Enter the enchanted world of medieval Christendom, where saints and hermits, monks and pilgrims, miracles and legends bring to life an age when the presence of God and His Angels seemed wonderfully close to the affairs of men.
Originally told by William Canton to his beloved young daughter, Winifred Vida (W.V.), these stories grew out of their conversations about the saints and the vanished world of medieval faith. Drawing especially upon the rich traditions of early Britain, Canton leads his readers through a marvelous world of ancient abbeys and extraordinary holiness, revealing the beauty of a Christian civilization in which the natural and supernatural were never very far apart.
A journalist, poet, and gifted storyteller, Canton possessed a rare ability to enter into the imagination of a child without sacrificing the richness of his language. His lyrical prose gives these ancient legends something of the quality of fairy tales, while preserving the deeper truths of faith, charity, and the providence of God that shine through them.
First published in 1898, A Child's Book of Saints (also published in America as W.V.'s Golden Legend) is a natural companion to Canton's later A Child's Book of Warriors. Yet where the latter celebrates the heroic struggle between Right and Wrong, this volume opens a window upon the beauty and wonder of holiness itself.
This edition has been painstakingly retypeset in imitation of the turn-of-the-century style of the original, preserving Canton's beautiful prose and the original illustrations.
5.5" x 8.5" paperback 268 pages
"These are pages, daintily composed, quaintly lighted up with bright and gleaming phantoms, out of a world now seemingly gone from us, which the Monk Felix might have read, and, in some sort, written. They take us into the dim forest, among legends, myths, parables, the tender, severe, suggestive, haunting Aberglaube, which has sprung up round the Catholic church, and cannot die until poetry itself shall be extinct."
--from The Bookman, February 1899
