The main criticism of the life of Olivia is that the elements of her legend do not have a personal nature in and of themselves, but they all derive, with slight modifications, from old themes or archetypes that were dear to the medieval imagination, such as that of the " 'sacred heroine' " or the " 'persecuted maiden' ". The Italian teacher and writer Giuseppe Agnello carefully undertook to sift the hagiographic tradition from the literary one, and did not see anything more than a random homonymous saint of Palermo conflated with the heroine of the mystery play dedicated to her, which was studied extensively by Alessandro d'Ancona and Alexander Veselovsky (who in turn cited Ferdinand Wolf).