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A NOTE ON A HAGIOGRAPHICAL SOURCE FOR GRATIAN’S DECRETUM: THE QUOTATION ATTRIBUTED TO SAINT LUCY IN C.32 Q.5

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2025

ATRIA A. LARSON
ATRIA A. LARSON*
Affiliation:
Saint Louis University
*
atria.larson@slu.edu

Abstract

Couched within a question about the culpability or innocence of a rape victim in a dramatic case in Gratian’s Decretum lies a quotation attributed to Saint Lucy. This early Christian martyr from Syracuse enjoyed increasing popularity and devotion in northern Italy and beyond by the twelfth century. Gratian appeals to her story and to her own statement as his first authority within this section of his famous textbook, Decretum C.32 q.5, in order to argue that a woman’s chastity or modesty (pudicitia) cannot be tarnished or taken away through physical force. If she does not consent to the act, she is not guilty and her purity remains. This note discusses the story about Lucy, explains the liturgical centrality of narratives like it, and, with an examination of several twelfth-century manuscripts, tracks down the source (or likely source type) for the dialogue Gratian quotes. In doing so, it highlights a hitherto underappreciated source for Gratian’s Decretum, namely, hagiography.

Keywords

Saint LucyGratianhagiographycanon lawconsentDecretum Gratiani

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Research Article
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Traditio , Volume 80 , 2025 , pp. 313 - 321
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fordham University

Causa 32 of Gratian’s Decretum presents the following astonishing case:

A certain man, since he did not have a wife, joined to himself in marriage a certain prostitute. She was infertile, granddaughter of a freeman, daughter of a servile land-tenant. When her father wanted to hand her over to another man, her grandfather joined her to this [first] man, for the sole cause of sexual gratification. Then this man, motivated by repentance, began to seek children for himself from his own female slave. Then he felt convicted and worthy of punishment on account of his adultery, and so he solicited a certain man to force himself upon his wife so that he might therefore send her away [in divorce] … It is first asked whether a prostitute can licitly be taken in marriage. In the second place, whether she is properly to be called a wife who is taken purely for sexual gratification. Third, whose judgment a certain woman is to follow, that of a free grandfather or of a servile father. Fourth, if a man is permitted to seek children from a maidservant when his wife is still alive. Fifth, if a woman who is sexually assaulted is proven to have lost the virtue of modesty.Footnote 1

In his answer to the fifth question, as I have explored elsewhere, Gratian treats at length the question of a woman’s guilt in situations of rape.Footnote 2 In fact, this is the one question where Gratian addresses sexual assault directly, removed from conversations about raptus. His treatment represents an original contribution in the history of canon law because he applies to the woman of the case—a former prostitute and now legitimate wife—texts from the Christian tradition that had previously only been applied to consecrated virgins and female religious. Furthermore, in contrast to the vague and ambiguous treatment of the sexual assault of women, especially married women, in Roman law, Byzantine canon law, and earlier western canon law, all of which seemed to focus more on external circumstances to the act and the type of person being assaulted, Gratian narrowly focused his attention on one question: did the woman consent to the sexual act? If she did consent with her mind and will, then she would be guilty of fornication or, in the case of marriage, adultery. If not, no physical force could pollute her and render her guilty; the perpetrator alone bore guilt, and the accused could not be dismissed by her husband on grounds of adultery.

Gratian’s opening dictum within C.32 q.5 begins by stating: “That pudicitia cannot be violently snatched away is proven by the authorities of many.”Footnote 3 Then he says, “Even if the body is violently corrupted, if the pudicitia of the mind is preserved inviolate, chastity is doubled.”Footnote 4 He has a specific justification for making this claim, namely, the fact that an early Christian female martyr, Saint Lucy, purportedly claimed this very same thing:

Just as Blessed Lucy is purported to have said to Paschasius, ‘If you cause me to be violated unwillingly, chastity will be redoubled upon me for a crown.’ After all, God judges according to dispositions and wills.Footnote 5

Lucy is not quoted again in the question, but it is clear that this authority plays a major role in Gratian’s thinking about the woman in his Causa 32 and whether she can be held responsible for the sexual assault perpetrated upon her. Gratian’s reference to Saint Lucy deserves further consideration. Scholars have paid immense attention to Gratian’s canonistic sources and have uncovered his theological sources, including early forms of what would become the Glossa ordinaria on the Bible.Footnote 6 Here we have hagiographical and liturgical material, however, that informs Gratian’s categories and argumentation.

