Medieval Saints and Modern Screens

By examining medieval female saints' lives in dialogue with modern film theories, a trans-historical spectrum of visual experience is revealed: medieval saint and modern moviegoer are connected in the visual act.

Spencer-Hall Alicia :

Alicia Spencer-Hall is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at University College London. Their research interests include: medieval hagiography, disability, gender, digital culture, and film and media studies. Her first monograph, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens: Divine Visions as Cinematic Experience was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2018, and is now available Open Access. Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, a collection co-edited with Blake Gutt, was published in 2021. Shortlisted for the Transgender Non-Fiction award at the 34th Lambda Literary Awards, the volume is now also available Open Access. Their second monograph, Medieval Twitter, was published by Arc Humanities Press in 2024.

"Spencer-Hall’s text is a perceptive interdisciplinary work that would be of benefit to scholars of religion and film both." - Stephen Okey Journal of Religion & Film (2021)

"This book is an innovative, interdisciplinary and informative study of an allegedly less well-covered topic in the medieval studies. It analyses the virtual worlds of the internet (...) as thoroughly as it deals with the female mystics of Liège. This book offers much inspiration for such dynamically developing disciplines as Fan, Audience and Celebrity Studies as well as Game Studies. Catholic Hagiography has never had a more skilled, feminist-secular female 'Influencer'." - Ludger Kaczmarek, MEDIENwissenschaft 03/2019 (originally published in German).

"Alicia Spencer-Hall’s Medieval Saints and Modern Screens is a work of impressive breadth and erudition that brings the study of hagiography in mediaeval scholarship into dialogue with contemporary issues of media materiality, ontology and embodiment in photography and film, as well as with the study of spectatorship, celebrity culture, fandoms and virtual environments." - Caroline Bem, Screen, Winter 2019

"For a reader who also approaches the medieval through medievalism, there is a lot to like here. The playful, lively and often 'heretical' reading of the Middle Ages offers an excellent pedagogical tool. Spencer-Hall’s refreshing re-reading of medieval sainthood thus resists any such outmoded and performative ‘contemptus mundi’ in order to lay the present alongside the past in (to adopt another film metaphor) a kind of Eisensteinian montage, a dialectical collision between the old and the new." - Andrew B.R. Elliott, English Historical Review, September 2019

"For researchers and students interested in medieval literature, hagiography, mysticism, theology, popular culture, fandom studies or any combination thereof, this volume is essential; Spencer-Hall masterfully takes the reader through a radically new perspective on a predominantly androcentric field of study, and in so doing, opens up anew both media theory and medieval studies through finding an unprecedented correspondence between the two." - Anthony Ballas, University of Colorado at Denver, Film & History Volume 49, Number 1, Summer 2019

"Medieval Saints and Modern Screens sparkles with moments of provocation and insight. It offers hope that modern life and thought might one day yield a true vision of life in the past. I expect that Spencer-Hall’s next book will truly dazzle us." - Lisa Bitel, University of Southern California, H-France Review, Volume 18 (2018)

"Medieval Saints produces a robust response to decades of neglect of hagiographical sources. Through her trans-temporal, transmedia study, Spencer-Hall repeatedly demonstrates how much the narratives of holy women might contribute to a number of studies outside the direct field of hagiography, including lay theology; the theorisation of vision and time; discussions of medieval self-creation; textual production and performance studies. While the lives of these women have frequently been marginalised in scholarship Spencer-Hall powerfully demonstrates their immediacy and relevance for our current times." - Daisy Black, University of Wolverhampton, Medievally Speaking.

"Medieval Saints and Modern Screens is a lively and engrossing book that brings theories from contemporary media studies together with medieval women mystics, particularly from the Liégeois corpus [...] The book will be of particular interest to scholars interested in the application of modern media studies to medieval contexts, and it should also prove useful to scholars who teach medieval hagiography, as it offers wonderful hooks for drawing students into these (frequently difficult) texts." - Jessica Barr University of Massachusetts Amherst, The Medieval Review.