The thesis questions what constitutes man and woman, textually, from an Old English viewpoint. By contextualizing the matter of literary explorations of gender identities as something separate from social identities, I aim to reconstruct binary gender paradigms as presented through hagiographies. With a combination of close readings and quantitative analyses of Old English word usage, as well as wider examinations of larger collections, such as Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, it becomes clear that binary gender, from an Old English viewpoint, is far from clear or stable.