In his role of apostle of the English and promoter of Augustine's mission, Gregory the Great became the subject of what is one of the earliest pieces of literature surviving from the Anglo-Saxon period: a Life written by an unknown author at Whitby around 680 704. Although crude in its latinity and idiosyncratic in its presentation, this work is a fascinating source of early traditions about the conversion of the English - including the famous story of Gregory's encounter with the Anglian slave boys - and an important witness to the veneration felt for the saint himself. It casts valuable...

These two complementary lives of Cuthbert illuminate both the secular history of the golden age of Northumbria and the historic shift from Celtic to Roman ecclesiastical practice which took place after the Synod of Whitby. Cuthbert was very much in the Irish monastic tradition. He adopted Roman usages, becoming prior and eventually bishop of Lindisfarne, but the essential nature of his commitment changed little and he lived for much of his later life as a hermit on the island of Farne, with the birds as his only companions. The two lives make an interesting contrast: the earlier, anonymous...

Written around 730 740 the Life of Guthlac by the monk Felix is an important and colourful source for the obscure early history of East Anglia and the Fens. It describes how the youthful Guthlac (674 714) won fame at the head of a Mercian warrior band fighting the British on the borders of Wales before entering the monastery at Repton at the age of twenty-four. Distinguished from the first by his piety and asceticism, Guthlac moved on around 700 to a solitary life on Crowland, an uninhabited island accessible only by boat deep in the wild and desolate marshland separating Mercia and East...

The Life of Wilfrid offers us a graphic portrait of one of the most forceful characters in the history of the English Church: a man courageous and energetic yet at the same time litigious, ostentatious and overbearing, his life punctuated by restless travels and the most violent quarrels. Of noble birth, Wilfrid (c.634 709) gained his first experience of monastic life as a boy at Lindisfarne. Thereafter we find him at various times, crossing Gaul, staying in Lyons, visiting Rome, back in England at York, Ripon or Hexham, preaching to heathens in Sussex or Frisia, quarrelling with kings and...

St. Alphonsus writes: "a single bad book will be sufficient to cause the destruction of a monastery." Pope Pius XII wrote in 1947 at the beatification of Blessed Maria Goretti: "There rises to Our lips the cry of the Saviour: 'Woe to the world because of scandals ' (Matthew 18:7). Woe to those who consciously and deliberately spread corruption-in novels, newspapers, magazines, theaters, films, in a world of immodesty " We at St. Pius X Press are calling for a crusade of good books. We want to restore 1,000 old Catholic books to the market. We ask for your assistance and prayers. This book is...