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  • The Letters of Catherine of Siena
  • Jane Tylus
The Letters of Catherine of Siena. Translated with introduction and notes by Suzanne Noffke, O.P. 4 vols. [Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, Vols. 202, 203, 329, 355.] (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Arizona State University. 2000 [2nd ed.], 2001, 2007, 2008. Vol. I: Pp. lxi, 601, $50.00, ISBN 978-0-866-98244-3; Vol. II: Pp. xxii, 808, $60.00, ISBN 978-0-866-98245-0; Vol. III: Pp. xviii, 428, $55.00, ISBN 978-0-866-98377-8;Vol. IV: Pp. xx, 474, $65.00, ISBN 078-0-866-98403-4.)

With this remarkable project now at an end, Suzanne Noffke has fully launched St. Catherine of Siena into the English-speaking world, as the letters join Noffke's earlier translations of Catherine's works (The Dialogue, New York, 1980; The Prayers, New York, 1983).This four-volume, annotated translation is more than a translation. A collaborative effort launched three decades ago by an extraordinary group of Dominican nuns, it is the first complete modern edition in any language that places Catherine's almost 400 letters in chronological order. It thus offers readers their first opportunity to see the growth and development of not only Catherine's theology but also her writing—a writing rich in memorable images, local expressions, and common sense. The earliest letters are from roughly 1370, the last from 1380. These were the years of Catherine's active ministry as she addressed herself to kings, queens, two popes, painters and prostitutes, her mother and brothers, and the members of her extended famiglia—disciples eager to have Catherine's words as she traveled to Avignon, Pisa, Florence, and finally, the Rome she helped re-establish as the center of Catholicism.

The fact that fewer than 10 percent of Catherine's letters are identified by date or internal historical evidence made this a challenging project from the start. Even fewer letters are autographs—a mere eight. Countless were probably lost; at one point, her scribes berate themselves for not keeping a copy of a letter sent to King Edward III of England, and one can only wonder about other missed opportunities to know more about Catherine's life and times. The earliest manuscripts of Catherine's letters, painstakingly assembled by disciples in Venice and elsewhere, were organized according to correspondent and gender: popes and male religious like Catherine's confessor, Raymond of Capua, came first, the laity last. This has largely been the norm ever since—at least until Eugenio Dupré Theseider began his monumental project in the 1920s to order the letters chronologically. Supported by the Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, Theseider managed to complete only the first volume of eighty-eight letters. He died in 1975, leaving behind what [End Page 797] Noffke calls "mountains of uncompleted research in note form for the remainder of the project" (I: xxxviii).

Noffke used those notes for her English edition, and when she began this project in the 1980s, she faithfully followed the order Theseider had envisioned. Yet soon after she published volume I of her translation in 1988 (reviewed by Karen Scott in ante, 76 [1990], 360-61), she largely jettisoned Theseider's strategies for dating. More than a decade went into articulating a new methodology for reconstructing Catherine's life through the letters, and she explains her rationale in the introduction to the second edition of volume I. Fascinated by what she saw as linguistic patterns—she would eventually identify some 3000 of them—she set out to organize the letters according to shared clusters of those patterns. The first letter in Theseider's volume is no. 30, to the abbess of the Monastery of Santa Marta in Siena. Noffke dates it to May 1374, largely because it shares a number of expressions with a letter written earlier that year; it also echoes some five letters placed as late as 1376. At the same time, she modestly insists that hers is a "`relative' chronology" (I: xlvii). She divides the volumes into the stages of Catherine's career, such as her six months in the Val d'Orcia or...

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