St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth - Hardcover

Dr Sam Riches, Teaching Fellow at the School of Art History, of St Andrews, is a historian and art-historian who has made a special study of quasi-historical saints. She is a noted authority on St George and on the iconography of the dragon, of which she has made a radical reappraisal.

Whoever St. George really was--perhaps a Christian Roman military officer executed around A.D. 300--he became a hugely popular icon in the late Middle Ages, especially in England. As a consequence, a rich tradition of visual imagery exists, ripe for interpretation by an author thoroughly fascinated by the saint. The central support of Riches' writing is her close examination of more than 100 paintings and sculptures of St. George (not seen in the prepublication proof). This evidence of veneration layered several stories over an original substrate of St. George's piety and martyrdom. Somehow the tale of the hero saving a damsel from a monster, a stock motif probably borrowed from folklore and Greek mythology, became attached to the saint, as did an increasing variety of tortures inflicted on him, depicted in medieval versions of the horror film, as Riches observes. St. George really arrived with the patronage of English kings, and the saint's association with English nationalism (St. George's red-cross-on-white-shield is the English flag) remains alive today. An illuminating excursion into a potent religio-national symbol. Gilbert Taylor
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