Saints' Lives In Middle English Collections (Teams Middle English Texts Series)

This volume is conceived as a complement to another METS text, Sherry Reames' Middle English Legends of Women Saints, concentrating chiefly on the lives of male saints (Andrew, George, Jerome, Benedict, Austin [Augustine of Canterbury], Francis, and Julian), though two women saints are included-Thais and Scholastica. As the introduction notes, this selectin "is intended to be broadly representative of saints' lives in Middle English and of the classic types of hagiographic legend as these were presented to the lay public and less-literate clergy of late medieval England." The legends themselves are drawn both from collections of saints' lives such as the South English Legendary and the Scottish Legendary and from independently composed lives such as Simon Winter's Life of Saint Jerome, and arranged "so as to constitute a 'legendary history' of post-New Testament Christianity in seven parts." And although hagiography is notoriously unreliable as history, the introduction notes that "[l]egends such as those printed here... provided generations of medieval people, both lay and clerical, with a stately procession of figures that constituted the Christian past, as well as being still 'present' as glorious members of the body of Christ, the communion of saints."Saints' Lives In Middle English Collections (Teams Middle English Texts Series), with ISBN 9781580440899 and ISBN 1580440894.