This book is the proceedings of a conference held in Rome in December 2021. As Silvia Nocentini notes in her preface, it is the product of a renewed interest in recent years in the linguistic and textual aspects of Catherine of Siena’s writings, a surge in research in which younger Italian scholars have played a significant role. A first phase was focused on Catherine’s letters and was connected broadly to the long overdue project of a complete critical edition of Catherine’s epistolario, the first volume of which was published by the Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medioevo in 2023. This book represents a second phase, focused on Catherine’s book, the Libro di divina dottrina or Dialogo, which is now also receiving a critical edition. Giuliana Cavallini’s 1968 edition of the Dialogo (revised in 1985) provided a standard text that readers of the letters lacked, but it is not a critical edition. Recent scholarship, including Nocentini’s research on the Latin translations of the Dialogo and their role in the textual history of the work, has made clear the urgent need for a reliable critical edition of the original Italian text—a need that is in the process of being met by Noemi Pigini, who is represented by an essay in this volume.
This volume includes eleven essays, written in Italian, French, and Spanish, and divided into three sections: “Il Testo,” “Le Traduzioni e le Tradizioni,” and “Il Contenuto.” As was true with many of the scholarly interventions occasioned by the revival of interest in Catherine’s letters, several essays in this volume demonstrate how close attention to linguistic and textual questions, including questions of textual transmission, can produce broader insights into the understanding of Catherine as an author. All the essays make the case for a renewed appreciation of the Dialogo as central to Catherine’s oeuvre.
Claudio Lagomarsini’s “L’ Orchestrazione della prosa nel Dialogo di Caterina da Siena” (3-19), the first essay of the section on the text of the Dialogo, is an example of how technical analysis can suggest broader insights. He focuses on the elements of narrative discourse, syntax, and argumentative structure of Catherine’s prose. While Catherine’s writings generally lack narrative, he notes that in the Dialogo the text is held together by a narrative introduced at the beginning of the text: the story of the soul raising itself to turn to God, through the soul’s experience of anxiety, desire, suffering, illumination, and gratitude. He remarks at the repetition in Catherine’s prose of the simple temporal connector allora (then), which she uses at the opening of chapters to mark transitions and to alternate between the actions of God and of the soul. Lagomarsini reads this repetitive structure not as a mark of Catherine’s lack of craft, but as an intentional strategy to stress how in a revelation like the one represented in the Dialogo “the dimension of time can expand or contract in ways that are completely different from common experience” (7). He describes how Catherine’s sentence structure reveals aspects of her thought and notes how at the level of argumentative discourse the Dialogo reveals the influence of the sermo modernus and vernacular preaching. He observes in conclusion how the orchestration of the text suggests that Catherine imagined her audience would hear the text read aloud, rather than read it silently, and notes that the forthcoming critical edition will open a window into the way syntactic and discursive structures designed for oral reception were reshaped during textual transmission.
In “L’Edizione critica del Dialogo della Divina Provvidenza,” Noemi Pigini summarizes her findings so far in her research on the critical edition of the Dialogo. She begins by noting the limitations of the twentieth-century editions of the Dialogo by Fiorelli in 1912, Taurisano in 1928, and Cavallini in 1968/1995. All were based on a single manuscript chosen for extra-textual reasons, or on a single manuscript with limited attention to variants; all lacked the kind of systematic study of the manuscripts necessary for textual classification and for understanding the dynamics of the manuscripts’ circulation. Pigini also emphasizes that the Biblioteca Casanatense MS chosen by Taurisano and Cavallini as their base text because of its age and connection to Catherine’s follower and scribe Barduccio Canigiani has been shown to be unreliable. Pigini makes some interesting general observations about the manuscript tradition: for example, the fact that there is a higher rate of variation in the later sections of the Dialogo than in the early chapters is evidence that the early parts of the work circulated among Catherine’s followers before the book was completed. Based on her complete collation of the surviving 28 vernacular manuscripts she proposes a new stemma with three major families, and she gives examples of the kinds of editorial interventions made by copyists, particularly in the largest of the three families. Pigini finds that copyists respected Catherine’s authority and made only minor changes of syntax and word order to make Catherine’s highly rhetorical and dense text more readable. Pigini notes in conclusion that even this partial summary of the textual tradition suggests ways in which the critical edition will “allow for a greater understanding of the dynamics of circulation” and help “frame the work of Caterina da Siena within the broader context of Italian literary history” (52).
Francesco Santi’s essay, “La Bibbia di Caterina da Siena,” is less about Catherine’s use of the Bible than about how Catherine, in response to what Santi argues was the marginalization of the Bible in fourteenth-century theology and preaching, adopted for herself the authority of a scriptural author. Catherine saw her own words as approved by God and therefore in continuity with scripture, a position that is endorsed by God the Father in the Dialogo when He explains to the soul that post-biblical doctors, virgins, and martyrs are all inspired by the same light of grace as the evangelists. Catherine does not just cite biblical passages in the Dialogo. She imitates St. Paul’s reformulation of passages from the Old Testament in light of the coming of Christ by adapting Biblical language by giving it new meaning in new contexts and according to her rhetorical needs. Santi illustrates his argument by focusing on Catherine’s adaptation of the Bible in key passages in the Dialogo. Attached to the essay is an appendix compiled by Elena Berti of scriptural passages cited by Catherine in the Dialago.
