Introduction: sanctity as literature – Eva von Contzen1. St Margaret and the literary politics of Scottish sainthood – Kate Ash2. Good knights and holy men: reading the virtue of soldier-saints in medieval literary genres – Andrew Lynch3. Englishing the saints in Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne - Kate Greenspan4. Modeling holiness: self-fashioning and sanctity in late-medieval English mystical literature –Jessica Barr5. Body and soul: from doctrine to debate in medieval Welsh and Irish literature – Helen Fulton6. Chaucer and hagiographic authority – Jennifer L. Sisk7. Reading classical authors in Capgrave’s Life of St Katherine – Sarah James8. Lydgate’s saintly poetics – Anke Bernau9. Narrating vernacular sanctity: the Scottish Legendary as a challenge to the ‘literary turn’ in fifteenth-century hagiography – Eva von Contzen10. Reforming sanctity: the Digby Mary Magdalen and Lewis Wager’s Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene – Tamara Atkin11. The humanist grammar of sanctity in the early Lives of Thomas More – Anna Siebach LarsenAfterword: Calendar time in balade form – Catherine SanokBibliographyIndex

This collection explores some of the many ways in which sanctity was closely intertwined with the development of literary strategies across a range of writings in late medieval Britain. Rather than looking for clues in religious practices in order to explain such changes, or reading literature for information about sanctity, these essays consider the ways in which sanctity - as concept and as theme – allowed writers to articulate and to develop further their 'craft' in specific ways. While scholars in recent years have turned once more to questions of literary form and technique, the kinds of writings considered in this collection – writings that were immensely popular in their own time – have not attracted the same amount of attention as more secular forms. The essays in this collection examine a representative choice of texts from the fourteenth century to the early sixteenth, including penitential literature, hagiographical compilations and individual legends, romance, debate and mystical literature. Although England provides the geographical focus of the book, chapters on the Scottish, Irish and Welsh traditions broaden and deepen this perspective. An Afterword draws out the implications of the collection as a whole and maps out areas for future research. The collection as a whole offers new insights for scholars interested in form, style, poetics, literary history and aesthetics, by considering sanctity first and foremost as literature.

'In its individual essays and collective prod to supple analysis, Sanctity as Literature will cast a long shadow over future scholarship on hagiography, poetics, and literariness in later medieval literatures.’Cynthia Turner Camp, University of Georgia