Legends about the saints had strong historical roots, but, as stories told and re-told in different places and various settings, they developed over time.Footnote 7 By the time of Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda sanctorum (later known as the Legenda Aurea), compiled around 1260 more than a century after Gratian’s life, Lucy’s vita comprised several narrative elements.Footnote 8 Jacobus’s famous collection is ordered according to the liturgical year, beginning with the time from Advent to Epiphany that represents the historical age of humanity’s reconciliation to God through Christ.Footnote 9 Since Lucy’s feast day is December 13, she appears in this earliest section of the collection. Jacobus drew attention to her name’s connection with lux (light). She was the daughter of a noble Roman family from Syracuse during the time of Diocletian. Her mother suffered an uncontrolled emission of blood, but through Lucy’s faith and devotion to Saint Agatha, she was healed. In response to the healing, Lucy and her mother started giving away their possessions to the poor. Upset at losing future possessions, her betrothed turned her over to the Roman authority, Paschasius, and accused her of being a Christian. She steadfastly refused to sacrifice to idols. Her exchange with Paschasius is marked by a mind-body or spirit-flesh dichotomy; after being called a whore, she accuses him of being a “seducer of the mind” (corruptor mentis) but also denies being engaged at all with “seducers of the body” (corruptores corporis). Although a virgin herself, she suggests a wider definition of chastity in claiming that “those who live chaste lives are the temple of the Holy Spirit (Qui caste uiuunt, templum spiritus sancti sunt).” Paschasius moves the discussion again in an overt sexual direction, threatening to take Lucy to a brothel, at which point he says, “Your body will be defiled, and you will lose the Holy Spirit.” Lucy does not concede and here gives a statement similar to the one used by Gratian: “The body is not defiled unless the mind consents. If you have me ravished against my will, my chastity will be doubled, and the crown will be mine. You will never be able to force my will.”Footnote 10 In response to Lucy’s obstinance, Paschasius calls upon a crowd to have their way with the virgin, but no matter how many men approach her and try to move her, she miraculously remains immovable, like a large boulder. She suffered torture by fire and boiling water before having a dagger plunged into her throat.

Since Gratian was working more than a century prior to Jacobus, scholars must determine the details of Lucy’s story circulating in Gratian’s time in central and northern Italy and the types of books within which Gratian would have known them. What could be his source? Many early medieval authors wrote hagiographical works. Among them was Bede, who included a treatment of Lucy in his Martyrologia. Gratian did not take his material on Lucy from this work, however,— because Bede focused on Lucy’s acts of charity and the miracle of not being moved by a crowd of men; the dialogue with Paschasius does not appear in his version.Footnote 11 We also know that devotion to Lucy was strong throughout Italy and revived in the south in the late eleventh century under Roger I, Count of Sicily (1071–1101). Moreover, a female monastery devoted to her was present not far from Bologna, having been erected already during the Lombard period.Footnote 12

Gratian gave a specific quotation, however. Like most medieval Christians and especially the clergy, he knew the stories of the saints through the liturgy. As Thomas J. Heffernan has explained, it was the liturgy that would “exercise the single most important influence in the composition of the saint’s Life,” and, over the history of the early Church and development of the Divine Office, “it was within the context of the liturgical service, specifically the Matins service of the Divine Office, that the saint’s Life developed.”Footnote 13 Material for saints’ vitae proliferated from the Carolingian period onwards in order to provide readings (lectiones) for the Matins service in breviaries, the books containing materials for the daily Office. Hagiographical texts filled out the lectiones for the second of three nocturns in the Matins service.Footnote 14 These readings from a saint’s vita were read on the date of their anniversary; in Lucy’s case, on December 13. Gratian may have heard a lectio about Saint Lucy during the liturgy or read it in a breviary, which was a succinct compendium of the entire Divine Office. The earliest breviaries date to the eleventh century.Footnote 15 It is not clear whether Gratian’s religious community—whatever it was, if indeed he was a monk—or his church had one.Footnote 16 They became much more common in the later Middle Ages.Footnote 17

