The extent to which religious, national, and local identity are tangled together in conceptions of the past has been largely obscured by modern historians' imposition of two distinct categories of "national history" and "ecclesiastical history", and by our focus on histories proper instead of looking at a variety of materials for accounts of the past. For early modern writers across the confessional spectrum, different aspects of spatial identity framed their investigations of history, thus shaping the ways in which they understood and legitimized their confessional identity. Attempts at the distinction between "religious" and "national" discourses create certain historical narratives that obscure these relationships and keep us from gaining a fuller picture of early modern knowledge and experiences. My project seeks to complicate standard patterns of religious and national history assumed in current scholarship.

This study provides a clearer understanding of the ways in which English Catholics and their Protestant interlocutors reinterpreted and reconstructed the stories of medieval Anglo-Saxon, British, and Celtic saints in debates surrounding the arrival of Christianity in England. The biographies of these local saints formed historical narratives that ultimately shaped the negotiation of religious and spatial identity. By taking into account national histories, local antiquarian works, hagiographies, martyrologies, liturgies and the landscape itself, I examine how contemporaries talked about England, Britain, Rome and Europe in relation to Catholic and Protestant identity, thus transcending the current boundaries of debates concerning early modern historiography in order to analyze the broader attitudes that underlay conceptions of the medieval Church.

Through their narratives, these founder saints connected the local devotional space with England, England with the Continent, and the human with the divine realm. Saints were also able to bridge time; in this case they linked the moment of origins with the present, but they also connected the phenomenological and cosmological, projecting a past that reconfigures the present situation of the reader. In this way, the imaginative power of "religious" materials not only represents a certain historical narrative, but also evokes affective responses from participants, providing a powerful tool for constituting collective memory.

These chapters thus focus on exemplary figures, historical episodes, and polemical debates in order to chart a broader theoretical framework for the ways in which saints serve as tools for negotiation as well as reflections of the complex intermingling of spatial and religious identity, one that might still be visible in the ways in which we negotiate identity today. Moreover, it seeks to illustrate the fruitfulness of reading hagiography as history and viewing histories through a devotional lens, revealing the inadequacy of our constructed categories for understanding the ways in which the past shapes the present.