St. Winefride, beheaded by a lustful suitor, was brought back to life by the power of prayer. On the site where her blood was spilled, a spring of healing water erupted and became the focus of a miracle-working cult which gained influence throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Two Medi¾val Lives of Saint Winefride brings together two twelfth-century accounts of her life, miracles and relics, with a study of British well-cults and her significance in medi¾val and early modern Britain.

Saints and Their Cults in the Atlantic World traces the changing significance of a dozen saints and holy sites from the fourth century to the twentieth and from Africa, Sicily, Wales, and Iceland to Canada, Boston, Mexico, Brazil, and the Caribbean. Scholars representing the fields of history, art history, religious studies, and communications contribute their perspectives in this interdisciplinary collection, also notable as the first English language study of many of the saints treated in the volume. Several chapters chart the changing images and meanings of holy people as their veneration traveled from the Old World to the New; others describe sites and devotions that developed in the Americas. The ways that a group feels connected to the holy figure by ethnicity or regionalism proves to be a critical factor in a saint's reception, and many contributors discuss the tensions that develop between ecclesiastical authorities and communities of devotees.

This book argues that in order to understand nationalisms, we need a clearer understanding of the types of cultural myths, symbols, and traditions that legitimate them. Myths of origin and election, memories of a greater and purer past, and narratives of persecution and mission are required for the production and maintenance of powerful national sentiments. Through an investigation of how early modern Catholics and Protestants reimagined, reinterpreted, and rewrote the lives of the founder-saints who spread Christianity in England, this book offers a theoretical framework for the study of origin narratives. Analyzing the discursive construction of time and place, the invocation of forces beyond the human to naturalize and authorize, and the role of visual and ritual culture in fabrications of the past, this book provides a case study for how to approach claims about founding figures. Serving as a timely example of the dependence of national identity on key religious resources, Griffin shows how origin narratives – particularly the founding figures that anchor them – function as uniquely powerful rhetorical tools for the cultural production of regional and national identity.

The Use of Hereford, a local variation of the Roman rite, was one of the diocesan liturgies of medieval England before their abolition and replacement by the Book of Common Prayer in 1549. Unlike the widespread Use of Sarum, the Use of Hereford was confined principally to its diocese, which helped to maintain its individuality until the Reformation. This study seeks to catalogue and evaluate all the known surviving sources of the Use of Hereford, with particular reference to the missals and gradual, which so far have received little attention. In addition to these a variety of other material has been examined, including a number of little-known or unknown important fragments of early Hereford service-books dismembered at the Reformation and now hidden away as binding or other scrap in libraries and record offices. This is the fullest examination of Hereford liturgical sources ever undertaken and may stimulate similar and much-needed studies of other diocesan uses, in particular Sarum and York. As well as describing in detail the various manuscript sources, the rare single edition printed Hereford texts, the missals and breviaries, are also discussed. Unlike books of the Sarum and York rites, these ’one-offs’ were never revised and reissued. In addition to the examination of these sources, William Smith discusses the possible origins of the rite and provides an analysis of the Hereford liturgical calendar, of the festa, including those of the cathedral’s patron St Ethelbert and the no less famous St Thomas Cantilupe, that helped to make Hereford use so distinctive.

Though manifestations of play represent a burgeoning subject area in the study of post-medieval responses to the Middle Ages, they have not always received the respect and attention they deserve. This volume seeks to correct those deficiencies. Though manifestations of play represent a burgeoning subject area in the study of post-medieval responses to the Middle Ages, they have not always received the respect and attention they deserve. This volume seeks to correct those deficiencies via six essays that directly address how the Middle Ages have been put in play with regard to Alice Munro's 1977 short story "The Beggar Maid"; David Lowery's 2021 film The Green Knight; medievalist archaisms in Japanese video games; runic play in Norse-themed digital games; medievalist managerialism in the 2020 video game Crusader Kings III; and neomedieval architectural praxis in the 2014 video game Stronghold: Crusader II. The approaches and conclusions of those essays are then tested in the second section's six essays as they examine "muscular medievalism" in George R. R. Martin's 1996 novel A Game of Thrones; the queering of the Arthurian romance pattern in the 2018-20 television show She-Ra and the Princesses of Power; the interspecies embodiment of dis/ability in the 2010 film How to Train Your Dragon; late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century nationalism in Irish reimaginings of the Fenian Cycle; post-bellum medievalism in poetry of the Confederacy; and the medievalist presentation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's 2020-21 Covid inoculation.