Middle English Legends of Women Saints

Presents a collection of saints' lives intended to suggest the diversity of possibilities beneath the supposedly fixed and predictable surfaces of the legends, using multiple retellings of the same legend to illustrate that medieval readers and listeners did not just passively receive saints’ legends but continually and actively appropriated them.

This collection of Middle English hagiographies presents readers with women saints’ lives in multiple retellings from the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Frideswide of Oxford was the Anglo-Saxon abbess of a well-endowed monastery who is presented as a victim of male persecution. Mary Magdalen’s story touches upon feminine authority while also offering three paradigms of sanctity—the repentant sinner, apostle, and contemplative—which could be emulated by both men and women. The virgin martyr legends of Margaret of Antioch, Christina of Tyre, and Katherine of Alexandria present these women as challengers to political tyrants. Finally, Anne’s vita popularized a new type of sanctity of holy motherhood that was not miraculously virginal but biologically and maritally typical. Sherry Reames introduces readers to relatively obscure female-centered hagiographies, the majority of which have never before been published or have not been edited since the nineteenth century.

Contributor: Sherry L. Reames (Edited by), Martha G. Blalock (Notes by), Wendy R. Larson (Introduction and notes by)

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