During the fourteenth century in Western Europe, there was a growing interest in imitating the practices of a group of hermits known as the Desert Fathers and M

Late antique and early medieval hagiographic texts present holy women as simultaneously pious and corrupt, hideous and beautiful, exemplars of depravity and mod

Though medieval "saints' lives" are among the oldest literary texts of Western vernacular culture, they are routinely patronized as "pious fiction" by modern hi

Among the thirteenth-century saints exalted are female martyrs and hermits of early Christianity. In The Lady as Saint, Brigitte Cazelles offers the first Engli