The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints

As a Catholic I am always interested in books and information from long ago. This is a new edition of a very old work. A real treasure for your bookshelf.

The text is great, a more than good translation of some artistic merit, but the paperback binding is completely insufficient for the weight of the text and the print quality us so so. I know a lot of people think of this as a reference book and the formatting is not truly terrible for this purpose but if you want to actually read it this edition is going to come apart before you are a couple hundred pages in and it is extremely cumbersome and uncomfortable to read. I am somebody who treats physical books very carefully.

Nowhere in the intro or apparatus to this translation does the publisher tell us that this is an ABRIDGED version of the GL. If you look at the Medieval Sourcebook (online) and check Caxton's 1483 edition of the GL, you find all sorts of other stories--such as of Adam, Noah, Ten Commandments, etc. that do not appear here. So, while this is a useful digest of the original, much material that medieval audiences read is missing here, without any notification to the reader about what has been excluded, esp. as I have noticed so far, in the early parts of the work. Great stuff, but misleading to the scholar who's looking for the GL itself. A simple list of what usually appears in the GL, and has been left out, would be most helpful.

I have been reading the GL for over 10 years now, and give it as a gift to new priests. Though I wish that this edition had the feast days, the format follows the Liturgical year, with useful essays on Advent and Easter, as well as the "legends" of each of the major saints celebrated throughout the year.

The Golden Legend is a fascinating book containing a wealth of valuable historical and traditional information about the men and women of the first thousand years who founded and expanded the church. It is impossible to comprehend the spread of Christianity especially for the first two centuries taking place in a vacuum. The exploits of the early missionaries had to have been documented. Accept the term "Legend" as correctly meaning 'stories that should be passed on' and not as myth and the book contains many of these documentations as seen through and interpreted by the eyes of the then observers.

Book in great shape

For lovers of tangible books, possessing heft, taking up space, and suffering entropy with everything else, the Golden Legend makes a spectacular addition to your bookcase! If you happened to have survived parochial school, the content as well is priceless!Here's where all the stories of the saints come from! Experiencing the memories of the saints, as taught by the nuns, along with the challenges of faith, and the pain of nostalgia is literally priceless. Fortunately, the translator makes the 13th century text very accessible, and even compelling.

Great background about Saint's lives when studying about art and literature.

As the description says, this is a "print replica" by which they mean a pdf file. The pdf isn't great quality, so when you increase the text size it is quite noticable. You will not be able to read this on your kindle, but only on a larger ipad or suchlike.

Fascinating book to dip into. Good packaging and a good price

Brilliant and varied lives of the saints

Te kindle version, is not a kindle book, it is a very bad scan of a paper book.

To see what friends went through. Don't be to quick to dismiss the spiritual aspects, as a thinking mind tends to do.