Christina of Markyate (c. 1096–c. 1160), born in Huntingdon, was a twelfth-century recluse and founder of a women’s priory at Markyate, not far from St Albans Abbey. We know of her from her Life (extant in one fourteenth-century manuscript) authored by a monk of St Albans, possibly Robert de Gorron, and probably written in the 1130s or early 1140s when she was still alive. The Life seems to have been written in the hope that Christina would become a new patronal saint for St Albans, but that hope was not realized and there was no posthumous cult. The Life describes Christina’s youthful flight into reclusion from an arranged marriage and her subsequent intense spiritual friendships with Roger the hermit and Abbot Geoffrey of St Albans, who may have adapted the luxurious St Albans Psalter for her readership: the Psalter certainly became closely associated with Christina and her community. Using established hagiographic paradigms, the Life constructs Christina as both a virgin martyr and a desert ascete. In addition, it sheds light on the complex relationship between “native” English religiosity (often constructed as eremitic) and the new Norman church.