England, and among them is a lengthy narrative sequence depicting the life and martyrdom of St Katherine.
In this paper I will explore the possible reasons for a heightened interest in the details of this saint’s life in mid-fifteenth-century England. I will also examine Capgrave’s particular focus on the status and use of images in several of his texts, and consider to what extent, if any, we might relate Capgrave’s poem to this extraordinary series of paintings.