Two Wednesdays ago I climbed the path in the pleasing Yorkshire town of Pickering to the parish church of SS Peter & Paul. Little did I suspect that the church houses a huge sequence of medieval wall paintings, uncovered and restored in the 1870s and 1880s; and furthermore, amazingly, I had no idea that among the images - St George and the Dragon, St Christopher, St Edmund shot with arrows, the Coronation of the Virgin and the Harrowing of Hell, is a beautiful depiction of the story of St Catherine. My photographs are a bit indistinct, even with some amendment, and you can doubtless find better ones elsewhere, but they are my photographs.
1. The Emperor Maxentius sets up an idol in Alexandria (a very devilish one, too) and announced that everyone must worship it, with sackbuts, trumpets and all kinds of music, as it says in the Prophet Daniel. Catherine, pious, learned, beautiful, and already handily crowned, refuses to join in.
2. Maxentius sends a gang of pagan philosophers to convince Catherine of the error of her opinions: she converts them to Christianity instead, and so they are all done away with, post-haste.
3. Catherine is imprisoned.
4. Catherine is taken out of prison, where angels have been keeping an eye on her ...
5. ... and is stripped to the waist to be scourged. Seeing the blessed Saint topless is a bit disconcerting, but presumably the medieval parishioners of Pickering were unfazed by such frankness. Her torturers do let her keep her crown on.
6. Catherine is returned to prison ...
7. ... where she is visited by the Empress, who she also converts to Christianity.
8. Maxentius is now beside himself and orders Catherine's execution. Here she is between the razored wheels which are intended to flay her to pieces, but angels helpfully smash them up and the bits massacre the unfortunate pagans at the bottom.
9. Finally Catherine is beheaded.
Funnily enough I am this very day in receipt of a copy of Katherine Lewis's 2000 book The Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in Late Medieval England in which she points out that the Pickering murals were 'rather imaginatively repainted' and that the beheading scene in particular was almost completely reinvented (the detail of Catherine's hair being swept forward to expose her neck does look strangely un-medieval). Dr Lewis states mildly that 'the repainted nave as a whole does at least have the advantage of giving one an idea of what a brightly painted late medieval English church looked like'.
Indeed, one supposes, it does. I found myself almost completely overcome by the unexpected presence of my Friend in Heaven and, had there not been quite a number of other people in the church at the time, might well have fallen to tears. As it was, it must have been peculiar to the other visitors to have me mooning around the nave in front of these particular images.
On my way home I dropped in at Leicester to see an old friend and visit the King. The Cathedral has this Catherine window which I suspect is mid-20th-century:
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