Leeds IMC 2027
July 5th-8th

It is by now widely accepted among scholars that hagiography is valuable for more than what it can reveal about saints and sainthood. Recent scholarship has shown that vitae, miracula, inventiones, and translationes were produced for a variety of purposes, often for specific local audiences, and that these audiences (including later readers, compilers and scribes) played an active role in shaping the texts themselves. Authors and audiences had a shared understanding of what hagiography was meant to do.

This session explores the implications of an approach that goes beyond seeing hagiographical texts as vehicles through which authors promoted particular agendas, to read them as products of communities of production and reception. It particularly invites papers which:

• recognise that each element of a hagiographical text reflects a deliberate choice on the part of its author(s), even when that choice is to follow established conventions;
• read hagiography as the product of a broader community, encompassing the milieu from which the text emerged, its intended audience, and even the saint or saints whose cult it sought to promote;
• treat individual manuscripts and textual witnesses as distinct texts, rather than copies of an original; and/or examine the different networks (textual, social, institutional, etc.) which shaped hagiography and were shaped by it.

This session ultimately seeks to explore how viewing hagiography as the product of shared communities of authorship and interpretation can reformulate the questions historians ask of these texts, and expand what hagiography can reveal as a historical source.

Studies on hagiography (broadly defined) from any period of the Middle Ages are welcome.

To participate, please send a short abstract to Theo Long (tgpl500@york.ac.uk) and Catherine Rosbrook (catherine.rosbrook@ugent.be) by September 15, 2026.