The relationships that saints' lives mediated and constituted – and might still mediate and constitute – feature only indirectly in this examination of old french hagiography; my readings of french vernacular saints' lives have been, first and foremost, explorations of the economies that underwrite such relationships. In investigating social and sexual economy in vernacular saints' lives I have focused on the structures that allow relationships to emerge and the ways in which these structures are given narrative articulation. This has been an examination of the narrative conditions that make relationships possible, and the possible relationships that such conditions might engender. The absence of relationships from this book is therefore explained by the fact that relationships are inevitably absent from saints' lives themselves: the forms of kinship and community that vernacular hagiography projects onto its audiences are never fully realized within the textual confines of this literature but are instead the potential outcome of the readings that these texts encourage.