Cunera

Saint Cunera of Rhenen (Kunera) was a virgin martyr of Rhenen in the diocese of Utrecht in the Low Countries, patron of the town. Our calendar dates her around 451. She is commemorated on 12 June. Her name is first mentioned in the eleventh century, and the historicity of the account is doubted.

According to a fourteenth-⁠century legend she was the only virgin to survive the massacre of the eleven thousand virgins of Saint Ursula, killed at Cologne by the Huns, a princess from the Orkney Islands. The King of the Rhine took her under his cloak to his palace at Rhenen. There the people loved her for her kindness and care for the poor, and the king entrusted her with the key to his cellars, which roused the queen's jealousy. While the king was out hunting the queen strangled Cunera with a scarf; her body was secretly buried in a stable, and the crime was miraculously discovered through the horses. The queen killed herself by jumping off a cliff.

Saint Willibrord is said to have announced her canonization. In the late Middle Ages a great pilgrimage took place during the annual horse fair at Rhenen, which led to the dedication of the local church of Saint Peter to Cunera; she is invoked as protector of horses, against animal diseases and sore throat. After the Reformation, in 1580, the church was stripped of images, and her relics were moved to Emmerich and to Bedaf in Uden. The scarf with which she was strangled is kept in the Museum Catharijneconvent; research has shown it to be a fifth-⁠century cloth woven of Coptic linen.