Saint Agatha of Catania: the Acts, Hymns, Oration, and Miracles from Acta Sanctorum

Agatha of Catania died in the persecution under Decius, about the year 251. Her name entered the Roman Canon of the Mass, where it has remained for some fifteen centuries - so that whoever prays the Canon says her name, whether or not he knows a single fact about her. This volume gathers what the Church has said about her.The seventeenth-century Bollandists, compiling the Acta Sanctorum, did not write a life of Agatha - they collected the documents: the earliest surviving Acts, a later Greek recension, the retelling by Simeon Metaphrastes, a long oration by Methodius of Constantinople, the history of her relics' journey from Constantinople back to Catania, two collections of miracles, and the hymns sung on her feast. Each is the work of a distinct hand, sometimes centuries apart. This edition presents them in full English translation, opening with the Passion and closing with the hymns, with the Bollandists' own paragraph numbers retained so any passage can be traced back to the complete scholarly edition.The Bollandists' commentary and manuscript apparatus - nearly a hundred pages weighing the rival claims of Palermo and Catania - has been set aside here in favor of the documents themselves. It remains freely available, in full, at actasanctorum.org. This book is for reading, and praying, in sequence.The Acta Library is a series of print editions drawn from the Acta Sanctorum, prepared for readers who keep the traditional Roman Martyrology.