Legend holds that the Roman emperor Maxentius ordered Catherine broken on a spiked wheel, which shattered at her touch, before she was finally beheaded. Her feast day, November 25, became one of the most widely celebrated in medieval Europe, giving her name to the 'Catherine wheel' firework and countless churches and colleges.
The historical record for Catherine of Alexandria is thin to the point of near-invisibility, yet her cult exploded across medieval Christendom with astonishing force. She was said to be a scholar-princess in Roman Egypt who debated pagan philosophers into silence, converted the emperor's own wife, and endured torture with serene composure. When the spiked breaking-wheel devised for her execution miraculously disintegrated, her executioners resorted to the sword.
Whatever the historical kernel, Catherine became the patron saint of philosophers, students, and unmarried women, and one of the 'Fourteen Holy Helpers' invoked in times of crisis. Joan of Arc claimed Catherine as one of the saints who spoke to her. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai desert, one of the oldest continuously operating monasteries on earth, bears her name and guards a relic said to be her skull.
The firework spun on an axle, showering sparks as it rotates, still bears her name: the Catherine wheel, a small mechanical echo of the torture device that supposedly could not touch her.