Christian, who suffered martyrdom when but thirteen during the reign of the emperor Diocletian, on the 21st of January 304. The prefect Sempronius wished her to marry his son, and on her refusal condemned her to be outraged before her execution, but her honour was miraculously preserved. When led out to die she was tied to a stake, but the faggots would not burn, whereupon the officer in charge of the troops drew his sword and struck off her head. St Agnes is the patron saint of young girls, who, in rural districts, formerly indulged in all sorts of quaint country magic on St Agnes’ Eve (20th–21st January) with a view to discovering their future husbands. This superstition has been immortalized in Keats’s poem, “The Eve of St Agnes.” St Agnes’s bones are supposed to rest in the church of her name at Rome, originally built by Constantine and repaired by Pope Honorius in the 7th century. Here on her festival (21st of January) two lambs are specially blessed after pontifical high mass, and their wool is later woven into pallia (see Pallium.)
AGNES OF MERAN (d. 1201), queen of France, was the daughter of Bertold IV., duke of Meran in Tirol. She is called Marie by some of the chroniclers. In June 1196 she married Philip II., king of France, who had repudiated Ingeborg of Denmark in 1193. The pope espoused the cause of Ingeborg; but Philip did not submit until 1200, when, interdict having been added to excommunication, he consented to a separation from Agnes. She died in July of the next year, at the castle of Poissy, and was buried in the church of St Corentin, near Nantes. Her two children by Philip II., Philip, count of Clermont (d. 1234), and Mary, who married Philip, count of Namur, were legitimized by Innocent III. in 1201 on the demand of the king. Little is known of the personality of Agnes, beyond the remarkable influence which she exercised over Philip II. She has been made the heroine of a tragedy by Francois Ponsard, Agnes de Méranie.
See The notes of Robert Davidsohn in Philipp II. August von Frankreich und Ingeborg (Stuttgart, 1888). A genealogical notice is furnished by the Chronicon of the monk Alberic (Aubry) of Trois-Fontaines, (Albericus Trium Fontium) in Pertz, Scriptores, vol. xxiii. pp. 872 f., and by the Genealogia Wettinensis, ibid. p. 229.
AGNESI, MARIA GAETANA (1718–1799), Italian mathematician, linguist and philosopher, was born at Milan on the 16th of May 1718, her father being professor of mathematics in the university of Bologna. When only nine years old she had such command of Latin as to be able to publish an elaborate address in that language, maintaining that the pursuit of liberal studies was not improper for her sex. By her thirteenth year she had acquired Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, German and other languages. Two years later her father began to assemble in his house at stated intervals a circle of the most learned men in Bologna, before whom she read and maintained a series of theses on the most abstruse philosophical questions. Records of these meetings are given in de Brosse’s Lettres sur l’Italie and in the Propositiones Philosophicae, which her father caused to be published in 1738. These displays, being probably not altogether congenial to Maria, who was of a retiring disposition, ceased in her twentieth year, and it is even said that she had at that age a strong desire to enter a convent. Though the wish was not gratified, she lived from that time in a retirement almost conventual, avoiding all society and devoting herself entirely to the study of mathematics. The most valuable result of her labours was the Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della gioventu italiana, a work of great merit, which was published at Milan in 1748. The first volume treats of the analysis of finite quantities, and the second of the analysis of infinitesimals. A French translation of the second volume by P. T. d’Antelmy, with additions by Charles Bossut (1730–1814), appeared at Paris in 1775; and an English translation of the whole work by John Colson (1680–1760), the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, was published in 1801 at the expense of Baron Masères. Madame Agnesi also wrote a commentary on the Traité analytique des sections coniques of the marquis de l’Hôpital, which, though highly praised by those who saw it in manuscript, was never published. She invented and discussed the curve known as the “witch of Agnesi” (q.v.) or versiera. In 1750, on the illness of her father, she was appointed by Pope Benedict XIV. to the chair of mathematics and natural Philosophy at Bologna. After the death of her father in 1752 she carried out a long-cherished purpose by giving herself to the study of theology, and especially of the Fathers. After holding for some years the office of directress of the Hospice Trivulzio for Blue Nuns at Milan, she herself joined the sisterhood, and in this austere order ended her days on the 9th of January 1799.
