Ten examples of hagiography from early medieval Italy are presented here in English translation, arranged in chronological order of the saints’ days (as was normal from the tenth century on). All are male. Nine of them were probably real people, who became the patron saints of their town or city, which is why they are known as Gaudentius of Novara, Barbatus of Benevento, Zeno of Verona, Senzius of Blera, Cetheus of Pescara, Vigilius of Trent, Apollinaris of Ravenna, Eusebius of Vercelli and Sirus of Pavia. The odd one out is the Archangel Michael, who was said to have founded a church near the summit of the Gargano in Puglia. Nicholas Everett has two main focuses of attention: the traditional approach, in which the modern investigator considers the tales for their value as historical accounts of the life and times of their subject (and is often rather rude about them); and a more text-based approach, where the emphasis is on trying to understand what the hagiographer thought he was up to, usually inspired by civic pride within his own contemporary context. Sometimes there is quite a large amount of apparently historical information included in the accounts, as with Apollinaris and Eusebius, but even then Everett is mainly pleased that ‘our ability to consult these and other surviving sources used by the hagiographer …. offers us the rare chance to watch an early medieval hagiographer at work’ (with reference to Eusebius, p. 179); and at times he feels pleased he has been able to be ‘adding to the fragmentary documentary record’ (p. 85). Thus even self-evident fictions, such as the dragon in the tale of Senzius of Blera, can be used as evidence of something, even if it is just the writer's need to cast around desperately for material to bulk out the miraculous achievements of his home town's patron. This perspective requires as accurate an assessment as possible of the date of the account being studied, which is often frustratingly hard to assess; Everett does his best, and better than his predecessors, collating data from many sources and arguing from both external and internal evidence, but we are sometimes left with possible datings for the texts that range over a century or more. Everett is exactly the right person to have undertaken this project, having already established some of the texts (for example, of Sirus of Pavia) and having a deeper understanding of the Lombard protagonists than most of us, and the result is an attractively produced edition, with a valuable map at the start and the Ravenna mosaic of St Apollinaris adorning the cover.