The Carolingians, on the whole, preferred their saints to be male and long dead. The exception to this rule was recently converted Saxony, where the Lives of these two female members of the Frankish-Saxon aristocracy were both composed sometime in the 870s, within a decade of their deaths. Liutbirga (d. c. 870) was an important member of the household of one of the leading Saxon families, before becoming an anchoress in the family's convent at Wendhausen some thirty years before her death; Hathumoda (d. 874) was appointed by her parents, the East Saxon Count Liudolf and his wife Oda, to become the first abbess of their newly established house at Gandersheim at the age of twelve. Carolingian female saints, like their Ottonian counterparts, have in the last two decades become of increasing interest to British, French, German and North American scholars, providing, as they do, an alternative perspective on the ninth century to that of the male-orientated political narratives of feud and rebellion. Whilst Rudolf of Fulda's mid ninth-century Life of Boniface's companion, Leoba (d. 782), has been available for over fifty years in C. H. Talbot's translation, those of Liutbirga and Hathumoda have until now only been partially rendered into English. For this reason alone Frederick Paxton's erudite, careful and fluent translation (based on the Bamberg manuscript as well as existing editions of Liutbirga's anonymous Life and Agius' prose Life of Hathumoda together with the verse Dialogue on her death), is to be welcomed. As Paxton makes clear, our picture of ninth-century Carolingian sanctity might be rather different had not Andreas Lang, abbot of St Michelsberg, Bamberg, decided to copy both texts into his late fifteenth-century collection of Lives of prominent members of his Benedictine order, for neither text survives in an earlier manuscript. This observation points to the depth and range of Paxton's scholarly introduction which places these works carefully in their literary as well as historical context. Such diligence is also evident in his notes to the text itself which are not confined to dates and citations, but go much further, pointing out puns in the Latin for a monoglot audience, echoes of earlier texts, rather than just direct citations, and the wider historical significance of particular passages, in ways which show his detailed knowledge of recent scholarship. It was Paxton's own interest in the emergence of the medieval death liturgy in late Carolingian monasteries which, we learn from the acknowledgements, first led him to investigate the detailed account of the rites which surrounded Hathumoda's death but, as his careful work demonstrates, these are texts which are of wider relevance not only to historians of death, but to those of Carolingian learning, politics, family, monasticism, eremitism and sanctity. In making them available in such a scholarly translation he has performed a great service for both students and their teachers.