The texts that make up breviaries have many precedents with a long history. Late antique passion narratives (passiones) or acts (acta) of the martyrs gave way to vitae of confessors whose lives attested to their saintliness even if these individuals did not die for their faith.Footnote 18 As noted above, the Carolingian period witnessed an explosion of longer narratives. Perusal of manuscript catalogues reveals numerous hagiographical texts that constitute passionaria (collections of passion narratives) or a mixture of passions and vitae, sometimes simply under the title vitae sanctorum. Such texts were produced and used for personal spiritual or meditative reading, for reading at meals, as a foundation for sermons, for liturgical lessons on feast days, and more generally as part of the traditions of individual orders and individual cloisters.Footnote 19 While the initial flowering of these texts may have been the eighth and ninth centuries, the massive survival of manuscripts of this genre dating to the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries testifies to their ongoing relevance and usage.Footnote 20

Saint Lucy appears in numerous hagiographical manuscripts prior to the composition of Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea. Specifically, the passio S. Luciae (BHL 4992), with the incipit Cum per uniuersalem prouinciam Siciliae, was widespread, even if it was not present in all such manuscripts. Among the forty-one codices containing passionaria in the Vatican collection, at least six contain the passio of Lucy.Footnote 21 All of them date to the eleventh or the twelfth century. The provenance of most of them remains a mystery, but one belonged to the Church of St. John in Ravenna, and another belonged to a house of Augustinian canons in Frankenthaler in southwest Germany. All of these manuscripts present the same story of Lucy with minor textual variants. The breadth of its geographical distribution is indicated by its presence in Lincoln, Cathedral Chapter Library 149, dated to the second half of the twelfth century and more than likely belonging to the Benedictine priory of St. Peter at Leominster in Herefordshire, established in the 1120s by Cluniac monks upon the occasion of a gift to Reading Abbey by King Henry I.Footnote 22 The passio also appeared in four hagiographical manuscripts now housed in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan.Footnote 23 Finally, a twelfth-century martyrology that can be identified as belonging to the Carthusians in Bologna contains an alternate account of Lucy’s martyrdom for the Ides of December with the same quotation used by Gratian.Footnote 24

That key piece of dialogue appears toward the end of the exchange between Paschasius and Lucy in the passio. In answer to Paschasius’s declaration that he will haul Lucy off to a brothel and then the Holy Spirit will leave her, Lucy responds with conviction about her own innocence in the presence of God, who knows that true guilt lies only in those whose minds and wills depart from righteousness. I produce here a translation based largely on the twelfth-century BAV, Vat. lat. 1194, the text of which is very similar to all other manuscripts I have consulted:

My body will never be polluted unless by the consent of my mind. For even if you put incense into my hand and make a sacrifice through my hands, God will take notice and scoff. After all, he judges according to dispositions and wills. For thus chastity suffers on the part of the violator, just as is the case for the serpent, the thief, the barbarian. And if you cause me to be violated unwillingly, my chastity will be redoubled upon me for a crown.Footnote 25

All the manuscripts I have consulted contain something very close to this version of the text, and clearly it is this section that Gratian was explicitly recalling when he wrote the text quoted above:

Even if the body is violently corrupted, if the pudicitia of the mind is preserved inviolate, chastity is doubled. Just as Blessed Lucy is purported to have said to Paschasius, ‘If you cause me to be violated unwillingly, chastity will be redoubled upon me unto a crown.’ After all, God judges according to dispositions and wills.Footnote 26

In short, there is no doubt that Gratian had in mind that narrative when he wrote, whether in the widespread version of the passio (BHL 4992) or a slightly different version. To the multiple sources upon which Gratian is known to have drawn in his monumental work, scholars can now add the passio of Saint Lucy. More than likely, other portions of the Decretum also show his familiarity with hagiographical literature and the importance of such narratives—and their theological and religious significance—in his thinking.

Footnotes

Research for this note benefited from a grant to use the Ambrosiana microfilms at the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame in September 2024. I am grateful to their staff, including librarian Julia Schneider, and to the staff of the Vatican Film Library at Saint Louis University, Gregory Pass and Lea Frost, for their invaluable assistance. I am also grateful to the hospitality and generosity of Claire Arrand and Julie Taylor, who made my work with manuscripts in Lincoln, England, possible in July 2024.

