Serena

Saint Serena is known from later Western hagiographical tradition rather than from contemporary historical evidence. Older editions of the Roman Martyrology commemorated her on 16 August with a brief notice identifying her as a woman who had once been the wife of the emperor Diocletian and associating her with Rome. Related material appears in the legendary Acts of Saint Susanna of Rome, in which an empress named Serena is portrayed as a Christian who favors the virgin martyr and who herself belongs to the company of those who suffered for the faith in the age of the Great Persecution. That dossier constitutes nearly the whole traditional account.

The identification cannot be reconciled with reliable fourth-century sources. Diocletian’s attested wife was Prisca (Prisca Augusta), mentioned by Lactantius and other near-contemporary writers together with their daughter Valeria; those women experienced hardship after Diocletian’s abdication, but they are never called Serena. Modern hagiographical criticism therefore treats the empress Serena of the martyrology and of the Acts of Susanna as a fictitious figure produced by the same late-antique or early-medieval process of pious elaboration that generated many other unhistorical passiones set in the Tetrarchic persecutions. The Latin name itself, meaning “serene” or “calm,” fits the conventional virtues assigned to holy women in such literature.

Because the figure is legendary, the ordinary biographical facts expected of a historical person—place and date of birth, family origin, precise manner and place of death, and burial—are unknown and almost certainly never existed in the form the legend implies. No early cult site, authentic relics, inscriptions, or independent liturgical commemoration from the first Christian centuries can be securely attached to her. The August feast lingered in some medieval calendars and in the pre-modern Roman Martyrology, but it was among the entries set aside in later revisions that sought to retain only saints whose existence and cult rest on firmer evidence.

The story of Serena nevertheless shows how medieval readers of the martyrologies imagined the imperial household of the persecuting emperors: even the emperor’s own wife might be represented as a hidden Christian and a martyr. That imaginative pattern, rather than any recoverable historical individual, is what the name Saint Serena represents in the hagiographical record. Devotion to her, where it occurred, remained modest and local and left little trace in art, lists of patronages, or later processes of beatification and canonization.