__Discover the dyer's daughter from fourteenth-century Siena who counseled popes, brought the papacy home from Avignon, and left one of the great spiritual classics of the Christian tradition.__Catherine of Siena lived only thirty-three years, but in that span she rose from a small cell off her family's kitchen to become a Doctor of the Church, a counselor to popes and queens, and the author of one of the most widely read mystical works of the medieval tradition. The Wisdom of Catherine of Siena: The Inner Chamber of Self-Knowledge traces her life from the dyer's quarter of plague-stricken Siena to the antechamber of the pope at Avignon and her last months in Rome during the Western Schism. With patient care and contemplative prose, it opens for the modern reader the heart of her teaching: the cell of self-knowledge in which the soul learns to know itself in God.

Inside this book you will find:

• A vivid account of her childhood in fourteenth-century Siena, her vision at age six, and the years of seclusion that prepared her public ministry
• The architecture of her great metaphor of Christ as a bridge, with its three stairs corresponding to fear, gratitude, and perfect love
• Her doctrine of self-knowledge as the simultaneous recognition of nothingness in oneself and of being held in being by the love of God
• The story of her 1376 journey to Avignon and her role in bringing Pope Gregory XI back to Rome after sixty-eight years of absence
• Her final years amid the Western Schism, her letters to popes and kings, and her death in Rome at thirty-three
• A glossary of key terms gathering the central vocabulary of her spirituality and historical context

Written in clear contemplative prose for the educated general reader, The Wisdom of Catherine of Siena: The Inner Chamber of Self-Knowledge gives the figure of the Sienese mystic the careful attention she deserves. It is a companion for anyone who would walk, with one of the most distinctive of Christian teachers, the long road from the cell of self-knowledge into the deep sea of the eternal Trinity.