Catherine of Siena's literary output was considerably more extensive than that of Paul of Tarsus and decidedly less influential (whose is not?), but it shares with his some fundamental characteristics, derived in large part from their mutual orality. Like Paul's, Catherine's thought derives its coherence from a solid core of concerns and convictions to which she returns obsessively. And like Paul, she articulates her convictions in vivid language that caroms like a deaf bat through a forest of habitual images. Thus, early in the first surviving letter she addressed to Raymond of Capua, Catherine exclaims, “Son, I see no other way of our attaining the most basic virtues we need. No, dearest father, your soul could not attain them—this soul of yours that has become my food. Not a moment passes that I am not eating this food at the table of the gentle Lamb who was slain in such blazing love. I am saying that unless you are drowned in the blood you will not attain the little virtue of true humility, which is born from hatred as hatred is from love, and so come forth in the most perfect purity as iron comes out purified from the furnace. So I want you to shut yourself up in the open side of God's Son, that open hostelry so full of fragrance that sin itself is made fragrant. There the dear bride rests in the bed of fire and blood. There she sees revealed the secret of the heart of God's Son” (The Letters of St. Catherine of Siena, vol. 1, trans. Suzanne Noffke [Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1988], 108–109). In considering the corpus of someone like Catherine, who lived in defiance of social norms and spewed her thoughts in a breathless gush of words, Grazia Mangano Ragazzi's decision to focus on discretion and prudence might well seem a puzzling choice.

In the first part of this short book, Mangano Ragazzi rehashes the question of whether Catherine can be considered the author of the works she dictated to her scribes. She makes no mention of Jane Tylus's recent Reclaiming Catherine of Siena: Literacy, Literature, and the Signs of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009), which is by far the most sophisticated and insightful discussion of literacy and orality in Catherine's epistolary production, or of the interpretive issues raised there. Rather, she simply follows earlier scholars in declaring that, despite some minor editorial interventions, Catherine's letters and Dialogue can be considered authentically hers. It is not clear what purpose is served by this extensive summary of an older body of scholarship, to which Mangano Ragazzi contributes nothing new. One short paragraph would have sufficed.

In the second part, Mangano Ragazzi surveys exhaustively Catherine's usage of discretion and its synonym prudence, quoting or paraphrasing each instance in which these terms appear in her writings. As she herself admits, “In carrying out this task, annoying repetitions could not be avoided” (102). The results are hardly revelatory. Catherine, she concludes, conceives of discretion as “a judicious rule of conduct in the moral and spiritual life: it not only brings man to know what he should render to God, to himself, and to others but also shows him the right way to do so and compels him to accomplish it concretely through virtuous action” (77)—a stock definition, articulated in standard phrases. Mangano Ragazzi then turns, in the third part, to a survey of the treatment of discretion in Christian theologians from Augustine, Ambrose, John Cassian, Benedict of Nursia, and Gregory the Great to Richard of St. Victor and Thomas Aquinas. Of course, as she admits, Catherine did not read Latin, so she could not have had direct knowledge of any of this tradition. Nor, she argues, did the works of Catherine's contemporaries, from the great popularizer Domenico Cavalca to the visionary Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine's own spiritual adviser Raymond of Capua, contribute anything significant to Catherine's teachings on discretion, which are in such perfect harmony with this theological tradition.

This leads Mangano Ragazzi to a conclusion familiar from hagiographical treatments of medieval holy women: if this uneducated woman could articulate theological truths in harmony with the teachings of the most authoritative scholars, it must be because she was truly an inspired mystic. The harmony between Catherine and Aquinas reveals “a unique spiritual affinity between the two saints. It is an affinity whose roots are deeply planted in the ‘first sweet Truth’ that shaped each of them, and in which the mind of Catherine—like the mind of ‘glorious Thomas'—reflected upon itself and derived an entirely luminous and sure teaching: the doctrine of the Truth” (150). “Catherine's mysticism,” Mangano Ragazzi avers, “is a profound and personal understanding of revealed truths, which expresses itself in a language that shows how deeply rooted the saint's reflections are in a solid doctrinal framework” (170). And we know that Catherine's doctrinal framework is solid because it accords with the “rigorous lesson by the Servant of God Father Tomas Tyn, OP,” the warnings of His Eminence Carlo Cardinal Caffarra, Archbishop of Bologna, about “the lack of this connection between truth and freedom that is at the origin of today's spiritual crisis,” and the “fundamental and universal theme . . . reaffirmed by the Synod of Bishops in 1991” which is “valid in all places and at all times” (189).

In short, this is not a work of history. It offers no fresh insight into the spiritual life of the fourteenth century or the writings of Catherine of Siena. It is a work of partisan theology, a strenuous effort to claim Catherine for a particular ideological current within the Catholic Church. One can only hope that Catherine will manage to escape this clammy embrace, as she did—barely—that of Mussolini's Fascist regime.