Livinus
[580-657]
Livinus was the son of an Irish princess and Scottish nobleman; his birth was foretold by a white dove, which flew through his parents’ window one night and deposited three drops of milk in his mother’s mouth. He was baptized by Augustine and ended up a bishop in Ghent. There, he was assisted by two wealthy sisters, one of whose son’s blindness Livinus cured with the sign of the cross.
One day, while Livinus was preaching outside, an angry mob accused him of being a magician — to end Livinus’s deception, a certain minister of Satan named Wilbertus cut off his tongue with a pincer. Legend has it that the disembodied tongue continued right on preaching, but I’m not sure how.
In 1633, Peter Paul Rubens painted his great The Martyrdom of St Livinus, shown above, for the millennium anniversary of the saint’s death. The millennium!