Eve of Dreux

Who they were

Saint Eve is one of the most ancient and venerable figures of the local Gallic martyrology, her veneration rooted in the city of Dreux, in what is now the French department of Eure-et-Loir. Tradition remembers her as a martyr, most likely a victim of the Roman persecutions that also touched the provinces of Gaul in the 3rd and 4th centuries, though the precise historical record of her life is fragmentary and no account of her trial and execution has survived.

What is known comes chiefly through local martyrologies and the oral tradition of the community of Dreux, which kept alive the memory of a real figure whose holiness and sacrifice had impressed itself on the region's Christians. Her veneration, and the veneration of her relics, endured through the turbulent centuries that followed, including disruption during the French Revolution, and her feast of 6 September continues to be observed at Dreux, where she is honoured as patroness.

The miracles

There was never a formal cause: she has been honoured as a saint since before the Church's formal processes began.

Why that counted as sanctity

Virgin martyr and patroness venerated at Dreux since ancient times, thought to have died in the Roman persecutions of the 3rd-4th century; feast 6 September.