References

1 C.32 case statement: “Quidam, cum non haberet uxorem, quandam meretricem sibi coniugio copulauit, que erat sterilis, neptis ingenui, filia originarii; quam cum pater uellet alii tradere, auus huic eam copulauit, causa solius incontinenciae. Deinde hic, penitencia ductus, ex ancilla propria filios sibi querere cepit. Postea de adulterio conuictus et punitus quendam rogauit, ut ui uxorem suam opprimeret, ut sic eam dimittere posset … Hic primum queritur, an licite meretrix ducatur in uxorem? Secundo, an ea, que causa incontinenciae ducitur, sit coniunx appellanda? Tercio, cuius arbitrium aliqua sequatur, an liberi aui, an originarii patris? Quarto, si uiuente uxore liceat alicui ex ancilla filios querere? Quinto, si ea, que uim patitur, pudicitiam amittere conprobetur?” ed. Emil Friedberg, in Decretum Gratiani, vol. 1, Corpus iuris canonici (Leipzig, 1879), col. 1115. All translations are my own.

2 See Atria A. Larson, “Lucretia (and Lucia) and the Medieval Canonists: Guilt, Consent, and Chastity in the Early Canonistic Jurisprudence of Rape,” Law and History Review 43 (2025), forthcoming.

3 C.32 q.5 d.a.c.1: “Quod autem pudicitia uiolenter eripi non possit, multorum auctoritatibus probatur.”

4 C.32 q.5 d.a.c.1: “Unde, quamuis corpus uiolenter corrumpatur, si pudicitia mentis seruetur illesa, tamen castitas duplicatur.”

5 C.32 q.5 d.a.c.1: “Sicut B. Lucia fertur dixisse Pascasio: ‘Si inuitam me feceris uiolari, castitas michi duplicabitur ad coronam.’ De sensibus enim et uoluntatibus iudicat Deus.”

6 The foundational study of Gratian’s canonistic sources is Peter Landau, “Neue Forschungen zu vorgratianischen Kanonessammlungen und den Quellen des gratianischen Dekrets,” Ius commune 11 (1984): 1–29; repr. in idem, Kanones und Dekretalen: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Quellen des kanonischen Rechts (Goldbach, 1997), 177*–205*. On theological source material, see John C. Wei, “Theology and Theological Sources of Canon Law,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Canon Law, ed. Anders Winroth and John C. Wei (Cambridge, 2022), 173–91; and Atria A. Larson, “Gratian, Original Sin, and the Sins of the Fathers: A Question of Sources and the Influence of the School of Laon,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 36 (2019): 175–93.

7 On the history of Saint Lucy in literature and art, with special attention to the textual witnesses to her acts in Greek and Latin, see Ottavio Garana Capodieci, Santa Lucia nella tradizione, nella storia, nell’arte (Syracuse, 1958). Lucy’s martyrdom was attested from early times in connection to the Diocletian persecution, and celebration of her in the liturgy is noticeable in the work of Gregory the Great. On the development of the Greek passio and the cult of Lucy in Byzantium, see Anna Lampadarini, “The Origins and Later Development of the First Italo-Greek Hagiographies: The Dossiers of the Sicilian Martyrs Agatha, Lucia, and Euplus,” in Interacting with Saints in the Late Antique and Medieval Worlds, ed. Robert Wiśniewski, Raymond Van Dam, and Bryan Ward-Perkins (Turnhout, 2023), 181–210.

8 Much of the account in Jacobus de Voragine is found in the Greek acts of Lucy. See Capodieci, Santa Lucia, 21–28 and 114–15. The various elements of Lucy’s vita allowed her to represent more than one ideal. See Anthony K. Cassell, “Saint Lucia as Patroness of Sight: Hagiography, Iconography, and Dante,” Dante Studies 109 (1991): 71–88.

9 William Granger Ryan, “Prologue,” The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1993), 1:3. The Latin basis for Ryan’s translation is Jacobi a Voragine, Legenda aurea vulgo historia lombardica dicta, ed. Dr. Th. Graesse, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1850). For a modern critical edition, see Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, ed. Giovanni Paolo Maggioni (Sismel, 1998). For a study of the structure and content of the Legenda Aurea, see Jacques Le Goff, In Search of Sacred Time: Jacobus Voragine and the Golden Legend, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, 2014).

10 Legenda aurea 49–55, ed. Maggioni, 51: “Pascasius dixit: ‘In te ergo spiritus sanctus est?’ Lucia respondit: ‘Ancilla dei sum, qui dixit: ‘Qui caste uiuunt, templum spiritus sancti sunt’. Cui Pascasius: ‘Ego faciam te duci ad lupanar ut ibi uiolationem accipias et spiritum sanctum perdas’. Cui Lucia: ‘Non inquinatur corpus nisi de consenu mentis. Nam si me inuitam uiolati federis, castitas mihi duplicabitur ad coronam; nunquam autem uoluntatem meam ad consensum poteris prouocare’,” trans. Ryan, 28.

