At first glance, medieval saints’ lives seem to have a fairly clear attitude toward power and authority: they value the latter over the former, frequently pitting a saint who has only faith and the ultimate auctoritas of God on his or her side against a representative of coercive, worldly power and showing the saint’s decisive triumph. Seemingly unprotected against the full onslaught of governmental, parental or purely aggressive power, the saint manages, with God’s help in the form of spiritual support, miracles, angelic aid and other unexpected resources, ultimately to beat those powers at their own game. As such victories suggest, however, medieval saints and, even more, medieval hagiographers were actually in a somewhat awkward position with regard to power and authority. On the one hand, saints in their pursuit of moral perfection tended ostentatiously to renounce all earthly goods, including secular power, and to regard them as corrupting. On the other hand, saints are inevitably depicted as exercising considerable spiritual authority, usually even before their deaths, and could invoke the awesome power of God through miracles of punishment, destruction and healing. A good number of them also held earthly power, or influenced those who did. Thus the claim that ‘Saints in this life were meek, humble and powerless. After death the situation is reversed’ points to a certain ideal of Christian reversal – that the last shall be first, that strength lies in weakness – but hardly represents accurately the hagiographic depiction of saints during their lives. Quite often a saint, while explicitly, indeed ostentatiously, despising the trappings of earthly power, proves able to exploit the implications of that power and even usurp it.

One reason for the complexity of power and authority as they are represented in saints’ lives is that the two terms are closely linked, yet potentially in opposition. While they had distinct meanings in medieval political theory, and retain these to some degree in modern usage, their relationship could be represented in a variety of ways. Thus ‘power’ might most straightforwardly designate the ability to produce physical actions or effects, while ‘authority’ refers to the ability to influence actions, effect moral persuasion or inspire belief; medieval political theory tends to associate the former with earthly rulership, the latter with spiritual leadership.