Books by Karen A. Winstead

Stories of the torture and execution of beautiful Christian women first appeared in late antiquity and proliferated during the early Middle Ages. A thousand years later, virgin martyrs were still...

Rejecting the prevalent view of Capgrave as predictably conservative, John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century contributes to a broader appraisal of fifteenth-century culture and offers a fresh view of orthodoxy and dissent in pre-Reformation England.

Virgin martyrs make up one of the largest categories of medieval saints. To judge by their frequent appearances in art and literature, they also figure among the most venerated. The legends of virgin martyrs, retold in various ways through the...