It does not require much exercise of the critical faculty to realise the improbabilities of this story, and at the present day critics are all but unanimous[683] in rejecting it; and so we need only concern ourselves with it here in so far as it has given rise to the Feast of St Catherine. In this connection we observe that not only the ancient Church as a whole knew nothing of St Catherine, but, what is still more to the point, neither the Syrian nor Egyptian Calendars published by Selden and Mai make any mention of this remarkable martyr. Among the Greeks, the _Menologium Basilianum_ is the first to mention her, while in the Latin Church she does not appear until the fourteenth century. Durandus, although he treats of all the important saints’ days, does not name St Catherine, neither does the _Liber Ordinarius_ of Siena concluded in 1263. In the numerous Italian missals consulted by Ebner, St Catherine is usually found only in the supplements which date from the fourteenth century. In the body of the missal, she appears only in the missal of Trani, belonging to the end of the thirteenth century. It is not difficult to fix the period at which the legend met with general acceptance, for St Catherine is absent from the menology of Constantinople, but is commemorated as a martyr of the second class in that of Basil. To this period belongs three Latin poems found among the works of Alfanus,[684] Abbot of Monte Cassino, and later Archbishop of Salerno (1058-1085). Alfanus, whom St Peter Damian calls a lover of truth, but who is proved to have been very credulous by a story which he tells of some unnamed Byzantine monarch,[685] appears to have been the first to make the legend known in the West. The origin of the story is lost in obscurity, and, as in the case of the legend of St Lazarus, we have hitherto been unable to discover reliable data on which to base any conclusion. The story of St Catherine may well be one of those popular tales, drawn up in a historical form, which were circulated in the Middle Ages, and occupied the place of poetic fiction. Its excision at any early date from the service-books is much to be desired in the interests of the respect due to them. 11. _The Festival of All Saints_