Sabra the Saint: Hagiography in Richard Johnson’s The Seven Champions of Christendom

This paper looks at the influence of hagiography, or the writing of the lives of saints, on Richard Johnson’s wildly popular text, The Seven Champions of Christendom (1596). The author focuses on the character Sabra, who represents a female saint figure in opposition to her not-so-saint-like husband St George, in order to show how the tradition of hagiography is changed in the sixteenth-century as it moves away from its pious and medieval origins. A text that has been mostly overlooked by literary scholars, The Seven Champions of Christendom emerges as more than simply a part of the culture of popular literary fiction of the 1590s as it considers Protestant hagiography and its cultural pertinence at the time Johnson wrote.