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The Quiet Work of the Heart: A Reader's Companion to Denis the Carthusian on Contemplation: Thirty sayings with their Latin
Paperback
Religion General Christian Living
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 11 2026
Pages: 104
Weight: 0.22
Height: 0.26 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
Denis the Carthusian wrote more Latin than any author of the Middle Ages. Almost none of it reached English.
His fullest book on contemplation was printed once in 1534 and not again for three hundred and sixty years. The Latin still sits in a volume held in a handful of libraries.
This is a companion to that teaching. Thirty short sayings, each facing the Latin word it turns on, with how to say the word, what it became in English, and a mark showing exactly where the saying came from.
THE MARKSA filled circle means Denis's own Latin, read against the printed page and translated here. A half circle means his thought, reported through scholars who worked directly from the Latin. An open circle means the compiler's own distillation.
Nothing is blended. A closing Provenance section lists which sayings carry which mark, so any claim in the book can be checked rather than taken on trust.
THE LATINYou do not need Latin to use this book, and you will finish it knowing some. It opens with the alphabet and how the words were actually said, then teaches the numbers one to thirty, one printed under each saying, so you count to thirty simply by reading through.
Thirty-three words are gathered in a closing glossary with their English descendants. Each carries a window: a note on where the root surfaces in ordinary speech, so the word can call something back later. Illuminate, luminous, lumen -- the unit your light bulbs are sold in. The word for grace lighting a mind is printed on the box in the hardware aisle.
FOR READERS OFThe Cloud of Unknowing, Pseudo-Dionysius, the desert fathers, John Cassian, lectio divina, and anyone who has wanted the tradition's own vocabulary in their mouth.
A reader's companion, not a translation, and it says so on every page. The sixteenth-century woodcut on the cover is decoded in full at the back, along with the Latin epigram printed beneath it in the original: a dialogue in which Denis is asked what each part of the picture means, and answers.
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