Middle English Saints' Legends

With the assistance of Margaret Rogerson, Saints' legends are being increasingly recognised as one of the most important genres of the middle ages, and attract much critical attention. This volume surveys the scholarly literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on the extensive Middle English corpus. It also provides a conspectus of the genre's history in the Middle English period, and its place in the development of the modern discipline of Middle English, while both the introduction and the annotations give attention to the problematic boundaries between genres and to the issues involved in separating out texts from their manuscript contexts. General studies of the corpus as a whole are covered, as well as discussions and editions of individual legends, of the various extended cycles of legends, and of sermon collections that include hagiographic legends and exempla; the volume has been structured so as to provide an overview of the research on major works (for example the South English Legendary and St Erkenwald), and authors such as Osbern Bokenham, John Capgrave, William Caxton and John Mirk.It includes an Index of Scholars and Critics keyed to the Bibliography, an Index of Middle English Texts that covers all works, of whatever genre, mentioned in the annotations, and an Index of Manuscripts that gathers the references to the over 170 manuscripts cited.