Saints’ lives afford ample opportunities for the representation of violence. Legends of martyrs who are stripped, beaten, burned and beheaded find their place alongside tales of saints who beat their demonic adversaries to a pulp, saints who self-harm, even saints who commit murder. The deaths of the wicked in hagiography are sometimes comparable in ghastliness to the sufferings of their saintly counterparts, while collectively writings about saints may be couched in the language of a militant, aggressively didactic Church. This chapter focuses on a particular configuration of violence in Middle English hagiography: its coupling with ideology. While it is clear that representations of brutality and bloodshed may be enjoyed in and of themselves, even in the context of religious piety, I wish to consider here how violence – and the representation of violated bodies – gets deployed as a means of materialising specific institutions, ideas and beliefs.

In exploring the relationship between violated bodies and beliefs, the main texts under consideration will be those assembled in the collection known as the South English Legendary. The collection’s modern title is somewhat misleading in that the work to which it refers was a diffuse and open text, relentlessly modified and adapted to suit the locations in which it was copied and the historical circumstances in which it was disseminated. Related legends are extant in at least sixty manuscripts, an index of the work’s popularity and capacity for adaptation, but no two manuscripts are alike in contents and emphasis. SEL manuscripts range in date from the end of the thirteenth century to the beginning of the fifteenth, with a date of c. 1270 assigned to the earliest (lost) version of the collection. For the purposes of my argument here, the interest lies in the extent to which the shifting, protean qualities of SEL resonate with the various trajectories of violence contained within. The legends most frequently abstracted from a collection such as SEL by modern critics concern the sufferings of virgin martyrs, women who died protecting their chastity.