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Medieval saints' lives and their cults were inherently malleable and brought into the service of a variety of interests, thus constituting a crucial means of understanding the individuals, communities and societies by whom they were valued. 1 Saints were chosen as objects of veneration, in part, because of the ways in which they reflected the experiences of their devotees and spoke to their identities. This article considers the ways in which the lives and cults of male monastic saints circulating in latemedieval England were underpinned by certain ideals of masculinity and explores the devotional and cultural ramifications of this for a lay audience. The moral and didactic nature of the discourse makes hagiography an important source for understanding medieval ideologies of gender and saints were often presented explicitly as genderspecific behavioural models. 2 Some of the saints' lives considered here are among the very oldest sort of hagiographic narrative: the lives of the early desert fathers, second only to martyrs' lives in their antiquity. Initially they were a product of the early Christian period and its concerns, intended to provide models for men following the new monastic form of life. 3 But these lives were re-told throughout the medieval period, and increasingly aimed at a lay audience of both men and women. 4 A contextualised reading of them enables analysis of a particular version of ideal holy masculinity, the ways in which this was presented to lay readers for imitation and the implications of this. 5

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