The Scottish Legendary: Towards a poetics of hagiographic narration

This is the first book-length study of the Scottish Legendary of the late fourteenth century. The only extant collection of saints' lives in the vernacular from medieval Scotland, the work scrutinises the dynamics of hagiographic narration, its implicit assumptions about literariness, and the functions of telling the lives of the saints.

The fifty saints' legends are remarkable for their narrative art: the enjoyment of reading the legends is heightened, while didactic and edifying content i...