Jacobus de Voragine: The Golden Legend, 2 vols.

Why should anyone want to read the Golden Legend today? Apart from the sheer charm of the stories (along with a whole panoply of miracles that even Jacobus had trouble narrating with a straight face), there is a simple scholarly answer to the question: The Legenda Aurea was an encyclopedic sourcebook which subsequent authors and artists drew upon for inspiration and iconographical details as they chronicled/depicted the lives of the saints. Much of the standard symbolism that we find today, for example, in the stained glass windows of our churches, comes to us mediated through a long tradition that flows from the compilation made by Jacobus in the thirteenth century. With fewer students of literature and art history studying Latin, one foresees that these two volumes will be constantly used in reference libraries. For that reason alone, we are grateful to the translator and to Princeton University Press for making these books available.

Jacobus divides his work according to the liturgical calendar (i.e., he begins with the Advent season) and utilizes a catalogue of saints that would have been commemorated during the celebration of the sanctoral cycle. This is not a book, I suspect, that will be read through (at least, I was not tempted to do so), but it is a browser's paradise. I much enjoyed Jacobus's extravagantly wrongheaded etymologies of names, his earnest detailing of miracles, the oddball stories of mistaken sexual identities (the monk Theodore who was, in fact, Theodora), saintly wrestling matches with demons, long excursions that give background to familiar iconographical themes (Catherine's wheel; Barbara's tower), and frustrated executioners who stab, burn, strike, and boil without effect. Since Jacobus also comments on feasts in the temporal cycle, it is interesting to read how he fleshes out details of the Nativity story (e.g., about the Magi) or the Passion (e.g., on the final fate of Pilate) which he draws from chronicles available to him at the time.

Given the cost of these volumes (perhaps a more affordable paperback version is to come; it would be desirable), few, beyond professionals, will be tempted to purchase the set. Nonetheless, these books belong in any decent reference library that pretends to comprehensiveness in cultural history in general and church history in particular.

There is nothing "hagiographical" about the life of a modern Carmelite nun whose letters have just been published. Her life cuts too close to the horrific side of human experience. Edith Stein (1891-1942), a student of Edmund Husserl, left a promising career as a philosopher to become a Catholic. After teaching in Catholic schools and pedagogical institutes, she entered the Carmelite cloister in Cologne, Germany, only to be transferred to another Carmel in Echt (Holland) because of Germany's racial laws. In August