Sixtus of Siena — Sixtus Senensis on his title pages, Sisto da Siena in Italian — was born of Jewish parentage at Siena, converted, and after early years among the Franciscans became a Dominican friar and one of the most learned biblical scholars of the sixteenth century.
His Bibliotheca Sancta (1566), an encyclopedia of Scripture in eight books, gave the Church the terms protocanonical and deuterocanonical, and remains a monument of Catholic biblical scholarship at the height of the Counter-Reformation.
Four of the eight books are offered here in English for the first time: the annotations and censures upon the interpreters of the Old and New Testaments (Books V–VI), and the defenses of the Old and New Testaments against those who assailed their volumes (Books VII–VIII). Books I–IV are in translation.