The trial transcript for the condemnation of St. Joan of Arc mentions St. Margaret more than 120 times. She’s usually paired with St. Catherine, and sometimes St. Michael. Joan never specified which Margaret and which Catherine, but Margaret of Antioch and Catherine of Alexandria were both saints with wide devotions and popular lives set in verse, so it’s considered likely that she was referring to them.

This has caused problems for some, because the lives of both were woven out of the common cloth used for the vitae (lives) of many saints. Margaret’s story used narrative cliches and fantastic imagery, offering wonders that left even a purveyor of legends such as Jacobus de Voragine, the 13th-century author of The Golden Legend, in doubt about their veracity.

There is no way to tell if any genuinely historical information about St. Margaret has come down to us in some way. She is just a name in martyrologies, and even those are late. The oldest surviving mention of Margaret is in the work of the monk Rabanus in the 9th century, long after her traditional date of death in 304.

St. Joan’s interrogators return repeatedly to Margaret and Catherine — what the women said, how they appeared, and what she could offer as proof of her divine messengers. Like so many things in the trial transcript, these details didn’t really interest Joan. She knew what she had experienced: repeated visible, audible and even tactile experiences of the saints.

Asked what sign she gives that this revelation comes from God, and that it is St. Catherine and St. Margaret who speak to her, she answered: ‘I have told you often enough that it is St. Catherine and St. Margaret; believe me if you will.’

Paul VI removed both saints, and many others, from the Roman Calendar with Mysterii Paschalis (1969) due to concerns about their historicity. Contrary to popular belief, this doesn’t mean she was “un-canonized,” but historians dismiss her biography out of hand and focus instead on her literary appearances and the growth of her cult. This is largely because of the fantastic details attributed to her life, which had an origin in pious fictions written to compete with tales and romances for the attention of a courtly audience.

Whoever this Margaret was, however, one thing is certain: she was very real to Joan.

The Growth of the Cult

The cult of Margaret grew almost entirely from the stories of her life and the promises they offered to her devotees. These tales — some of them tiny gems of Latin, Greek, Old French, Anglo-Norman, and Old and Middle English poetry and prose — were the work of literate monks feeding a growing demand for pious lives to serve as examples for the faithful. In turn, the written lives led to veneration, the veneration led to shrines and churches, and the shrines — against all logic for such a backward process — yielded genuine miracles.

In England, the cult grew rapidly after her feast day was added to the calendar in 1222. Several hundred churches and shrines are dedicated to her in both the West, where she is called Margaret, and the East, where the Copts and Orthodox know her as Marina the Great Martyr.

What we can know about the past is always limited, but what we can know about Margaret’s literature is vast. Contained in hundreds of manuscripts by authors as notable as Wace (famous for his Arthurian works) and Lydgate (one of the great poets of his age), many with significant variations, they tell a story with a common core.

The Dragon Burst Asunder

Margaret lived in Antioch, the daughter of a pagan Lord named Theodosius. After she was baptized by her Christian wetnurse, her piety earned the disdain of her father. One day, tending the nurse’s sheep, a prefect named Olybrius happens to see her and, inflamed with desire, wants to make her his own. He questions her, and growing enraged by her faith, throws her in prison until she venerates the pagan gods and yields to him.

Various stories tell of the back-and-forth between Olybrius and Margaret, but nothing can persuade her to deny Christ. She is ordered strung up and beaten with iron rods, her flesh torn with iron rakes. The people cry out for her to yield and Olybrius promises to have her nursed back to health and then marry her. In an Old French vita, she replies:

If my body endures these tortures,
My soul will ascend even more happily
To Paradise, in the company of the saints.
This martyrdom is but a bath
Which purifies body and soul

She is taken down and cast into prison, where she glows with a marvelous light. There, she prays for her true enemy to be revealed, whereupon a dragon appears in her cell.

Writers often let themselves go wild with vivid descriptions of the dragon, making these scenes the high point of the vitae, and an influence for centuries of art and poetry. The dragon’s long tongue unfurls, takes her by the leg, and drops her bodily into its slobbering maw.

In different versions, she either makes the sign of the cross, or her crucifix irritates the dragon, or she cuts her way out of the beast’s stomach with the crucifix. In any case, she is usually depicted rising triumphantly from the split belly of a defeated dragon. Although Jacobus says this scene is “apocryphal and not to be taken seriously,” and many simply interpret it as a metaphor for the defeat of evil, it became an inspirational image that endured in the popular imagination for centuries.

Margaret again asks to see the true face of her tormentor, and a dark figure appears in her cell to tempt her further. She grabs him by the hair, takes a copper hammer, stands on his chest, and beats him senseless, exacting admissions from him about his evil deeds and hatred of humanity. This, too, became a popular image for artists and writers.

She is brought before the prefect again, and reassured by her defeat of evil, she once again refuses him. She is further tormented — stripped naked and burned with torches, plunged into icy water, and burned again — but to no effect, and thousands are converted by her example. After offering a final prayer for her tormentors, she is summarily beheaded on the 20th day of July.

Aside from the vivid nature of the story in word and art, the cultus of Margaret also grew because of her dying promises, which made her a patron for pregnant women. Again, from the Old French vita:

God give me power
To protect any pregnant woman
If she crosses herself
With a book containing the story of my life,
Or opens it,
Or places it on her body,
So that she be granted a safe delivery.

Further promises include protection against stillbirth, for a healthy baby free of physical or mental deformity who will “never be wrongly judged nor deprived of his rights,” and many other graces for those devoted to her. Given high maternal and infant mortality rates, such promises married to such powerful storytelling made Margaret hugely popular, and her legacy continues today in churches and shrines that bear her name.

What can we know about the saint known as Margaret of Antioch? In truth, almost nothing beyond the devotion of those who venerate her, including a young French girl who became one of the most beloved of all saints. History has swallowed her as surely as the dragon did.

We can say this much with a fair degree of confidence: There was a woman named Margaret, or Marina. She may have been from Antioch, or from somewhere else. This or that might have happened to her, but those details no longer matter except inasmuch as they make for a good tale. Like so many others, known and unknown, named and unnamed, she lived and died for her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. More than this, perhaps, we will never know, but for those who believed, and those who still do, that is enough.

As one Middle English life concludes:

Of that swete mayde this is her vye (life),
The twenteuthe daye of her in the moneth of Julye.
Jhesu Cryste, that was yborne of the virgyne Marye,
For Saynte Margaretes love on us have mercye. Amen.

St. Margaret, pray for us.