In The Fates of the Apostles Cynewulf shows only limited interest in the details of his heroes' lives and passions. He devotes more of his poem to meditation on the meaning of those events than to the actions themselves. Even so, for the last hundred years, scholars have sought to identify the source or sources of the hagiographical information the author incorporated into his text. Cynewulf speaks of having gathered his information from far and wide (lines 1–2), but most investigators have dismissed this statement as a conventional tag, and they have tried to identify the minimum number of sources needed to provide the details that Cynewulf relates. Efforts to locate a single source have always been in vain, but early investigators generally agreed that the most important source was probably the martyrology of the Venerable Bede or a related document. Not only did this text include nearly all of the information that Cynewulf chose to convey, but its attribution to Bede seemed to assure that it would have been available to an early-ninth-century poet. In 1908, however, this consensus was shaken by the publication of Henri Quentin's path-breaking investigation of the medieval martyrological tradition. Surprisingly, although nine decades have passed since this work appeared, its full implications have yet to be integrated into Cynewulf scholarship. Now a revival of the view that Cynewulf employed a martyrology makes the assimilation of Quentin's conclusions along with the results of more recent martyrological studies imperative.