The Holy Library — the Bibliotheca Sancta of Sixtus of Siena, O.P. (1520–1569) — is now complete on the site in all eight books, in English for the first time. The first four books join the four already on the shelves:
Book I, On the Divine Volumes, sets the canon of the sacred books in order — their names, authors, arguments, and times — and distinguishes the canonical Scriptures of the first and the second order from the apocryphal. It is in this book that the terms protocanonical and deuterocanonical, used by theologians ever since, were first coined.
Book II, The Books and Writers Mentioned in Scripture, is an alphabetical lexicon of every book, writer, and writing of which mention is made in the holy Scriptures — and of those falsely fathered upon them: the lost books of the kings and prophets, the sibyls, the apocryphal gospels and acts, the volumes of the Talmud.
Book III, The Art of Expounding Scripture, digests the whole art of interpretation into its parts and its twenty-four methods — translation, paraphrase, gloss, commentary, homily, catena, the scholastic method, and the rest — each defined and each shown in a worked example.
Book IV, The Catholic Expositors of the Divine Volumes, is a catalogue, in the order of the alphabet, of every Catholic expositor of Scripture from three hundred years before Christ to the author’s own day, with the catalogue of the Hebrew expositors and the catalogues of the expositors by book and by method.
With the Annotations on the Old Testament and on the New (Books V and VI) and the Defenses of both Testaments (Books VII and VIII), the whole work now stands together on one page, The Holy Library, with the dedication to Pope Pius V and the general preface at its head and the eight books in Sixtus’s order.
Because the entries of Books II and IV stand in the order of the Latin alphabet, each of those books now carries, at the head of its contents, an index of every entry by its English name, from A to Z, linked to the printed folio where it stands. The five site-wide indexes have been extended through the new books; in the Index of Persons, a reference to Book IV points to Sixtus’s own account of that expositor. Each book may be read online, or downloaded as a PDF (Books I–IV in one volume) or as an EPUB.