This chapter is concerned with community: that is, community as an imaginary and always ideological relationship to others. It is also concerned with the role that medieval texts might have played in creating a sense of community in the world outside them. As both this and the next chapter will demonstrate, these are themes with which vernacular saints' lives are very much concerned. The formation and confirmation of Christian community is axiomatic to the hagiographic project as a whole and, in some vernacular Lives, provokes reflection on the processes that contribute to this important textual and extra-textual function. It is not just medieval hagiographers who are interested in such issues, however. As indicated by the above quotation, questions of community have currency in debates taking place in medieval studies, as elsewhere. In a postmodern universe where God is dead (or unconscious), issues of identification, resemblance and connectivity have become fraught but nonetheless urgent and anxiously debated concerns.