Writing Women Saints in Anglo-Saxon England

The twelve essays in this collection advance the contemporary study of the women saints of Anglo-Saxon England by challenging received wisdom and offering alternative

methodologies. The work embraces a number of different scholarly approaches, from codicological study to feminist theory. While some contributions are dedicated to the description and

reconstruction of female lives of saints and their cults, others explore the broader ideological and cultural investments of the literature.

The volume concentrates on four major areas: the

female saint in the Old English Martyrology, genre including hagiography and homelitic writing, motherhood and chastity, and differing perspectives on lives of virgin martyrs. The essays reveal how

saints’ lives that exist on the apparent margins of orthodoxy actually demonstrate a successful literary challenge extending the idea of a holy life.