The legends of St. Michael the archangel were widespread in medieval England. Indeed, it was upon the well-established stock of legends of the archangel as warrior-angel and psychopomp that the poet John Milton relied to create his heroic figure of St. Michael in Paradise Lost.

These legends derive their literary impetus from a matrix of references to the archangel in scriptural and apocryphal literature. Part I of this book, “Genesis and Migration of the Legends,” presents a historical survey of this body of literature. One of the principal angels venerated by the early Church, St. Michael the archangel appears five times in canonical scripture: three times in the Old Testament and twice in the New Testament. As Chapter One, “Literary Origins of the Archangel's Legendary Roles,” makes clear, there was no Michaeline cultus to speak of in the biblical era, only a measure of popular appeal, and this appeal was defined largely by the archangel's roles in biblical and extra-biblical literature.