Hagiography Beyond Tradition
About the Book Series
The study of sanctity in medieval Europe is starting to elicit cutting-edge, innovative and genuinely interdisciplinary scholarship that destabilizes what people have conventionally considered to be hagiography. This is demonstrated in the topic range of panels sponsored by the Hagiography Society at recent landmark medievalist conferences. While hagiography has traditionally been understood only in religious terms, recent scholarship moves beyond such frameworks to consider alternate ways of identifying and representing exemplary people. So doing, such research emphasises modern cultural analogies and resonances with medieval figures.
It is not enough, however, to approach saints’ lives with a “sexy” modern framework. The best scholarship is rooted in analytical rigour, close attention to context(s), and a keen awareness of the potential pitfalls of anachronism, all the while accepting that anachronism can often be productive. This series provides a home for the kind of work that negotiates that border between the traditional and the contemporary and encourages scholarship enhanced by interventions drawn from celebrity studies, trans studies, crip theory, animal and monster studies, the history of senses and the emotions, media studies, and beyond. Rather than considering hagiography as a single genre, the series is open to expanding the ways in which we imagine how people come to be offered for veneration, as well as the media and genres in which they are fashioned, represented, and celebrated.
The Cistercian Cult of Saints as a Treasury of the Living Past in the Later Middle Ages
1st Edition
By Emilia Jamroziak
June 15, 2026
This book explains how the late medieval Cistercian order and its communities in Central Europe engaged with, adopted and supported a broad range of saints’ cults as an element of their relationship with the outside world, within their network and as an important element of their identity. Contrary...
King Alfred the Great, his Hagiographers and his Cult: A Childhood Remembered
1st Edition
By Tomás Mario Kalmar
December 01, 2025
This book situates Alfred the Great in his hagiographic context. For 150 years, the fables told in the ninth century about Alfred’s childhood have posed interlocking disciplinary challenges to historians committed to evicting romance from history. Blending current Hagiography Studies with ...
Sacred Sisters: Gender, Sanctity, and Power in Medieval Ireland
1st Edition
By Maeve Callan
December 01, 2025
Sacred Sisters focuses on five saints: the four female Irish saints who have extant medieval biographies (Darerca, Brigid, Íte, and Samthann), and Patrick, whose writings -- fifth-century Ireland's sole surviving texts -- attest to the centrality of women in Irish Christianity's development. Women ...
Disability and Sanctity in the Middle Ages
1st Edition
Edited
By Stephanie Grace-Petinos, Leah Parker, Alicia Spencer-Hall
April 28, 2025
This volume significantly expands current understandings of both disability and sanctity in the Middle Ages. Across the collection, heterogeneous constructions, and experiences, of disability and holiness are excavated. Analyses span the sixth to the fifteenth century, with discussion of holy men ...
St. Elisabeth of Thuringia: A Psychological Study (1931)
1st Edition
By Elisabeth Busse-Wilson
November 14, 2024
Only twelve years after German women had been granted voting rights, the German medievalist Elisabeth Busse-Wilson, a first-wave feminist activist and scholar, challenged centuries of silence about violence against women by taking on the case of the most famous European saint, the young Elisabeth ...
Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography
1st Edition
Edited
By Alicia Spencer-Hall, Blake Gutt
April 24, 2023
Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography presents an interdisciplinary examination of trans and genderqueer subjects in medieval hagiography. Scholarship has productively combined analysis of medieval literary texts with modern queer theory – yet, too often, questions of gender are ...