Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 August 2024
I remember a secular priest, in the course of a retreat at Oxford a good many years ago, politely chiding us Dominicans for not making more of St Catherine of Siena. The rebuke was, and is, worth attending to. St Catherine is always rated among the greatest figures in Dominican history, and there are those who would place her among the greatest women of all time. Yet it is now eighty years since the first, and last, really solid work on her life and teaching by an English Dominican—a nun, as it happened—appeared: the massive biography by Augusta Theodosia Drane, a very good work for its time and one unduly neglected. Since then there have been four books in English worth mentioning here: the two ‘Lives’ by Edmund Gardner and Alice Curtayne, the translation of the Dialogue by Algar Thorold, and vida Scudder's version of a selection of the Letters.
1 The Book of Catholic Authors, ed. by W. Romig, p. 128.
2 Alvaro Grion, o.p., Santa Caterina da Siena: Dottrina e Fonti. Brescia, Morcelliana, 1953.
3 Only vol. I, containing 88 letters, has so far appeared: Rome, 1940.
4 A good example is in Dialogo, c. 136.
5 See Life of the Spirit, April 1961, p. 439.
6 Orazioni, v, ed. Gigli, IV, p. 343.
7 Dialogo, c. 92.
8 Summa theol. 2a 2ae. 157.
9 Ia. 39. 7-8.
10 For this point I depend on Grion, op. cit. PP. 24, 25, 37. 44.
11 Oraz. XVII, ed. Gigli. p. 359.
12 Oraz. x, ed. Gigli, pp. 350-1; Dialogo, c. 53.
13 Epist. II, 16, ed. Misciatelli.
14 Dialogo, cc. 21, 26, 54-64. See the valuable synthesis in Grion, op. cit., pp. 104-35.
15 Epist. IV, 273, ed. Misciatelli; I, 31, ed. Duprè Theseider.
16 Dialogo, c. 75.