Studying the medieval-based vernacular traditions and folklore about Christian saints – saints’ lore or saint-lore – is complex for several reasons. First, the actual sources, folklore notes, tend to be fairly recent, roughly 300 years old. Second, saints’ traditions involve a variety of folklore genres in oral transmission, each one having developed its particular forms and uses: sacred legends, religious folk tales, origin legends, folk prayers or charms, proverbs, calendar customs, rituals, dream narratives, memorates (narratives about encounters with supranormal beings, in this case with a Christian saint, the Virgin Mary, or Jesus), even humorous anecdotes. These genres have been moulded ever since saints appeared to the world of the laity during a process lasting nearly a thousand years in Scandinavia and northeastern Europe, in the interaction between literate and oral traditions.

Folklorists as scholars of oral traditions may ask how saint-lore expresses lay piety, thinking, and world view, and how medieval saints’ traditions, as taught by the Church, were received and interpreted in vernacular religion. In Finland no folklore texts were written down in medieval times. The earliest folklore collections come from the seventeenth century, and do not become substantial until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The earliest records are quite sporadic, and generalizing from scarce sources is a danger. We cannot base our studies on medieval written documents and say anything about what so-called ordinary people thought in medieval times, yet it is clear that we can follow how some ideas were carried on in tradition. They have certainly been transformed, but still connect to medieval times in some recognizable way, and prove that folk tradition has a long-lasting, although whimsical, memory.

The aim in this chapter is to study the vernacular traditions about St. Catherine of Alexandria in Finland after medieval times. What happened to hagiographical traditions in Finland when they were adopted by people through the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages and were transformed into a vernacular tradition, which was practised in Protestant surroundings up to the early twentieth century? How did the vernacular and Church traditions meet? Which elements of the Church traditions did the vernacular tradition make use of, and how and why did they survive?