As an educator, whose career has spanned the course of thirty-six years, and having had varied responsibilities from classroom teacher to Superintendent of Schools, I have come to understand the use of myths and legends as teaching tools and underlying guiding life practices. What has piqued my interest are the recurring themes, symbols, and icons of the warrior's spirit of goodness prevailing over evil. The same formats of the earliest tales of Saint George and the representative icons still exist today and are used to teach the same lessons.

The written research of some of the foremost authors and leading authorities of medieval iconography have guided my work. The Dictionary of the Middle Ages and the Catholic Encyclopedia offer a firm grounding for understanding western European hagiography and iconography. For an understanding of the medieval epoch, I began my study with Henry Osborne Taylor's The Medieval Mind and Saint Augustine's The City of God. I furthered my research seeking the work of scholars such as David Knowles, Emile Mâle and Erwin Panofsky. Peter Brown's The Cult of the Saints, Jacobus de Voragine's The Golden Legend and Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints offered insights into the legends surrounding Saint George, the cult of the saints and the societal impress on their cultural evolution. In pursuit of this topic these sources, as well as my travels to Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and North Africa, have served as a basis for my bibliography.

Predicated upon my studies of Saint George, I establish an understanding of the Cult of the Saints through the development of the political, social, and religious worlds through the epochs.