11 Bede’s section on Lucy is found in his Martyrologia, PL 94, cols. 799–1148, at 1131–32.

12 On Roger, see Francesco Calò, “Devozione privata e ostentazione politica: Ruggero I il Gran Conte e la diffusione del culto di santa Lucia tra Sicilia e Meridione d’Italia,” History and Art 1 (2018): 65–101 (special issue: ‘Set Me as a Seal Upon Thy Heart’: Constructions of Female Sanctity in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Early Modern Period). On the monastery, its property, and its relationship to pastoral care in the diocese of Bologna, see Renzo Zagnoni, “Santa Lucia di Roffeno: Un monastero nonantolano nei secoli XI–XIV,” in L’abbazia di Santa Lucia di Roffeno nel Medioevo, lungo la strada Piccola Cassia: Atti del Convegno di studi Bologna, Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio (Bologna, 2018), 21–74.

13 Thomas J. Heffernan, “The Liturgy and the Literature of Saints’ Lives,” in The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan and E. Ann Matter, 2nd ed. (Kalamazoo, 2005), 65–94.

14 Heffernan, “Liturgy and the Literature of Saints’ Lives,” 74 and 79–82.

15 Philippus Oppenheim, De vetustioribus breviariorum codicibus manuscriptis: Inquisitiones et adnotationes (Torino, 1949), 54. An example of an extant twelfth-century breviary is Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 4928, with a section entitled de tempore et de sanctis on fols. 25–85. The manuscript is written in Beneventan script and belonged to the abbey of S. Sophia. All the references to texts to be read are in an abbreviated form, so one would still in this case have to use other books for the actual readings. For a description of the manuscript and its contents, see Hugo Ehrensberger, Libri Liturgici Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae (Freiburg, 1897), 206–208.

16 It used to be a commonplace in scholarly literature that Gratian was a Camaldolese monk, but this identification is now open to question. Nonetheless, it is not inconceivable that he was a religious rather than a secular priest. See Orazio Condorelli, “Graziano,” Dictionario biografico dei giuristi italiani, XII-XX secolo, 2 vols. (Bologna, 2013), 1:1058–61; John T. Noonan, Jr., “Gratian Slept Here: The Changing Identity of the Father of the Systematic Study of Canon Law,” Traditio 35 (1979): 145–72; and Anders Winroth, “Where Gratian Slept: The Life and Death of the Father of Canon Law,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Kanonistische Abteilung 99 (2013): 105–28.

17 Not every region, even in Italy, followed the same breviary. Cyrille Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to the Sources, rev. and trans. William G. Storey and Niels Krogh Rasmussen (Washington DC, 1986), 299, determined that, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Roman rite was not dominant throughout Italy, let alone Latin Christendom. Rather, in those centuries, “Roman liturgical influence was confined below a line passing through Umbria and Nursia” (Vogel, Medieval Liturgy, 299). Even farther to the south, the Beneventan rite predominated. Regardless of where Gratian was born, he spent a large portion of his life in Bologna and likely hailed from that region. Bologna sits squarely north of the line identified by Vogel in an area that operated under the influence of the Ambrosian rite of Milan. So, if he had access to a breviary, it may have been one of the Ambrosian rite. On the development of the Roman breviary, with some notable changes in the thirteenth century, see Heffernan, “Liturgy and the Literature of Saints’ Lives,” 87 n. 55.

18 For a discussion of the genres of passiones, acta, and vitae largely in terms of their late antique origins, early history, and literary features, see Réginald Grégoire, Manuale di agiologia: Introduzione alla letteratura agiografica, 2nd ed. (Fabriano, 1996), esp. 109–59. The best introduction to these kinds of texts in their manuscript form, rather than in terms of literary analysis, is Guy Phillippart, Les légendiers latins et autres manuscrits hagiographiques (Turnhout, 1977).

19 Ernst Tremp and Rudolf Gamper, Geschichte und Hagiographie in Sanktgaller Handschriften: Katalog durch die Ausstellung in der Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen (2. Dezember 2002 – 9. November 2003) (Klosterhof St. Gallen, 2003), 37.

