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The authority afforded to women in early modern Galicia was shaped and perpetuated through local folklore and legends. Over the centuries, Galicians formulated a wide variety of images of powerful women from Reina Loba, who according to legend, permitted the Christianization of the region, to María Pita to whom they attribute the valiant defense of the city of A Coruña against British forces. Popular saints' lives were reformulated to reflect the region's gender norms. Long-standing beliefs in the power of witches in the region reveal significant gender tensions in a culture so reliant on female power. The cultural images of powerful women reiterated in local legends and songs not only provided role models for female behavior, but also perpetuated notions of female authority during periods of demographic and economic change.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of the literary culture of women in medieval England. It describes the focuses of the book, which is on saints' lives and their importance for women. A primary concern is the pervasiveness of virginity as a cultural ideal and form of exemplary biography for women. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the German theologian Albert Ehrhardt wrote a chapter on the History Byzantine Literature. It included a paragraph on hagiography, where he compared Byzantine hagiographical literature to a ‘thick jungle with no path leading into its interior’. His remark touches upon one major problem of hagiography: the correct distinction between fact and fiction. Two extreme points of view have been developed with regard to the value of hagiographical texts as historical sources. According to one, hagiography provides valuable information about some aspects of daily life in Byzantium. It stresses the idea that hagiography contains hard facts. According to the second point of view, hagiography is mere fiction. Saints' Lives are hagiographical novels that tell us nothing about the saint and his life, and may at best reveal something about the author's intentions and the historical situation at the time of writing.

Writers in the service of the post-Tridentine Church responded not only to Protestant challenges but also to a range of internal needs — jurisdictional, liturgical, and theological — most of which predated the Reformation. Post-Tridentine Catholic scholars reprinted early medieval works on the history of the Church and its saints in great number. However, with the resurgence of the Counter-Reformation papacy and the energetic worldwide expansion of Roman Catholicism, new works of Catholic historia sacra, many of them collaborative projects, were written and published on an unprecedented scale. This Catholic historical enterprise included both Roman-centred projects, such as the magnificent libraries — ‘arsenals of faith’ — as well as the creation of the more famous Vatican archive. In addition, there were more provincial (if ultimately global) projects, such as the massive compendium of saints’ lives undertaken in the Low Countries by the Bollandists, the still incomplete Acta sanctorum.

This chapter on mother-son incest (the most serious kind for the Middle Ages) considers two main types of plot. When the incest is consummated, the issue is whether the protagonist(s) will confess, do penance, and be saved. Saints' lives sometimes include a story of incestuous birth, and also double incest (unknown in classical stories), where the incestuously conceived son later unwittingly marries his mother, and sometimes kills his father too. The discovery of this sin drives him to penance, and later he becomes a pope (Gregorius) or a saint (Albanus). Here the Oedipus story finds a spiritually happy ending. In the case of Judas, however, the incest and parricide cannot be absolved. In exemplary versions, the mother is the protagonist, and knowingly sleeps with her son, but confesses in the end. In near-miss incest stories (often romances), the son and mother recognize each other in time, and a family reunion is the happy ending.

This chapter presents various case studies involving peasants and local societies. It characterizes a set of individual social realities, located specifically in time and place. The set consists of: the territory of Lucca in the eighth century; the middle Rhine in the eighth century; the Île de France in the seventh and eighth centuries; central Anatolia around 600; two large Egyptian villages, Aphroditõ in the sixth century and Jēme in the seventh and eighth; and a village in England in the seventh century. There are three main sources for discussion. The first one is some saints' lives, which occasionally can be used as a basis for their narrative assumptions about peasant perceptions and social relationships. The second one is law, particularly in the Romano–Germanic West, which gives direct evidence about peasant social practices. This evidence is given the greatest weight because medieval social history came out of legal history. The third types of source are charters and legal documents.

This chapter discusses how texts established and perpetuated a link between the spiritual grace of Kievan and Northern Rus′ and monastic life. Hagiography, homily, and prayers, written in the monasteries and incorporated into local collections, helped disseminate core beliefs about the conversion of Vladimir in Kiev and an indelible link between the territory of Rus′—already seen as a magical place in folklore—and the Orthodox faith. The chapter charts the types of national and individual stories told in the literature. Textual production remained based in monasteries and stable as a manuscript culture, but new styles of writing altered and enhanced the rhetorical character of a wide range of forms, including, hagiography, legends, tales of miracles and holy fools, and sermons.

This chapter analyzes meaning and form in Eusebius of Caesarea's biographical works Life of Constantine and Life of Antony. It explains that these works were written not more than twenty years apart and the latter was considered by all as the paradigm of a saint's life. It argues that both works are self-conscious in the extreme and their form makes reference to other established genres.

This chapter argues that, through his intimate familiarity with late antique and medieval Spanish chronicles, saints’ lives, liturgical texts, and antiquities, Higuera was able to mold the false chronicles in close imitation of ancient and early medieval models to create the illusion of verisimilitude. Higuera’s forgeries were hardly flights of whimsy, but rather carefully constructed texts that reflected his diligent research and scholarly communication with other enthusiasts of history in Spain and Catholic Europe. Higuera was part of a much longer tradition in which history, hagiography, and liturgy intersected, overlapped, bled into one another, and refused to separate themselves out into distinct genres. In this tradition, the highest good could be served by any and all, whose poetic conventions were not separated by rigid considerations of genre. Classical rhetoricians had been aware of this sometimes complex relationship among, and sometimes fluid boundaries between, poetry and history, fables, and facts.

This chapter explores literary debates about the contractual nature of sovereign relations in a set of literary texts about wolves: saints’ lives in which wolves submit miraculously to human mastery; Marie de France’s fables, in which wolves contemplate the advantages of domestication; and Marie's Bisclavret, a story about a werewolf. In all these narratives, a wild wolf’s consideration of voluntary domestication structures a representation of consensual subjection to mastery and rule between animals and human masters. Yet in representations of animals as subjects that consider or desire a relationship with humans, medieval literary texts also explore the limits of a social contract that would define human mastery as a response to animal desire.

This chapter analyses William Blundell's entries on devotional writing and religious histories in his commonplace books. It considers how Blundell used his reading to bolster his own religious beliefs and discusses religious beliefs based on his engagement with the Bible and other devotional works. The analysis of his commonplace books indicates that certain aspects of Catholicism caused him problems, particularly the details of saints' lives. This chapter also describes how Blundell read and rewrote Catholic and Protestant history to add credibility to the former.

This chapter examines the richness of the comparative study of sources and influences in its exploration of early medieval conceptions of the mind in Latin and English prose and poetry. It explains that there are two different traditions in Anglo-Saxon England when it comes of the conceptions of the mind. These include the group represented by Alcuin, Alfred, and Aelfric and those reflected in the poetic vocabulary. This chapter also provides a comparative analysis of Boethius' De consolatione Philosophiae and a philosophical text in Aelfric's Lives of Saints.