You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute,

an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Catholic Saints. My name is Taylor Kemp,

the vice president of content at the Augustine Institute and with me is Dr. Elizabeth Klein,

professor for our graduate school of theology. And today we are talking about Saint

Isidora of Egypt, whose feast day is May 1st. I know nothing about St. Isidora of Egypt. So I'm excited to learn.

Almost nothing is known about St. Isidora of Egypt. Until today, Dr. Klein.

You should have the subtitles of which saints are like Dr. Klein's wacky saints.

Like some subgroup. Dr. Klein's's lesser known but now growing devotion.

Yeah, I'm promoting devotion to lesser known saints.

I really love the story of St. Isidore of Egypt, but very little is known about her.

Basically, what is known about her amounts to two or three pages in the Lausiac history by Palladius of Espuna.

So the Lausiac history is a fourth century, monastic history that tells stories of all kinds

of saints of Egypt around Palladius' time.

If you're like me and like weird monastic saints from the fourth century, highly recommend

picking up a copy of the Lousiac history and having a browse through it.

So you might wonder if almost nothing's

about her, why do I want to talk about her? I was wondering, but we're going to find out. Yeah,

you're going to find out. So she lived in the fourth century. We don't really know her dates,

something like 300 to 365. The reason I wanted to talk about her is because she's probably the

oldest recorded Holy Fool.

So a holy fool is a kind of saint archetype you might want to say or a path to holiness that we're not quite as familiar with in the West,

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