The Letters of Catherine of Siena

Most of these letters were spoken, not written. Catherine Benincasa, a dyer's daughter from Siena, dictated them in Tuscan to young disciples — Neri di Landoccio Pagliaresi, Stefano Maconi, Barduccio Canigiani among them — and the claim she pressed on nearly every reader was the same: nobody knows themselves until they see how much they have been given by God, and a love of God that does nothing for a neighbour is not love. Her readers ranged from a Florentine tailor's wife to the English mercenary John Hawkwood, whom she urged to stop making war on Christians, and Gregory XI at Avignon, whom she called babbo, the Tuscan word for daddy. To the pope the same claim became a programme: come back to Rome, win rebellious Florence with mercy rather than armies, and clear out the prelates who bought their promotions and lived for luxury. Her mission to Avignon on Florence's behalf failed; Gregory reached Rome in January 1377 all the same. About 380 letters survive, gathered by the disciples after her death in 1380, and scholars still disagree over how far the secretaries shaped her wording. Aldus Manutius printed 368 of them in Venice in 1500, and the woodcut of Catherine in that volume carries the first words ever set in italic type: the sweet-Jesus, Jesus-love formula with which she closed her letters. In 1717 the Sienese scholar Girolamo Gigli built a dictionary on her prose to prove Siena's Italian the equal of Florence's; it was banned and burned, and the Accademia della Crusca expelled him. A critical edition begun in 1940 stopped after 88 letters, and a new one is under way in Rome.