Among the many scholarly services it renders, Catherine Sanok's impeccably researched volume on female saints’ lives should definitively put an end to the fiction that late medieval hagiographic literature knew nothing of history. Through her studies of such writers as Osborn Bokenham, Henry Bradshaw, the scribe of the Book of Margery Kempe, Chaucer, and others, Sanok demonstrates that the legends of women saints—inscribed in written form or performed dramatically—demand that their readers engage both the continuities and discontinuities between the past and the present. Often, the texts accomplish this by means of what Sanok's subtitle calls “exemplarity,” which here means not so much the literal imitation of a saint but the reappropriation of her virtues in a changed social and cultural context.

The first chapter offers perhaps the clearest example of this phenomenon. Medieval women, including Julian of Norwich, who read the life of St. Cecilia were not in a position to directly adopt the saint's practices as their own: they generally could not refuse their husbands’ sexual advances, for instance, as Cecilia did. Instead, imitatio is allegorized: through the lens of a didactic text such as the Book of the Knight of the Tower, Cecilia becomes less a chaste female preacher than an example of Christian charity. “The Book teaches its audience that feminine ethical practice is contingent on contemporary social expectations” (9).

The other primary concern of Sanok's study is to describe the process by which saints’ lives “imagine a collective feminine response” (xii) and the ways in which doing so provides their authors with a vehicle for social commentary. The relationship between this feminine audience and exemplarity is not always clear; indeed, the three chapters (2–4) in which Sanok analyzes the construction of a female readership stand somewhat apart from the rest of the book. Chapter 2 makes the important point that studies of female saints’ lives have often been handicapped by excessive concern with their misogyny; while not denying this, Sanok argues that a more fruitful way of reading these texts written for women by men is to consider how they address themselves to a largely, if not exclusively, feminine audience and how they envision that audience's response. Chapter 3 puts this method into practice: studying Bokenham's Legends of Holy Women, Sanok shows that by addressing his saints’ lives to an audience containing Lancastrian as well as Yorkist women, Bokenham was able to contrast the political disunity of mid-fifteenth-century England with the idealized feminine community of his patrons. These women, like the saints whose lives they commissioned him to write, Bokenham figures as his muses: “rather than speaking openly in the pagan court or the city square, the virgin martyr now inspires the poet, who speaks for her” (79).

Like Bokenham, the next author Sanok considers also contrasts stable and divided communities. Henry Bradshaw's Life of St. Werburge depicts the Cheshire saint as protectress not only of her northern city and its monastery (where Bradshaw himself lived) but as a symbol of the “continuity and coherence of English identity” (83). In Bradshaw's account of the miraculous preservation of Werburge's body from decay, Sanok discerns the saint's distance from the vicissitudes of secular history. Presenting Werburge as a symbol of an alternative way of life, Bradshaw proceeds to hold her up as a model for contemporary women. But his account insists upon exemplarity according to hierarchy: noblewomen can imitate Werburge by dressing simply, but common women (for whom sumptuous dress would in any case be illegal) must follow the saint's example in other, less literal, ways.

In chapter 5, Sanok returns to her main theme, that of exemplarity, by showing how the life of Margery Kempe depicts the dangers medieval women faced when they practiced too literal an imitation of the saints. This chapter, for this reader the most daring and intellectually satisfying of the volume, places Margery's Book squarely within the context of traditional saints’ lives. Sanok convincingly argues that Margery's story draws heavily on that of Mary Magdalene, not least because the two are both narratives of conversion. Margery's difficulties arise when her appropriation of Magdalene's example was perceived to violate the social norms of the fifteenth century. The possibility of the misappropriation of a saint's life returns in Sanok's final chapter, which studies the St. Katherine play performed in honor of Arthur Tudor's bride Catherine of Aragon as well as Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale. While Sanok's readings of these texts remain persuasive, this chapter unfortunately devotes substantial time to a somewhat more specious argument, namely, that the reason the Chronicle of London devotes only a single line to the separate play of St. Katherine performed in 1393 is that it presented a challenge to civic and ecclesiastical authority. It is true that, especially in the wake of the revolt of 1381, gilds were perceived as a source of unrest, but Sanok's is an unconvincing argument from silence, circumstantial at best.

Sanok's main line of argumentation, about the utility as well as the dangers of hagiographic exemplarity in a shifting, unstable world, is a valuable addition to our understanding of the social and cultural contexts of late medieval English saints’ lives. Her study is critically informed; her close readings are compelling. But in places her style is overly indebted to jargon, and there are times when the argument appears to move along a tangent, particularly in short sections (e.g., that on Pynson's Kalendre of the New Legende of Englande) at the end of otherwise coherent chapters. On a separate note, Sanok's treatment of lollardy seems to want to ascribe too coherent an ideology to a “movement,” which, at best, can be described as theologically divergent. The heresy suspect Walter Brut may have acknowledged the possibility that women could preach, but recent research has cast doubt on whether Brut would have advocated for actual women preachers. But in the broader context of Sanok's agenda, these are minor points. Her volume will repay careful reading, not least as a reminder that the lives of female saints did not have to wait until the Reformation to be written with a critical eye on the past.