be regarded as history.1 They are but intended to take one of the
lowest places among those numerous representations of the Passion which
have been given us by pious writers and artists, and to be considered
at the very utmost as the Lenten meditations of a devout nun, related
in all simplicity, and written down in the plainest and most literal
language, from her own dictation. To these meditations, she herself
never attached more than a mere human value, and never related them
except through obedience, and upon the repeated commands of the
directors of her conscience.

The writer of the following pages was introduced to this holy
religious by Count Leopold de Stolberg. (The Count de Stolberg is one
of the most eminent converts whom the Catholic Church has made from
Protestantism. He died in 1819.) Dean Bernard Overberg, her director
extraordinary, and Bishop Michael Sailer, who had often been her
counsellor and consoler, urged her to relate to us in detail all that
she experienced; and the latter, who survived her, took the deepest
interest in the arrangement and publication of the notes taken down
from her dictation. (The Bishop of Ratisbonne, one of the most
celebrated defenders of the faith in Germany.) These illustrious and
holy men, now dead, and whose memory is blessed, were in continual
communion of prayer with Anne Catherine, whom they loved and respected,
on account of the singular graces with which God had favoured her. The
editor of this book received equal encouragement, and met with no less
sympathy in his labours, from the late Bishop of Ratisbonne, Mgr.
Wittman. (Mgr. Wittman was the worthy successor of Sailer, and a man of
eminent sanctity, whose memory is held in veneration by all the
Catholics of the south of Germany.) This holy Bishop, who was so deeply
versed in the ways of Divine grace, and so well acquainted with its
effects on certain souls, both from his private investigations of the