Trying to find sources for saints, especially female saints, can be problematic. If you go through google, the choices displayed will be mostly Roman Catholic, and heavily weighted towards pages that sell beads and prayer items. The Orthodox tradition does not have good representation, even though its history is steeped in sainthood. And you can forget Buddhism or any other non-Christian list of saints. Likewise with local saints, for example of Norway or Cornwall, not to mention historical or archaic lists of saints.
To offset that, I am starting this running list, a sort of annotated bibliography, so if I am in the mood for a saint on a particular day, I can find one easily, along with a description of the traditional observances.
Calendars
“List of women’s saint’s names” from Saints Mary & Martha Orthodox Monastery, by date.
Orthodox women saints calendar
Description of a Norwegian Clog-calendar: Communicated to the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, by Eiríkr Magnússon, 1879. Internet archive. Google Books. Also “Description of a Norwegian Calendar”
The Roman and British Martyrology: Now First Translated, Literally, from the Latin Ed, O’neill and Duggan, 1846. by date.
“Celtic and Old English Saints” Calendar.
Lives of the Lady Saints, by date or location
Background
“Women Buddhas: A Short List of Female Saints, Teachers and Practitioners in Tibetan Buddhism” Dharma Fellowship Library
A Dictionary of Saintly Women, Agnes Baillie Cunninghame, c 1901-1905. Volume 1 free ebook on Google Books. Internet archive. Volume II, internet archive, also A Dictionary of Saintly Women, Volume 2, By Agnes Baillie Cunninghame Dunbar seachable on gbooks
Gulaþings lög/Gulathing’s Law 11th c. contains Catalogue of Saints‘ days established by church law (Norway), Archbishop John’s Law 1284,
The Saints in Iceland: Their Veneration from the Conversion to 1400, Margaret Cormack, Société des Bollandistes, 1994. No Ebook, but searchable.
Catholic online: alphabetical list of women saints.
Orthodox lives of the saints, search by date
The Book of Saints, by Saint Augustine’s Abbey, 2015, Roman Catholic searchable.
The Book of Saints: A Comprehensive Biographical Dictionary, By Basil Watkins, 2015, over 10,000 Roman Catholic saints – searchable.
A Handbook of Legendary and Mythological Art, by Clara Erskine Clement Waters, 1881. Free ebook. Internet Archive (illustrations removed). Hathi Trust (full view with illustrations, Harvard University copy digitized by Google)
Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index. Search (“hagiography”?)
The lives of the Fathers, martyrs, and other principal saints, 1903, by Butler, Alban, 1711-1773; Buttler, Charles, 1750-1832, Internet Archive.
Cornish Saints
From blog of Celtic saints:
From Cornish language resources
- “The female saints of Cornwall, Sarah Fish, University of Wales – Trinity St David (PDF) (Download PDF)
- “Beunans Meriasek (The Life Of St Meriasek)“, (NLW MS Peniarth 105) a drama in Middle Cornish based on the life of Meriadoc, the saint from Brittany, 1504. National Library of Wales; The life of Saint Meriasek, bishop and confessor : a Cornish drama by Stokes, Whitley, 1872.
- “Beunans Ke (The Life Of St Ke)“, sixteenth-century copy in Middle Cornish of a drama based on the life of Saint Ke or Kea with stage directions in Latin (NLW MS 23849D). National Library of Wales.
- List of Cornish saints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cornish_saints
- Cornwall – Land of Saints, Cornwall guide, list.
- Cornish Saints, The Arthurian center
- Women Saints of Cornwall, Part 1, Orthodox Christianity, pix and dates.
- Celtic and Old English Saints – 2018. Calendars by month
- “St Ia of St Ives: a Byzantine saint in early medieval Cornwall?” blog with pics and maps
- Dictionary of Celtic Saints, Elizabeth Rees, 2012. Celtic Sites and Their Saints: A Guidebook, Elizabeth Rees, 2003. Gbooks.
- “The patron of Sennon (Cornwall) often asserted to be Senan of Scattery, seems instead to have been a Cornish woman saint, called Sanctae Sennanae in the Poll-tax rolls of 1377″, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, Fifth Edition Revised, David Hugh Farmer, p.393.
- G.H. Doble, (26 November 1880 – 15 April 1945), The saints of Cornwall, 1960. Gilbert Hunter Doble, collection of forty-eight booklets known as the “Cornish Saints Series”, 1923-1945, after 1926 with historical commentaries by Charles Henderson, republished without commentaries in 5 vol and single volume. partial list The Medieval Cult of St Petroc, Karen Jankulak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Hunter_Doble List of saints by district.
- Orme, Nicolas, Saints of Cornwall, Oxford University Press, 2000. considered the authoritative source
User:St. Jake is just after St. Auggie of Hippo. ^^ So what is catholicsaints.info? Apparently, it’s out of Kentucky. I wonder if they are right that St. Adrian of Nicomedia is considered to be the patron saint of arms dealers. I should probably search to see if you’ve treated St. Jake or St. Adrian here before. 🙂
Oops. Again I left out one of the references (for the patron saint of arms dealers). Thanks for the leads, by the way…
Since the topic here is gender, I tend to focus on female spirituality. But if you want to research a particular saint I would recommend starting with some of the dictionaries and encyclopedias listed under ‘background”. Many will let you do a limited search. For something longer, click on one of the resources on Internet Archive then see how much farther you can get by following their suggested books at the bottom. There are quite a few resources that are out of copyright and have been scanned and uploaded. Saints don’t change that much over the centuries, a book published a century ago is still likely to be useful.
Oh I see what you’re talking about now, user:Jackemcgee13 added “Jack of McGee” to the list of saints, second from the top, in the process deleting Saint Saturius of Soria. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_saints&diff=858878328&oldid=852869844
Where’s Dirk?