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When Eddius Stephanus, an Anglo-Saxon priest, sat down to write The Life of Bishop Wilfrid in the early decades of the eighth century, he mused, "This very task of preserving the blessed memory of Bishop Wilfrid is of great gain and value to myself. Indeed it is in itself a ready path to virtue to know what [Wilfrid] was." His goal was not merely to generate an historical record of Wilfrid's actions, but to strengthen his own faith and the faith of others.

Those spiritual and pedagogic concerns lie at the heart of the genre, or more properly genres, of "hagiography"—literally, "writings about saints." Thus a work of hagiography tells us at least as much about the author and his audience as it does about the saint who is its subject. Though often unreliable as factual history, hagiography nonetheless provides some of the most valuable records for understanding pre-modern Christianity.

Hagiography encompasses many types of literature, including Lives of saints, collections of miracle stories, accounts of the discovery or movement of relics, bulls of canonization, investigations into the life of a candidate for canonization, liturgical books, sermons, and visions.

Saints were quite literally holy men and women, and venerating them lay at the core of medieval Christianity. Saints demonstrated their holiness through their actions—the willingness to accept martyrdom, the rigors of extreme asceticism, the wise exercise of episcopal office, or the heroic defense of virginity.

With God's assistance, saints could draw on their holiness to perform miraculous actions, such as curing the sick, defeating their enemies without the use of force, and exorcising demons.

Those miraculous powers were not extinguished by death, for posthumously the saint became a resident of God's court. His or her intercessory powers could be invoked by living Christians through prayer and pilgrimage, donation and devotion.

The first Christians to be honored as saints were martyrs who died during Roman persecutions. The Martyrdom of St. Polycarp and The Passion of Sts. Perpetua and Felicity are two well-known hagiographical accounts from this initial period.

In the fourth and early fifth centuries, the burgeoning ascetic movement in the Egyptian desert provided a new ideal of sanctity. Around 360, Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria composed The Life of St. Antony of Egypt, celebrating one of the movement's earliest and most charismatic members.

The heart of the new hagiography was didactic, and the works sometimes produced dramatic effects. Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) counted the Life of St. Antony as a crucial influence in his conversion to Christianity and celibacy. Athanasius' Life was to remain a central reference point for all writers of hagiography, both eastern and western, throughout the Middle Ages. In the twelfth century, for example, such abbots as Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) and Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167) were consciously described as imitators of their ancient predecessors.

In 386 Bishop Ambrose of Milan (d. 397) discovered the relics of two martyrs, Gervasius and Protasius, and enshrined them in a church in the center of his city. While this was hardly the beginning of the public veneration of relics, Ambrose's actions excited widespread interest in the discovery and acquisition of new relics of martyrs.

About a decade later, Bishop Victricius of Rouen wrote In Praise of the Saints to commemorate the arrival in his remote diocese of several martyrs' relics. "Before today," Victricius wrote, "we carried our apostles and martyrs by faith. So the saints have come twice to Rouen. Then, they entered our chests; now they crowd the city's church." This text is one of the earliest pieces of hagiography to document the cult of relics.

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