St Catherine of Siena is one of the most important Roman Catholic saints. Living in the fourteenth century, Catherine showed devotion from an early age. She first had visions of Jesus Christ and the Evangelists in childhood and by the time she was a teenager a vision of St Dominic made her seek to join the Dominican Order. She was not permitted to join the Order by her father so instead joined a community of devout laywomen, where she learned to read and lived a life almost entirely in silence. At the age of 21, another vision of Christ led Catherine to leave her seclusion and begin to preach in public.

By the 1370s, she had gathered a small community of followers and travelled around Italy. She also dictated letters that contained her thoughts to scribes and were sent to important figures throughout Italy. She died in 1380 following a stroke likely brought on by her extreme fasting that had lasted for many years.

Following her death, miracles were quickly attributed to Catherine’s intercession and relics were taken from her body and deposited in churches across Italy. She was canonised in 1461. In 1970 she became one of the first women to be made a Doctor of the Church and in 1999 she was declared one of the patron saints of Europe.

This biography was published at Valencia in 1511. It is a Spanish translation of the Legenda Major, the biography of Catherine written by her confessor, Raymond of Capua, between 1384 and 1395.