Saints' Lives in Middle English Collections

This collection brings together a dozen, mostly anonymous Middle English hagiographies about nine saints, dating from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. The edition is organized into seven parts, in which saints represent an era of Christian history: Andrew denotes the missionary apostles of the first century; the soldier George depicts a period of martyrdom and persecution; church father Jerome portrays the late antique age of patristic learning; the penitent prostitute Thais illustrates the desert hermits; abbot Benedict and the virgin Scholastica epitomize the monastic culture of the early Middle Ages; the bishop and missionary Austin exemplifies the establishment of national churches; and the mendicant Francis embodies a late-medieval evangelical revival of apostolic poverty. The only exception is the fictional Julian the Hospitaller. Most of these vernacular texts are excerpted from the popular South English Legendary, though some circulated independently, and they cover an impressive breadth of English dialects, from Older Scots and Anglo-Irish to London and the Midlands.