Some time between 1173 and 1199, Clemence, a nun of Barking Abbey in Essex, England, took up the work of translating the Life of St Catherine of Alexandria into the Anglo-Norman vernacular, also known as the French of England. Her source is a Latin text, the Vulgata, composed in the mid-eleventh century. She is true to this source as to the organization of events and the events themselves, but inserts her own voice, speaking through her heroine to weave her own views into the work, making it far more than a mere translation. It is curious, however, that she chose this life of a North African saint, so alien to her chilly island home in the north that had its own abundance of illustrious saints, several of whom were former abbesses of Clemence's own abbey of Barking. One reason may be that in Britain Catherine is associated with women from quite early, particularly with elite matrons, who are encouraged, in the vita, to follow the example of the virgin Catherine. Another reason may be the value of Catherine's example for female religious, especially as an icon of women's scholarship. Her association with theology would have had great appeal for the learned Clemence. In this chapter, I explore another possible motivation behind her choice of material: that this vita provided her with the opportunity to participate in the political and religious discourse of her day. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Glyn S. Burgess point out that ‘the Latin legend implicitly configures virgins, matrons and clerical men in an allegiance against secular power’.