At least fifty of these manuscripts survive, preserving nearly three hundred hagiographic works.
Earlier scholarship attempted to identify a unitary work known as the South English Legendary (SEL) that varied between different copies but still had an identifiable point of origin, similar to The Canterbury Tales or Piers Plowman.
More recent work understands 'South English legendaries' as a category of manuscripts that flourished in the later Middle Ages.
[4] Manuscripts containing versified saints' lives in Middle English include: Manfred Görlach concluded that the first collection of versified saints' lives identifiable as a legendary written in southern Middle English was created c.
[14] Dialectal evidence suggests that most of the texts were composed in the South-West or West Midlands of England.