All historical evidence – written, visual, archaeological or folkloric – comes into being within a specific context. As historians, whether professional academics or amateur enthusiasts, it is vital that we try to reconstruct as much of the context of production and usage as we can so that we are able to engage with this evidence appropriately. Middle English hagiography is now almost exclusively experienced as printed, bound volumes, often read silently and alone, but this is very different from its original form and purpose. Fundamentally, we must appreciate that these saints’ lives were not composed in order that future students of religious history and literature would be able to read them in edited, printed versions. Modern editions are often compiled and translated from a number of variant sources, so that what may appear to be the ‘true’, ‘real’ or ‘only’ version of a text is often little more than a compromise between conflicting versions, rendered into contemporary language with inevitable loss of nuance. Increasingly, editions of lives of the saints are becoming available on the internet, and this is a welcome development in terms of ease of access. However, many of the same caveats apply: these versions are often merely transcriptions of printed editions (sometimes simply scanned and digitised, with the result that typographical errors often creep in), so the reader still needs to make a conscious effort to develop awareness of the ways in which the text would have originally been used. Furthermore, this heightened awareness needs to encompass some consciousness of the fact that written saints’ legends will originally have formed just one aspect of devotion to particular saints; they may actually have been less significant at the time of their composition than shrines, relics, visual imagery, ritual, liturgy, oral narrative and other elements of a saint’s cult. These physical and performative aspects are often fugitive, with the consequence that written hagiography can be unduly privileged by the simple fact of its survival and publication.

The specific reason why a piece of hagiography was composed or copied usually cannot be retrieved but sometimes we can establish the patronage of an individual text. A good example of a clear rationale for composition is Osbern Bokenham’s dedication of his ‘Life of St Anne’ to Katherine Denston, who hoped that the saint, who had herself suffered from childlessness, would help her and her husband John to conceive a son.