Commentators on hagiography have long identified a vocabulary of common narrative themes and motifs deployed in the writing of saints’ lives together with an episodic formula or compositional ‘grammar’ for establishing what has been termed a ‘paradigm for the attainment of glory’. Gregory of Tours’s observation that ‘it is asked by many whether we should say the Life of the saints, or the Lives’ testifies to the fact that by the late sixth century models for composing hagiography had become firmly established, be it in the passio tradition centring on the martyrdom of early saints in defence of their faith, or in the vita tradition recording the lives of more contemplative saints and their daily experience of endurance and asceticism. From the fourth century onwards the structure of hagiography developed from a diametrical model solely representing martyrs’ fatal struggles with heathen tyrants towards a more gradational form focusing on the life, not simply the death, of a saint as the basis for emulation. Nowadays the use of a narrative formula in hagiography and attendant repetition (or plagiarism) of motifs between different saints’ lives may necessitate an explanatory apology in introductory studies of the field, but for the medieval audiences for whom the lives were initially composed edification might be of more interest than historical accuracy. General characteristics over and above the individual character of a saint were of great utility in providing a timeless model worthy of inspiring emulation on the audience’s part. Composition and embellishment of a saint’s life drawing upon the common stock of motifs and scenarios not only made up for a paucity of historical ‘facts’ but related the individual saint’s life to the wider saintly community thus reinforcing the essential theme of all hagiography: the wonder of ‘divine goodness and mercy’.

However, hagiographic themes and motifs are by no means exclusive to the kinds of narrative found in well-known collections such as the Golden Legend and South English Legendary, and the morphology of hagiography itself is in turn influenced by works from other genres. Perceptions of genre are of course conditioned by historical, social and intellectual contexts. Many of the texts that appear in medieval collections of saints’ lives incorporate elements from the types of writing that nowadays constitute separate sub-genres or fields of analysis in themselves, such as horror, sado-masochistic pornography, folklore and the supernatural.