Library › Latin: Myth, Hymn & Religion › De Sancta Marina
One of the shortest chapters of the Legenda Aurea, Jacobus de Voragine’s collection of saints’ lives of about 1260, tells the story of Marina, an only daughter whose father, on entering a monastery, dresses her as a boy and has her received among the monks as brother Marinus. Accused years later of fathering a child, she accepts the blame in silence, is expelled, raises the child at the monastery gate, and is discovered to be a woman only at her death.
Marina’s story belongs to a group of early Eastern legends of women who lived disguised as monks, preserved in the Vitae Patrum. Voragine tells it plainly as an example of patience under false accusation, and the tale’s reversal at the end gives it the shape of a short moral romance. Such stories were popular reading in the Middle Ages, and Marina’s legend circulated widely in Latin and vernacular versions, with a cult in both the Eastern and the Western churches.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from The Latin Library, which publishes public-domain texts. Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.