The Life of St. Agnes of Rome

She was thirteen or fourteen when the prefect of Rome put her on trial. The Acts kept her answers, and this short 1856 life gives them in full.

Most Catholics know St. Agnes as a name in the Canon of the Mass and a girl with a lamb. This life, translated from the French in 1856, gives the rest of the story, and much of it is in her own words. The Acts of her martyrdom recorded her answers to the prefect's son, who came with his hands full of presents, and to the prefect himself, who tried pity first and then the choice between the altar of Vesta and a public brothel. The book quotes those answers at length, with the Latin of the Acts cited in the notes, and fills in around them from St. Ambrose and the poet Prudentius.

The details are the kind a reader keeps. The men who came to the brothel withdraw more pure than they entered. The fire divides and burns the rioters who called for it. No irons can be found small enough for her arms. The executioner is paler than the girl. After her death the story goes on to the vision of Agnes with the lamb at her tomb, the cure of Constantine's daughter there, the basilica he built over it, and the two lambs the Pope blesses on her feast, whose wool is spun for the pallium.

A closing appendix takes up the historians who called the Acts apocryphal and answers them from Prudentius, St. Ambrose, and St. Maximus of Turin, arguing that these Acts are the only life of Agnes that tradition has handed down. The whole book reads in an evening. It suits an adult who wants the real story before her feast on 21 January, and it is a good book to put in the hands of a girl who has taken Agnes as her patron.

About this edition

Set from the 1856 edition published by Peter F. Cunningham of Philadelphia in the series The Saints and Servants of God, translated from the French. The wording of the historical text is preserved in this newly typeset edition. EPUB edition.