Setting the World on Fire: The Brief, Astonishing Life of St. Catherine of Siena

"Emling . . . handles her subject tenderly and respectfully, in the process breathing new life into a remarkable figure." —Austen Ivereigh, author, The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope

One of only two patron saints of Italy, the other being St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine was ahead of her time. As a political powerhouse in late fourteenth-century Europe, a time of war, social unrest and one of the worst natural disasters of all time—the plague, she worked for pe...