St Catherine at the British Library

I learned a variety of things from the 'Medieval Women' exhibition at the British Library yesterday. Among them was that there is a patron saint of ice skating (Lidwina of Schiedam), and what Margery Kempe thought the Devil smelled like (rather nicer than one might presume, as it turns out); that the last ruler of a Crusader state was a woman (Countess Lucia of Tripoli), that Margaret of Anjou had a pet lion, and that about a third of medieval medical practitioners were women (not all of them midwives). There were also two images of St Catherine: a small woodcut made by the sisters of the Bridgettine convent of Marienwater, and the terrible, charismatic painting on the Battel Retable, with its face scratched out like its sister of Maidstone. But there is more: like the other saints depicted on the Retable, she is surrounded by astrological graffiti, charms against witchcraft, and geometrical patterns whose significance remains obscure. She is a saint not merely maimed, but neutered, and recruited to some other cause.