Saint Lawrence of Brindisi (1559–1619)

On the Admirability of the Virgin Theotokos is a Marian sermon by the Doctor of the Church, St. Lawrence of Brindisi, based on the passage in Revelations about the woman crowned with stars. As such, it is unexceptional. What is exceptional is the way this edition is formatted. The publishers are apparently trying to be pan-Christian/non-denominational, which means that the title of saint is always in parentheses (e.g. (St.) John) and is probably responsible for the odd use of "Theotokos" (a term the author would never have used) in the title. This would be odd enough if the editors also didn't randomly include bits of Latin in square brackets to show the author's original words (do they have so little faith in their translation that they feel this is necessary?). I'm fairly certain that this is why God invented facing page bilingual editions, or footnotes, or both. Either way, it's quite distracting and really poor style. But there is so little by or about (St.) Lawrence of Brindisi (see what I did there) in print, that anyone English-speaker looking for something is almost forced to end up with this. Which, considering what a remarkable figure he was, is actually a bit sad. Still, if you're interested in him or in Counter-Reformation Mariology, you might as well pick it up since it costs less than five bucks. At that price, one can afford to ignore its disastrous formatting as a mere annoyance.… (mehr)