In an 11th-century English life of Saint Margaret, or Marina, of Antioch, there is a moment when she gets the devil in what martial artists call a ‘submission hold’.

In order to be made a saint in the Catholic Church, you first have to be dead and then you have to perform two miracles. The first posthumous miracle the Vatican says Mother Teresa performed was the healing of an Indian woman named Monica Besra, whose abdominal tumour disappeared after a locket containing a picture of the nun was pressed to her stomach. The tumour was caused by tuberculosis, one of the diseases Mother Teresa had spent her life providing care for. The Vatican rushed to confirm the miracle, but Besra’s family and doctors were sceptical: ‘She took medications for nine months to a year,’ Besra’s doctor told the New York Times. Other hospital staff said that they felt pressure from Catholic authorities to say that the recovery was miraculous.

Hieronymus Bosch painted clog ships, fish soldiers, armoured creatures with insect wings and scales gobbling human limbs. In the recesses of his paintings you might find a spoonbill, wearing a hooded cape, sitting down to a supper of bird-claw at a table set with white linen and pewterware. His picture of Saint Wilgefortis – usually in the Accademia in Venice, but currently on display at an exhibition in ’s-Hertogenbosch, the town where he lived and worked – is perhaps one of his least strange paintings. It shows a bearded woman being crucified.