n the twenty-first of January in what is customarily believed to
be the year 304 A.D., a thirteen-year-old Christian girl, Agnes
of Rome, was martyred when she refused to sacrifice to the pagan
gods and lose her virginity by rape. She was tortured, and
though several men offered themselves to her in marriage, either
in lust or in pity ("Catholic Forum"), she still refused to
surrender her viriginity, claiming that Christ was her only
husband. She was either beheaded and burned or stabbed (sources
vary), and buried beside the Via Nomentata in Rome. She became
the patron saint of virgins, betrothed couples, and chastity in
general, and iconographers almost always represent her with a
lamb, which signifies her virginity. The eve of her feast day,
January 20th, became in European folklore a day when girls could
practice certain divinatory rituals before they went to bed in
order to see their future husbands in their dreams. Fifteen
hundred years after her death, St. Agnes' Eve would translate
itself into one of t