Those who work with Middle English hagiography know Catherine Sanok as one of the leading proponents of a careful interpretation of poetry's formal features as they engage issues of temporality, secularity, and literariness. In New Legends of England, she extends that focus across a range of Middle English hagiographic texts as it asks how these lives of British saints encode multiple, overlapping, and sometimes unexpected communities for both saints and devotees. This is a book that expects much of its readers as it engages with field-specific questions about the nature of Middle English literary sensibilities. It does, however, repay that attention greatly in its nuanced consideration of how these lives conceive heterogeneous communities through their formal elements, providing a corrective to the scholarly tendency to read saints’ lives in terms of “national” or “regional” identities.

The central framework that Sanok engages across the book is the question of scale. Saints’ lived experiences, their compatriots, their bodies in life and death, the pacing of their cults, the scope of their legends: how do all these elements of a legend trace the variable temporal, spatial, and conceptual scales of communities available within later medieval England? These issues drive Sanok's interrogation of a wide range of prose and poetic Middle English hagiography in multiple forms, ranging from the magisterial lives of John Lydgate to the intricate carols of John Audelay, and from the early versions of the South English Legendary to the lives composed in early sixteenth-century England.

Sanok decenters homogeneous notions of an English nation figured through the body and policy of the king. Rather, as she adroitly demonstrates throughout, the lives of British saints are committed to a wide variety of communities, often standing in opposition to a singular idea of an English nation. In chapters 2 and 3, Sanok demonstrates how the Wilton Life of Edith and the Lives of Wenefred penned by Osbern Bokenham and John Audelay resist national or royal concepts of community in favor of bonds built on affect, proximity, and spatial and emotional intimacy. These localized, even personalized avenues of community identity are further pursued in chapter 1, on the ever-shifting South English Legendary, and chapter 4, on the fifteenth-century Gilte Legende and Bokenham's Abbotsford Legendary. Here, too, the British saint is not a figure for the nation, but rather an index a whole variety of communities: collectives constructed through civic ties, through episcopal jurisdictions, through supranational corporations, through professional identities and through embodied identities like gender. These positions are available simultaneously and are not (as a rule) subordinated one to another. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 pivot toward the jurisdictional boundaries that these saints’ lives limn out, in John Lydgate's Lives of Edmund and Fremund and Lives of Alban and Amphibal, Lawrence Wade's life of Thomas Becket, and William Hatfield's Lyf of Saynt Ursula. Here, royal, civic, and national unities are not necessarily coterminous with spiritual, personal, or geographic identities, and the individual rather than the collective frequently dominates in these texts.

The book's strengths are threefold. Foundational to the argument is Sanok's subtle, dexterous close reading of these texts’ formal features. This strength feeds her analysis of the ways these saints figure multiple communities—sometimes intersecting, sometimes not—enabling their medieval readers to engage with these saints from their own varied, complex identity positions. Finally, the book brings less studied texts, like Wade's Becket and Hatfield's Ursula, into the critical light alongside the more thoroughly examined lives by Lydgate or Bokenham, according these legends the same critical care and nuance of interpretation.

Sanok is little interested in the specific historical conditions under which these lives were conceived or read. The Hundred Years’ War and the dynastic conflicts of the Wars of the Roses provide a generalized backdrop for her assessment of these legends’ construction of community and formal investments, but the reader will not find any consideration of (for example) the original audience(s) for Bokenham's magnificent “Life of Wenfrede” or the specific groups who may have read different iterations of the South English Legendary or Gilte Legende. While this desire stems from Sanok's admirable attempt to “avoid reading literature as ‘symptomatic’ of a more consequential political or social phenomenon” (18), this decision at times suspends her interpretation of these texts in a vacuum. The detailed formalist reading often leaves unanswered questions about how these texts’ community formation strategies may have been received by their readers—male and female, lay and clerical, elite and bourgeois, metropolitan and hinterlanders. Chapter 7 is the exception; tracing how Saint Ursula and her peripatetic companions were used across Europe to figure the mobility of civic and royal desires, this chapter demonstrates the immense profit to be had from considering questions of reception across various communities. The volume invites further detailed analysis in this vein.

New Legends of England provides a rich, rewarding examination of the different scales of communities, in space and time, imagined by Middle English legends of British saints. Providing a new lens through which to revisit saints’ lives and modeling formalist reading practices at their most productive, this is a book that scholars of Middle English and hagiography will be thinking with for years to come.