St. George's Day: A Cultural History of England's National Holiday

In this remarkable book, Hanael Bianchi reveals how a religious feast commemorating a Middle-Eastern martyr became the national holiday of England. Previous attempts to explain the origins of St. George's Day have focused almost exclusively on the medieval period and, in large part, have neglected the five hundred years from the Reformation to the present. Bianchi delivers the authoritative history of St. George's Day based on his original investigation of the relationship between the medieval feast and the modern holiday.