ABSTRACT
The waxing and waning reputations of individual saints were a process in which history, politics and even fashion played a part. 'Martyrs' were created by Angevins and Plantagenets from those who had fallen victim to civil war, and the cult of Henry VI was more than once appropriated to political ends, first in anti-Yorkist propaganda, and later by Henry Tudor. This chapter examines expenditure on the upkeep of the shrines and statues of the saints fluctuated as new saints were introduced into the local community and the national calendar, but images continued to be cast, clothed and cultivated in the early decades of the sixteenth century. It explores that late-medieval hagiography came to be dominated by the written and printed life, in a process that culminated in the humanist and Bollandist catalogues of the lives of the saints and the rising status of hagiology over traditional vitae.
