Saint Bibiana

Saint Bibiana, also known as Viviana or Vivian, was a martyr of Rome whose grave lay inside the city walls. The earliest historical notice of her is in the Liber Pontificalis, which records that Pope Simplicius (468 to 483) consecrated a basilica of the holy martyr Bibiana containing her body, near the Palatium Licinianum. That church still stands as the basilica of Santa Bibiana in Rome, and the statue of her above its altar was carved by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

The familiar story of her life comes from a later legend attached to the Acts of Saints John and Paul. In it she is the daughter of the prefect Flavian and of Dafrosa, both martyred under Julian the Apostate; she and her sister Demetria are handed over to a woman named Rufina, who tries to force them into prostitution; Bibiana refuses, is shut in a madhouse, and is scourged to death about the year 361; and her body is left for the dogs, which will not touch it. An herb that cured headache and epilepsy was said to grow in the garden beside her church, and that herb, together with her imprisonment among the mentally ill, is the root of her patronages.

She is represented with a branch, with a pillar, and with a green branch covered in twigs and foliage. Her feast is 2 December. She is invoked against epilepsy, headache, insanity, mental illness and hangover, and for torture victims and single laywomen, and the town of Bibiana in Piedmont carries her name.

She is not Saint Vibiana, the martyr whose relics rest in Los Angeles. The two names are variants of one another and older sources print hers as Bibiana (Vibiana), so the two have often been joined. Bibiana of Rome was already lying in her own basilica within the walls in the fifth century; the martyr venerated in Los Angeles was found in a catacomb in 1853.