Violence in medieval literature is often codified and formulaic. This is well known to students of medieval literature from genres such as epic and romance, where the depiction of violence is frequently repetitive and highly stylised. Critics have sometimes pointed out the ideological value of such depictions for the formation of community and identity both within and beyond such texts. In a technical sense, medieval saints' lives offer comparable representations of violence to those found in so-called ‘secular’ literature: where violence is represented, it is bound by certain conventions and is ideologically significant. Indeed, on a formal level, vernacular saints' lives have much in common with epic and frequently depict violence in terms of feudal relations; the widespread notion of the saint as a soldier of Christ, or miles Christi, is just one example of this. Saints' lives in the high and late Middle Ages also borrow substantially from romance literature, though not always in ways that flatter romance: one occasionally finds in saints' lives a derogatory layering of recognisable scenarios of romance seduction with more explicit forms of violence and coercion. Certain commentators have seen this as an exposure of what is really at stake in romance plots, which tend instead to euphemise and romanticise sexual violence. Yet, despite such formal similarities, the representation of violence in saints' lives is worked into what is in many respects a different textual framework from that underlying either epic or romance.