FOREWORD

TO THE SIXTH EDITION

Thirty-five years have passed since the death of Ernest Hello; and the fame he was able to secure for the little book of Blessed Angela of Foligno remains so enduring that a new edition of it has become necessary.
Ernest Hello (1828–1885) was a French Catholic writer and philosopher. His translation of Angela of Foligno, first published in 1868, is credited with modernizing her medieval prose for a 19th-century audience.
Angela of Foligno (c. 1248–1309) was an Italian mystic and member of the Secular Franciscan Order. She is known for her intense spiritual experiences and her "Book of Visions and Instructions."

In the sublime regions where the text of Blessed Angela led him, Hello as a translator was not in unfamiliar territory; to be faithful to his author’s thought, he had to take flight, but was Hello’s intellectual life ever anything other than a dizzying ascent toward the infinite?

Everything we know about Angela is contained within the prologues of Brother Arnaud and the personal revelations of the Blessed herself. The biographers who, in 1909, on the occasion of her sixth centenaryThe 600th anniversary of her death in 1309., attempted to speak of her, were unable to do more than comment on these meager details, just as...
Brother Arnaud was a Franciscan friar and Angela’s relative and confessor. He acted as her scribe, translating her spoken Umbrian dialect into the Latin text known as the "Memoriale."