This project aims at tracing and interpreting ancient novelistic influences in late antique and early medieval hagiography from different linguistic traditions. Traditionally, scholarship concerning the history of the novel deals with the ancient love novel (1st-4th centuries) and then jumps to its Byzantine heirs of the 12th century, leaving a gap of roughly eight centuries uncovered. The driving hypothesis of this project is that the novel did not suddenly disappear after the fourth century. The ancient novel continued to be read and its motifs continued to exist throughout late antiquity and the early middle ages within the framework of Christian hagiographical writing. Since a systematic effort to trace novelistic material diachronically throughout the hagiographical corpus is still lacking, the project Novel Saints intends to provide just that. Secondly, the project also aims to benefit the study of hagiography itself, since it envisages a literary approach to a body of texts that remains understudied from a literary point of view.