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The first English publication of the earliest surviving Christian sermons from the Americas

The Americas’ First Sermons presents the first English translation and critical study of the complete set of sermons composed by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and his Nahua students at the Imperial College of Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, Mexico in 1540. The volume represents a crucial moment in the cultural exchange between European and Indigenous civilizations in sixteenth-century colonial Mexico.

With the collaboration of Mario Alberto Sánchez Aguilera, this edition offers unprecedented access to the collaboration between European friars and Nahua scholars in translating Christian concepts into Native languages. It captures Sahagún’s evolving methods across three phases (1530s–1560s) through his extensive annotations, bridging the divide between his ethnographic and doctrinal works. Unique in its analysis of both text and manuscript features—such as rare maguey paper—it highlights Indigenous intellectual contributions at the Colegio de Santa Cruz. This translation provides essential insights into early colonial religious negotiations and makes previously inaccessible material available to scholars across multiple disciplines.

Based on his wide-ranging knowledge of late-medieval Latin sermons from England as well as his editorial experience with medieval Latin texts, Siegfried Wenzel offers critical editions of five instruction manuals on the "art of preaching" dating from 1230 to the fifteenth century. Four of the texts are edited and translated for the first time; the fifth is re-edited from all extant manuscripts. Each of the five sermons is accompanied by a facing-page translation into English. The book aims to stimulate interest and new research in a field that still awaits closer analysis of the relationships among existing treatises and of their historical development.

The Chigi Codex makes available for the first time a critical edition and comprehensive study of a late fifteenth-century anthology of sacred musical works.

Compiled between 1500 and 1504, The Chigi Codex contains the complete contents of an extraordinary illuminated manuscript, an anthology of forty polyphonic masses and motets associated with the royal courts of France and Burgundy. This edition includes nearly the complete oeuvre of Johannes Ockeghem, five motets by Johannes Regis, and compositions by Josquin des Prez, Henricus Isaac, Antoine Busnoys, Pierre de la Rue, Jean Mouton, Alexander Agricola, and others. Twelve works are unique to The Chigi Codex; seven motets were added by a Spanish scribe after 1515. The complete contents are presented here with transcriptions of the music accessible to musicians today, with a critical commentary on the music and concordant sources. The Codex transmits works that were copied in manuscripts and prints throughout Europe later in the sixteenth century.

In addition to its monumental repertory, The Chigi Codex includes notable works of visual art in the double-folio openings of thirty-six works with miniature paintings, coats of arms, inhabited capitals, family mottos, bizarre creatures, and colorful borders, all in the famed Ghent-Bruges style. Herbert Kellman discusses these as well as the history of the Codex and its long journey from its original patron, the Burgundian seigneur Philippe Bouton, to the Spanish families Folch de Cardona and Fernández de Córdoba, and finally to Rome and to the library of Fabio Chigi, Pope Alexander VII. The Chigi library is now an important part of the Vatican Library.  

Making the manuscript accessible to the public and musicians, this edition of The Chigi Codex supports the study, performance, and understanding of its music and art in the musical, cultural, and historical contexts of its creation.

This volume contains fifty-nine homilies preached by St. Jerome on selected Psalms.

This volume of the Homilies of Saint Jerome contains fifteen homilies on Saint Mark's Gospel, Homilies 75-84.

The Book of Mormon prophet Nephi describes the journey to eternal life as going through a gate of ordinances and traveling a “straight and narrow path.” Twenty-three authors took that gospel roadmap passage as a prompt to write “a Mormon story.” They responded with a surprisingly wide range of realistic and fantastic tales. Many are human reactions to unexpected steps on the path: a lifetime of faith in a patriarchal blessing’s unfulfilled promise, a survivor of violence calling a divided community to repentance, a baptism gone very wrong, and spiritual gifts that extend far beyond the apostle Paul’s list. The characters stretch from wayward bishops and helpful home teachers to cyber-­Seventies searching for lost sheep in the metaverse, with settings from the slums of Mumbai to a heaven that turns out to be more difficult than expected. Some characters reject the path’s restrictions and expectations, while others can second the reported words of J. Golden Kimball, “I may not always walk the straight and narrow, but I sure in hell try to cross it as often as I can.”

This book presents for the first time in English the fully documented history of the Gregorian chant restoration which culminated in the publication of the Vatican Edition ordered by Pope Pius X at the dawn of the twentieth century. It is based upon archival documents in the Abbey of St. Pierre de Solesmes.

The Sacred Harp is the most famous of the shape-note hymnals, a collection of over five hundred four-part a cappella hymns dating back over a hundred and fifty years. Shape-note singing itself is seeing a resurgence in popularity with sings being organized all over the country. And yet, George Pullen Jackson's groundbreaking history of the first hundred years of the hymnal has been out of print and hard to come by for decades. But now, The Story of the Sacred Harp, 1844-1944 is back in print and available for music lovers, historians, and librarians alike.

Written in the 1890s, Leon Bloy's masterful novel has had an immeasurable effect on all European Catholic writing since. (Bloy was responsible for the conversion of Jacques and Räissa Maritain in 1905, and they referred to him as their godfather.) It is an extraordinary book, powerful in the manner of dos Passos, and yet spiritual in the manner of the Bible. 
         
It is the story of a woman who is abysmally poor, brutally treated and exploited by her parents, living in the gutters of Paris, yet she retains the spiritual outlook and purity of a saint. We are spared no brutality, yet there are scenes of the most tender beauty.

The woman, Clotilde, becomes an artist's model, meeting all the great French writers, among them the gloomy and magnificent Marchenoir, who is Bloy himself. They are all impressed by the depth of her thoughts and feelings; she finally marries one of them. They are pitifully poor, and the pages that cover the birth and death of their child shock with horror while moving the reader in their tragic beauty and tenderness––for this is Bloy, always hovering between death and ecstasy. Left a widow, Clotilda finds her true vocation, a vocation of poverty. She is the woman who is poor, no other words describe her more accurately. The novel ends with those famous words of extraordinary optimism: "There is only one misery…not to be saints."