CATHERINE of Siena.
Dialogo della serafica vergine, et sposa di Christo S. Catherina da Siena. Diviso in quattro trattati … Et un breve compendio della sua vita, & canonizatione … Et nel fine se narra il suo felice transito. Venice, Giacomo Cornetti, 1589.
Small 8vo, pp. [32], 652, [4, colophon and blanks]; woodcut printer’s device to title, initials, head-pieces; small worm tracks to title (not touching text), paper flaw to lower blank margin of pp. 239–240, quire S very browned, occasional light foxing; overall a good copy in seventeenth-century vellum, two nineteenth-century labels pasted to spine; ties wanting, a few marks, upper hinge split; early ink inscription at foot of title.
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Dialogo della serafica vergine, et sposa di Christo S. Catherina da Siena. Diviso in quattro trattati … Et un breve compendio della sua vita, & canonizatione … Et nel fine se narra il suo felice transito.
An uncommon edition of Saint Catherine of Siena’s famous Dialogo, thought to have been composed between 1377 and 1378, and to have been largely dictated by the saint while she was in a state of ecstasy.
The Dialogo is here divided into four parts, on discretion, prayer, divine providence, and obedience. ‘In all her writings, the central theme is that of Christ crucified, and in particular the thought of His blood, which Catherine saw as the supreme sign and pledge of divine love and the chief motive for ours’ (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church).
The Dialogo was first printed, also in Venice, in 1494, although the text here follows Domenico Farri’s edition of 1579. The prefatory matter contains a short biography and details of her canonisation by Pius II. The title-page bears the attractive rose device of the Venetian printer Giacomo Cornetti, with the legend ‘Dabo omnibus gratum odorem’.
EDIT16 CNCE 10276; USTC 819721. Only one copy traced in the UK (Bodley) and three in North America (California State, Stanford, Fisher).