Gertrude More belongs to a tradition of mystical writers who believed in the value of the via negativa, a path to union with God by way of total self-abnegation and the emptying of the mind of set ideas and images. Her only book-length work, THE SPIRITVAL EXERCISES (Paris, 1658), is a collection of her writing assembled by Dom Augustine Baker, OSB, and published some thirty-three years after her death. Some of More’s other verse and prose appears in the biography that Baker composed, but her SPIRITVAL EXERCISES remains the main text she has bequeathed to her order and to posterity. It is reprinted here in full with Arthur F. Marotti's introductory note outlining Gertrude More's life and work.

Delicious entertainments of the soule is a translation of a collection of conferences which Francis de Sales held for the Order of the Sisters of the Visitation. This order took the form of an institute for young girls and widows who wanted to enter a convent but lacked the strength or the inclination for the physical austerities of the great orders. It was for these sisters that Francis held conferences or 'familiar conversations' on religious topics at regular intervals. These conversations were not written out by Francis himself but were noted down and collected by the sisters. Pudentiana Deacon's translation of these transcripts gives the reader an idea of the personality of the speaker. De Sale comes across as a humane, commonsensical, practical man with an occasional sense of humour and a shrewd idea of the specific worries and temptations of his audience.