In the last essay in the first section, “La teologia della croce di Caterina da Siena” (85-110), Alessandra Bartolomei Romagnoli examines Catherine’s violent language of sacrifice through the interpretive framework of René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and scapegoat violence, and also in the context of shifting approaches to the idea of crucifixion as sacrifice during the Middle Ages. Catherine’s possibly off-putting language must be understood in the context of specific currents in late-medieval Christianity, especially the way female mystic saints offered examples of internalized sacrifice and the transformation of the logic of expiation through an emphasis on divine mercy. Bartolomei Romagnoli argues that the Dialogo fits into this tradition, in which the cross is “not only a site of punishment and expiation...it is also the supreme revelation of the mercy of God” (107).
The second section begins with Sylvia Nocentini’s “Le traduzioni latine del Dialogo di Caterina da Siena,” on the Latin translations produced between 1385 and 1419 by central figures in Catherine’s circle. Nocentini relates the move to translate Catherine’s book into Latin to the growing awareness among Catherine’s followers that the vernacular character of her text was limiting its dissemination and impeding the cause of her canonization, a fact that was made clear by the role played by Birgitta of Sweden’s Revelations—a work that circulated in Latin—in Birgitta’s canonization in 1391. Nocentini makes the important observation that writing was not part of Catherine’s reputation for sanctity during her life. But it is an important theme in Raymond of Capua’s Legenda maior, in which Raymond included excerpts from his own partial translation of the Dialogo into Latin. Raymond thereby made the Dialogo central to the case for Catherine’s sanctity and tied Catherine’s reputation as a saint to her authorship.Catherine’s subsequent persona as an author is thus linked to the movement for her canonization and to the translations of her book into Latin.
In “La Patrona d’Italia fuori dall’Italia: La diffusione del Dialogo nell’Inghilterra medieval,” Nicola Estrafallaces describes the Catherinian literature that moved to England and Catherine’s influence on English religious literature. English translation of the Dialogo, The Orcherd of Syon, was based on the Latin version by Catherine’s follower Cristofano di Gano Guidini and was intended for the Bridgettine nuns of Syon Abbey, one of the most prestigious monastic foundations in fifteenth-century England. While it is usual to note the structural novelties of the Orcherd, Estrafallaces argues it was a faithful translation that even followed the chapter structure in Guidini’s version. He concludes that since English translations of continental mystical texts often modified them to the extent that they are almost unrecognizable, the Orcherd of Syon’s unusually fidelity to the Latin original should be considered was a mark of the esteem for Catherine in medieval England.
Pablo Acosta-García’s “La difusión de la obra de Caterina da Siena en la Península Ibérica: El case de El Diálogo”introduces recent research on the dissemination of Catherine’s work in the Iberian Peninsula in the later Middle Ages and Early Modern period. Acosta-García argues that the lack of evidence of Catherine’s Dialogo in the peninsula before 1668, the publication date of the earliest known Castilian translation, may be an effect of the dispersal and sometimes destruction of ecclesiastical libraries following the desamortización of 1834. The works of other continental mystics circulated in the peninsula, and Catherine herself was well known through hagiographical texts, so one would expect her writings also to have been read there. Important recent discoveries—for example, a 1546 Valencian translation of the Dialogo—adds to other evidence of the dissemination of the Dialogo in late-medieval Iberia.
In “La source textuelle de la première traduction française du Dialogue de Catherine de Sienne,” Piotr Tylus examines the translation produced by the Paris Dominicans in 1580 and compares it to six Italian editions that could have been its source. From this study he concludes that the source for the first French translation was likely the 1540 edition published in Venice by Marchio Sessa. In a parallel to Estrafallaces’ conclusion about the English translation, Tylus draws attention to the unusual fidelity to the original in the French version as a response to the text’s character as divine speech and to Catherine’s popularity.
The final section includes three essays on the theology of the Dialogo. In “La théologie de l’Église à l’oeuvre dans le Dialogue de Catherine de Sienne.” Alexandra Diriart explores what she argues was a coherent and profound ecclesiology in the Dialogo. Diriart emphasizes as a dominant theme in Catherine’s ecclesiology the tension between her profound belief in the Church’s holiness and an equally deep awareness of the sins of its members—especially the sins of the clergy. In this way Catherine provides a lasting model for how to both maintain faith in the holiness of the Church and criticize its sins.
In “Le Dialogue, pièce maîtresse de la proclamation de Catherine de Sienne comme Docteure de l’Église” (201-218), Clarisse Tesson examines the crucial role of the Dialogo in the declaration of Catherine as a Doctor of the Church in 1970. An increased scholarly interest in Catherine in the twentieth century and research on her theological sources by scholars like Alvaro Grion and Giacinto d’Urso provided essential background for Catherine’s new title, but a turning point in the process was Giuliana Cavallini’s 1968 edition, which provided Catherine with a necessary theological opus—in effect, her version of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. Tesson then describes the use made of the Dialogo by the Dominicans in the positio prepared for Rome. She concludes by noting the relevance of Catherine and her book as a model of authentic dialogue in the period after Vatican II.
In the final essay, “Il contributo di Innocenzo Colosio OP agli studi Cateriniani in Italia” (219-249), Gianni Festa emphasizes the important role Colosio played in twentieth-century Dominican scholarship and in the study of the medieval and early modern spirituality. Colosio published several essays on Catherine’s Dialogo, and it figured significantly in the staunchly neo-Thomist and anti-modernist tendency of his thought. Festa emphasizes the robustness of Colosio’s neo-Thomist reading of Catherine, which stressed the purely theological character of Catherine’s thought against what he saw as a tendency to reduce her to historical circumstances. Festa acknowledges the limitations of Colosio’s approach but argues that his interpretation of Catherine remains a compelling assessment of Catherine’s theological contribution in the Dialogo.