Secret Memoirs of a Renaissance Pope: The Commentaries of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Pius II - An Abridgement (The Folio Society)

373 pp. Full cream vegetable parchment ('Elephanthide') with Piccolomini's crest in blind, dark red leather spine-label (lettered by David Eccles). The text is a selection from Gragg's 1959 translation of Piccolomini's manuscript, written between around 1458 and 1464 and now in the Vatican library. The plates reproduce a fresco of Piccolomini's life, painted in the early sixteenth century and now in Siena Cathedral (the ten central images from the fresco are numbered I - X). An abridgement, translated into English by Florence A. Gragg, and edited with an introduction by Leona C. Gabel. Pope Pius II was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 19 August 1458 to his death in 1464. Aeneas Silvius was an author, diplomat, and orator, and private secretary of Antipope Felix V and then the Emperor Frederick III, and then Pope Eugenius IV.