During the last twenty years, medieval hagiography has experienced a surge in academic interest as a previously undervalued literary and historic source. Late medieval hagiography was once dismissed as formulaic and unoriginal, yet in her most recent work, Karen Winstead maintains that the “fifteenth century was a golden age of Middle English hagiography” (1). Building on the work of Catherine Sanok, Winstead contends that vernacular hagiography had real life application for its medieval readers. Fifteen-century English writers creatively translated and rewrote saints’ lives to serve as exemplars to imitate. Winstead demonstrates that in these writers’ hands, hagiography was transformed to reflect contemporary concerns and promote church reform. Fifteenth-century hagiographers used exemplar saints to encourage education as an antidote to heresy, to downplay saints’ miracles, and to portray saints as active and caring members of their communities and families instead of as countercultural individuals who defied authority in their single-minded devotion to God. Winstead argues that this fifteenth-century hagiography laid the foundation for sixteenth-century post-Reformation martyrology and its depiction of the ideal Christian.

Following a roughly chronological sequence, the first two chapters focus on individual hagiographers—John Lydgate and Osbern Bokenham—and their vernacular translations. Although Lydgate worked closely with the Lancastrian court, Winstead contends he was not a sycophant, but, nonetheless, tailored his hagiography to suit his patrons’ needs. His saints were good citizens, living in harmony and submission to their family and civil leadership, unless it conflicted with their duty to God. Lydgate omitted or downplayed dramatic confrontations between saints and civil authorities, focusing instead on their patient suffering in the face of persecution. After the censorship of the fourteenth century, persecution was depicted as counterproductive to an orderly society. Teaching and preaching rather than miracles or divine revelation in Lydgate proved more persuasive in converting individuals to orthodox Christianity.

Like Lydgate, Bokenham presents his holy women as faithful family members who sought an educated understanding of their faith. Their devotion to God and learning led them to act in radical ways by preaching and teaching, but Bokenham, similarly to Lydgate, de-emphasized their miracles and emphasized instead their interior spiritual devotion.

The next two chapters are topical. Chapter 3 expands on the first two chapters and examines how education and an intellectual faith is promoted by fifteenth-century hagiographers including Symon Wynter, Lydgate, John Capgrave, and the anonymous playwright of Mary Magdalene. Hagiographers used saints’ lives not only to promote education but also to teach their audience about theology and particularly the Trinity. According to Winstead, hagiographers specifically selected female saints, not male, to discuss controversial theological topics. Winstead suggests that hagiographers chose women rather than men as the transmitters of orthodox theological discourse because women had long been assumed to have a greater proclivity to heresy. Therefore, hagiographers deployed educated women, teaching orthodox religion, to demonstrate the power of education to eradicate heresy even amongst those most prone to it. A longer gender analysis and a more robust discussion of the conversations among recent scholars about women's participation in heresy would have strengthened this section.

From writing about established saints, the book shifts to writings about medieval holy women. Although contemporaries mentioned in passing English holy women, no English holy women, except Margery Kempe—who commissioned her own autobiography—received a full-length vita. Only a few writers translated the stories of mainland European medieval holy women. Winstead argues that Kempe was part of the same fifteenth-century English trend in hagiographical writing that made sanctity accessible and imitable by pious laity, even if they could not be virgins, clergy, or martyrs. In contrast to the extreme asceticism depicted in continental holy women, Kempe presented an alternative option—inward piety. But, as Winstead acknowledges, Kempe's attempts to duplicate the behavior of earlier medieval holy women did not go uncontested by her contemporaries. Although hagiographers might have presented educated, inwardly pious, vocal saints as exemplars, a woman actually attempting to do so in medieval England received criticism and resistance. Winstead does not explore how Kempe's lived experience might affect her thesis.

The final chapter examines the continuity in ideas between fifteenth-century Catholic hagiography, particularly Bokenham and William Caxton's English translations of the Legenda Aurea, and Foxe's Protestant Book of Martyrs in the sixteenth century. Bokenham and Caxton's translations of saints’ lives from the Legenda Aurea contain significant additions and omissions. Both included more English saints. Instead of gruesome torture and miracles, Caxton stressed the saints’ personal piety and their familial and communal responsibility. Like his fifteenth-century predecessors, Foxe emphasized the learning and intellectual achievements of his martyrs and elided family conflict. Foxe claimed to remove the layers of Catholic superstition in his rendition of the lives of martyrs, but he still retained a summary of their miracles and supernatural signs. According to Winstead, Caxton not Foxe successfully created “a simple story of faith and perseverance without the sensational” and thereby “out-Foxed Foxe” by divesting his translations of saints’ lives more completely of the supernatural (145).

Winstead provides fruitful insight into the connections between English pre- and post-Reformation thought. She successfully argues that fifteenth-century reformers were just as concerned as their sixteenth-century Protestant successors about the importance of education to create and maintain theologically orthodox Christians. Likewise, she establishes that educated women preaching and teaching appeared frequently in fifteenth-century hagiography. The work does not explore how that translated for women into the sixteenth century. The chapters overall are well argued, but the book would have benefited from a more in-depth discussion of Foxe's Book of Martyrs to connect more fully fifteenth-century hagiography to sixteenth-century martyrology. Winstead has produced a well-written, thoughtful, and engaging work that will interest upper division undergraduates as well as late medieval and Reformation scholars in religion, gender, literature, and history.