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Margaret the Virgin

Saint Margaret of Antioch
St Marina the Great Martyr
St.Marina the Martyr hammering a devil.jpg
St. 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.
Virgin-Martyr and Vanquisher of Demons
Born 289
Antioch, Pisidia
Died 304 (aged 15)
Feast July 20 in Roman Catholic Church, July 20 in Anglican Church -; July 17 in the Eastern Church
Attributes slain dragon (Western depictions); hammer, defeated demon (Eastern Orthodox depictions)
Patronage childbirth, pregnant women, dying people, kidney disease, peasants, exiles, falsely accused people; Lowestoft, England; Queens' College, Cambridge; nurses; Sannat and Bormla, Malta
Catholic cult suppressed
1969 by Pope Paul VI

Margaret, known as Margaret of Antioch in the West, and as Saint Marina the Great Martyr (Greek: Ἁγία Μαρίνα, Hagía Marína) in the East, is celebrated as a saint by the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches on July 20 and on July 17 in the Orthodox Church. Her historical existence has been questioned. She was declared apocryphal by Pope Gelasius I in 494, but devotion to her revived in the West with the Crusades. 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 cultus.

According to the version of the story in Golden Legend, she was a native of "Antioch" and 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 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 (in what is now Turkey). Olybrius, Governor of the Roman Diocese of the East, asked to marry her, but with the demand that she renounce Christianity. Upon her refusal, she was cruelly tortured, during which various miraculous incidents 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. The Golden Legend describes this last incident as "apocryphal and not to be taken seriously" (trans. Ryan, 1.369). She was put to death in AD 304.


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