Her sister, Maria Teresa Agnesi (1724–1780), a well-known Italian pianist and composer, was born at Milan in 1724. She composed several cantatas, two pianoforte concertos and five operas, Sofonisbe, Ciro in Armenia, Nitocri, Il Re Pastore and Insubria consolata.
See Antonio Francesco Frisi, Éloge historique de Mademoiselle Agnesi, translated by Boulard (Paris, 1807); Milesi-Mojon, Vita di M. G. Agnesi (Milan, 1836); J. Boyer, “La Mathématicienne Agnesi,” in the Revue Catholique des revues françaises et étrangères (Paris, 1897).
AGNEW, DAVID HAYES (1818–1892), American surgeon, was born in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, on the 24th of November 1818. He graduated from the medical department of the university of Pennsylvania in 1838, and a few years later set up in practice at Philadelphia and became a lecturer at the Philadelphia School of Anatomy. He was appointed surgeon at the Philadelphia Hospital in 1854 and was the founder of its pathological museum. For twenty-six years (1863–1889) he was connected with the medical faculty of the university of Pennsylvania, being elected professor of operative surgery in 1870 and professor of the principles and practice of surgery in the following year. From 1865 to 1884—except for a brief interval—he was a surgeon at the Pennsylvania Hospital. During the American Civil War he was consulting surgeon in the Mower Army Hospital, near Philadelphia, and acquired considerable reputation for his operations in cases of gun-shot wounds. He attended as operating surgeon when President Garfield was fatally wounded by the bullet of an assassin in 1881. He was the author of several works, the most important being The Principles and Practice of Surgery (1878–1883). He died at Philadelphia on the 22nd of March 1892.
AGNI, the Hindu God of Fire, second only to Indra in the power and importance attributed to him in Vedic mythology. His name is the first word of the first hymn of the Rig-veda: “Agni, I entreat, divine appointed priest of sacrifice.” The sacrifices made to Agni pass to the gods, for Agni is a messenger from and to the gods; but, at the same time, he is more than a mere messenger, he is an immortal, for another hymn runs: “No god indeed, no mortal is beyond the might of thee, the mighty One. . . .” He is a god who lives among men, miraculously reborn each day by the fire-drill, by the friction of the two sticks which are regarded as his parents; he is the supreme director of religious ceremonies and duties,and even has the power of influencing the lot of man in the future world. He is worshipped under a threefold form, fire on earth, lightning and the sun. His cult survived the metamorphosis of the ancient Vedic nature-worship into modern Hinduism, and there still are in India fire-priests (agnihotri) whose duty is to superintend his worship. The sacred fire-drill for procuring the temple-fire by friction—symbolic of Agni’s daily miraculous birth—is still used. In pictorial art Agni is always represented as red, two-faced, suggesting his destructive and beneficent qualities, and with three legs and seven arms.
See W. J. Wilkins, Hindu Mythology (London, 1900); A. A. Macdonell, Vedic Mythology (Strassburg, 1897).
AGNOETAE (Gr. ἀγνοέω, to be ignorant of), a monophysite sect who maintained that Christ’s human nature was like other men’s in all respects, including limited knowledge. Its founder was Themistius, a deacon in Alexandria in the 6th century. The sect was anathematized by Gregory the Great.
AGNOIOLOGY (from Gr. ἄγνοια, ignorance), the science or study of ignorance, which determines its quality and conditions.
AGNOSTICISM. The term “agnostic” was invented by Huxley in 1869 to describe the philosophical and religious attitude of those who hold that we can have scientific or real
