IMC 2026: Sessions

Old English saints’ lives are notable for how they adapt their Latin source material to create engaging, entertaining, and educational narratives. These narratives grapple with how to re-present saints — many of whom belong to remote time periods and geographic locations — for English audiences. Rooting audiences within a sense of Christian time and creating a sense of Christian unity was fundamental to saints’ lives; yet a holistic view of how Old English saints’ lives achieved a sense of vernacular Christian identity is often obscured by a schematic approach, examining prose and verse separately. These sessions remedy this by bringing together scholars working on Old English hagiography in both verse and prose. They give space to the diverse approaches, aims, and foci that Old English hagiographers engaged with to create a vernacular Christian identity. Session One explores the various voices hagiographers inhabited across different temporalities; Session Two considers how contexts of reception inflected vernacular narratives; and Session Three examines how the translations and rhetorical use of landscape, nature, and geography allow us to reconsider the vernacularity of early English saints. Together these sessions seek to illuminate how distinctive vernacular approaches to Christian identity and sanctity manifest throughout Early Medieval England.