What are the motives and methodologies for modern historians writing about saints? If Chapters 1 and 2 demonstrated that the saintly past was rarely packaged value- free for posterity, the purpose of the present chapter is to sketch some of the ways that this is no less true of modern scholarship on hagiography. Religious beliefs, theoretical dispositions, and stylistic sensibilities each affect the perceived value of saints’ stories as historical sources. These bring with them different attitudes to what might constitute appropriate— maybe even “scientific”— methods for analyzing medieval texts. It remains easy for historians to claim that, if we “read with care”— i.e., check for biases and dismiss anything that sounds implausible like the miraculous— then we are left with straightforward accounts of a historical past. But we need to be cannier than that. Bias is essential to understanding polemic and mentality. “Implausible” episodes are still integral parts of the story. Modern historians are (inevitably) capable of imposing their own agendas and dispositions onto the past, even when they have the best intentions. We need better- defined analytical tools than just raw common sense and aesthetic judgements. In what follows, we will encounter some of the heroes and anti- heroes who have attempted to develop different approaches to hagiography, and the paradigms they have helped to create. I don't advocate any particular approach: indeed, I hope the reader will find inspiration and useful questions throughout that might be redeployed and recombined to help generate new studies.

The present chapter is also supposed to work in tandem with Chapter 4. There, readers will find discussion of the ways in which modern studies of hagiography have changed how we view crucial aspects of the early Middle Ages. One can have all the tools in the world, but one has to see them in action sometimes to know what difference they actually make— although, hopefully, this will also be clear in what follows. Together, the two chapters address an important issue that haunts studies of the past in all its forms: the way you study it will affect the way that it seems, regardless of what happened.