The Road to Siena: The Essential Biography of St. Catherine - Hardcover

Edmund G. Gardner's work on Catherine of Siena was groundbreaking in its day, and is still one of the most important biographies ever written of a medieval saint. He was the professor of Italian at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and wrote many books over a long career on Dante, English mystics, the cities of Florence and Siena, Arthurian legends, and Italian Renaissance painters.

“The Road to Siena is a fairly brief-but-concentrated book illustrating a rather brief-but-concentrated life. Our instincts to distrust Catherine’s visions as delusions and her hearty exhortations as mania are natural, but repeatedly Gardner manages to put them down in turn, and all of our modern understanding must be humbled a bit when we read that the invisible stigmata Catherine claimed in her life became manifest and quite visible upon her death, even if her mystical wedding ring did not. Taken together, the book brings the reader into close contact with Catherine’s flame; one feels the heat that singed the consciences of popes and monarchs alike.”
—Elizabeth Scalia, Benedictine Oblate, author of the award-winning Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols in Everyday Life, and Word on Fire Editor-at-Large

“[This is] the story of the life and times of one of the most treasured saints of Italy, Catherine of Siena. A bold woman who stood up for the people while speaking out against the queen with honesty, her life is covered with much depth to help readers gain a feel for who the woman truly was.” 
—Midwest Book Review, “Reviewer’s Choice”