This essay explores the specific relevance of hagiography for female readers engaged with the ideals and circumstances of pious lay life. Whitehead demonstrates that the accounts of Hilda, Æthelburga, and Æthelthryth in Bedeߣs Historia are strikingly supplemented by the depictions of female sanctity and powerful female agency in works connected with the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon mission to the Germanic peoples, while sophisticated literary skill is demonstrated by Hrotsvitha, canoness of Gandersheim. The essay demonstrates the long textual life of Bedeߣs abbesses, along with more recent examples of sanctity. Whitehead explores secular and religious contexts, contrasting the Vie seint Audrée, probably written for a courtly audience, with the writings of the anonymous ߢNunߣ and Clemence of Barking and the early Middle English Lives of the virgin martyrs in the Katherine Group, designed for a well-born group of anchoresses in the west Midlands. The essay shows that the lives of women saints continued to be popular reading in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in both lay and religious contexts, including in Benedictine compilations.

This essay examines medieval women dramatists, from Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim in tenth-century Germany, through Hildegard of Bingen and her Ordo Virtutum (Play of the Virtues) in the twelfth century, to Katherine Sutton, Abbess of Barking in the late fourteenth century, who composed liturgical dramas for Holy Week. The essay locates these women dramatists within the wider context of medieval convent performances in England and Europe, and shows that religious women were not only authors but also actors, directors, and costume makers; their convents provided the play space, while laywomen sometimes also contributed. Niebrzydowski also explores the often speculative or conjectural evidence for womenߣs participation in drama outside the convents. Although there is only one definitive English example of women as associated with a Corpus Christi production, a lost Chester pageant of ߢour Lady thassumpcionߣ, other fragmentary evidence suggests lay womenߣs involvement in a range of dramatic forms from saintsߣ lives, interludes, and morality plays to processions and pageants.