In September 1947, after reading C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters in Italian, Fr. (now St.) Giovanni Calabria was moved to write the author, but he knew no English and assumed (rightly) that Lewis knew no Italian. So he wrote his letter in Latin, hoping that, as a classicist, Lewis would know Latin. Therein began a correspondence that was to outlive Fr. Calabria himself (he died in December 1954, and was succeeded in correspondence by Fr. Luigi Pedrollo, which continued until Lewis's own death in 1963).

Translator/editor Martin Moynihan calls these letters "limpid, fluent and deeply refreshing. There was a charm about them, too, and not least in the way they were 'topped and tailed' -- that is, in their ever-slightly-varied formalities of address and of farewell."

More than any other of his published works The Latin Letters shows the strong devotional side of Lewis, and contains letters ranging from Christian unity and modern European history to liturgical worship and general ethical behavior.

This new edition is greatly enhanced by a new foreword from the eminent Lewis Scholar, Mark A. Noll, from the University of Notre Dame.