20 Tremp and Gamper count forty-five hagiographical manuscripts of the eighth through twelfth centuries in the Sankt Gallen collection alone. The term “hagiographical” admittedly covers a vast array of materials, namely, anything to do with saints, but stricter genre qualifications would seem to invite more problems: Dieter van der Nahmer, Die lateinischen Heiligenvita: Eine Enführung in die lateinische Hagiographie (Darmstadt, 1994), 3–4 and 131–45.

21 Ehrensberger, Libri Liturgici Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae, 57 (BAV, Vat. lat 1194, fol. 56v–59r, which Ehrensberger dates to the tenth century, but M.-H. Laurent correctly dates to the twelfth century in Codices Vaticani Latini: Codices 1135–1266 [Vatican City, 1958], 102–104), 68 (BAV, Vat. lat. 6073, fol. 1 [eleventh cent.]), 79 (BAV, Vat. lat. 6933, fol. 225 and 255 [twelfth or thirteenth cent.; incomplete passio S. Luciae]), 84 (BAV, Vat. lat. 6444, fol. 14 [twelfth cent., belonging to the Augustinian house of canons at Frankenthal, founded 1119; I disagree with the Ehrensberger’s dating to the thirteenth century because the script dates from the first half of the twelfth century]), 91 (BAV, Vat. lat. 1190, fol. 251vb [eleventh cent., belonging to the Church of St. John in Ravenna]), and 97 (BAV, Vat. lat. 1197, fol. 44ra [eleventh cent., in Beneventan script]). I have examined these BAV manuscripts on digi.vatlib.it whenever possible. In the case of Vat. lat. 1194, which has not been digitized, I examined the manuscript on microfilm (roll 125) at the Vatican Film Library at Saint Louis University.

22 The manuscript identifies the contents as Vitae sanctorum, and the passion narrative of Lucy appears on fols. 17v–18v. Its companion volume is Lincoln, Cathedral Chapter Library 150. The identification of Leominster as the likely original proprietor was made in Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: A List of Surviving Books, Supplement to the Second Edition, ed. N. R. Ker and Andrew G. Watson (London, 1987), 44. Watson dates it to the third quarter of the twelfth century. I have examined this manuscript in person.

23 B. 053 Inf., fols. 28r–29v (eleventh century); B. 049 Inf., fols. 19v–21r (c. 1100); E. 084 Inf., fols. 289r–290v (twelfth century); and B. 033 Inf., fol. 181va–182vb (thirteenth cent.). I have examined microfilms of each of these manuscripts.

24 BAV, Vat. lat. 377, fol. 80rb–80vb. See the general description of its contents in Ehrensberger, Libri Liturgici Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae, 173–74. The text gives an abbreviated account, focusing on the passion portion of the narrative including the dialogue between Paschasius and Lucy but omitting details about Lucy’s earlier life and her faith and devotion to Saint Agatha that saved her mother’s life. It seems to be adapted from BHL 4992, but it is not a version specifically registered in the BHL.

25 BAV, Vat. lat. 1194, fol. 58ra: “Numquid inquinatur corpus nisi ex consensu mentis. Nam et si in manu mea thura ponas et per manus meas facias sacrificium, deus hec attendet et deridet. De sensibus enim et de uoluntatibus iudicat. Nam sic patitur uiolatorem castitas sicut serpentem, sicut latronem, sicut barbarum. Et si me inuitam feceris uiolare, castitas michi duplicabitur ad coronam.” Variants in other manuscripts include videt or ridet for deridet (videt seems to be the most common), and consensu for sensibus. The twelfth-century martyrology belonging to the Carthusians in Bologna has the same reading as the other copies of the passio S. Luciae quoted above, except for a minor variant on the verb tense of “redoubled” (duplicatur instead of duplicabitur). See BAV, Vat. lat. 377, vol. 80va: “Numquam inquinatur corpus nisi de consensu mentis. Nam etsi in manu mea thura ponas et per manum meam facias sacrificium, deus hoc attendit et videt. De sensibus enim et uoluntatibus iudicat. Sic patitur uiolatorem castitatis, sicut latronem, sicut barbarum. Nam si me inuitam uiolari feceris, castitas mihi duplicatur ad coronam.”

26 C.32 q.5 d.a.c.1: “Unde, quamuis corpus uiolenter corrumpatur, si pudicitia mentis seruetur illesa, tamen castitas duplicatur. Sicut B. Lucia fertur dixisse Pascasio: ‘Si inuitam me feceris uiolari, castitas michi duplicabitur ad coronam’. De sensibus enim et uoluntatibus iudicat Deus.”