Selected Letters of Catherine of Siena
Lettere
Catalogue updated 2026-06-08
Full Sub Rosa translationRead the full translationOpen reader →Open the chapter reader with the full English translation, source text, notes, and scripture echoes.What is Selected Letters of Catherine of Siena?
Dictated during the 1370s, Catherine of Siena’s letters turn the formulas of Tuscan correspondence into forceful spiritual direction. This reader presents ten complete letters from the Tommaseo text reissued by Piero Misciattelli in 1922, chiefly to her mother Lapa, her brothers, and other private recipients.
Al nome di Gesù Cristo crocifisso e di Maria dolce.
Our renderingIn the name of Jesus Christ crucified and of sweet Mary.
What it is
Dictated during the 1370s, Catherine of Siena’s letters turn the formulas of Tuscan correspondence into forceful spiritual direction. This reader presents ten complete letters from the Tommaseo text reissued by Piero Misciattelli in 1922, chiefly to her mother Lapa, her brothers, and other private recipients. Their counsel on self-knowledge, patience, family duty, and conversion is domestic in occasion but continuous with the voice that admonished popes and rulers. The wider corpus contains 382 letters conventionally dated 1370–1380, including letters to Joanna I of Naples and Charles V of France. Those documented addressees justify the Anjou-Naples and Valois labels for the corpus, but neither monarch appears among these ten selections, and the connection does not imply patronage. Catherine dictated the letters to secretaries; no autograph corpus survives, and later manuscript collections passed through copyists and differing editorial arrangements. Scholarship nevertheless regards the collection as substantially authentic while allowing for the verbal variation inherent in dictation and transmission.
Why it still matters
These letters show spiritual counsel operating inside ordinary family tensions as well as public crises. Christian readers may find Catherine’s union of self-knowledge, patience, and fearless moral speech especially bracing.
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Kept alongside
The Imitation of Christ
De Imitatione Christi
Written by Thomas à Kempis in the Netherlands in the circle of the Brethren of the Common Life — the same Devotio Moderna movement that directly shaped Margaret of York's documented devotional practice and the piety of Isabella of Portugal at the Burgundian court — the Imitation became the most copied vernacular religious text in 15th-century Europe, circulating in thousands of manuscripts and hundreds of early printed editions. Its four books move from the vanity of worldly learning through conformity to Christ, inward consolation, and finally the sacrament of the Eucharist, forming a complete program of interior conversion. No specific ducal inventory copy has been identified linking this text to Valois-Burgundy by name, but its presence in court circles of this era and region is established through movement history rather than document. It remains the second most widely read Christian book after the Bible.
Laude: Selected Spiritual Poems
Laude
This reader presents fifteen complete Umbrian laude selected from Jacopone da Todi’s much larger vernacular corpus. The poems arose across the later thirteenth and opening years of the fourteenth century within the performative culture of lay confraternities and Franciscan preaching. Their range is deliberately volatile: ecstatic love breaks into song, Lady Poverty overturns worldly lordship, the Passion becomes dramatic lament, and holy folly exposes respectable prudence. Other pieces attack ecclesiastical corruption or register Jacopone’s support for the Spiritual Franciscans and the Colonna against Boniface VIII, a conflict that led to his excommunication and imprisonment. Attribution must remain collection-specific: roughly ninety laude are generally accepted as his, while additional poems are disputed. This selection follows Giovanni Ferri’s 1910 edition, itself based on the Florentine printing of 1490, rather than claiming to reproduce a complete modern critical corpus. The Anjou-Naples label is contextual only: Jacopone worked in Umbria and papal politics, not at the Angevin court, and no commission, ownership, recipient, or patronage link to that dynasty is documented.
Obsecro te (I Beseech You)
The Obsecro te ('I beseech you') is one of the two universal private Marian prayers found in virtually every medieval Book of Hours produced for noble or royal women across western Europe, making it the single most widely owned personal Marian prayer of the entire period. The feminine grammatical forms in the prayer allowed scribes to identify the manuscript's female patron, and its opening illumination almost invariably depicted that woman kneeling in intimate address before the Virgin and Child, personalizing the prayer to a degree no other devotional text achieved. This direct invocation of Mary—citing her joy at the Annunciation, her grief at the Crucifixion, and her power of intercession at the hour of death—gave it a comprehensiveness that made it the first prayer many noble women turned to in private devotion. It is documented in the Books of Hours of Anne of Brittany, Catherine of Cleves, and Isabella Stuart, among many hundreds of other surviving manuscripts.