Girolamo Gigli, the editor of the quarto edition of the Saint's works, printed at Lucca and Siena, in 1707-13, an enthusiastic and laborious investigator and collector of every description of information regarding her, gives in his Preface to the letters, a careful account of the manuscript collections from which they have at different times been printed, but has not a word to say of any scrap of original document. "As soon," he writes, "as the saintly Virgin had ascended to heaven in the year 1380, some of her secretaries and disciples collected from one place and another some of her letters and writings." But the words which follow this seem to indicate that even these earliest collectors did not possess any of the original manuscripts, but made copies of them, in most cases probably from other copies. "The blessed Stefano Maconi," he says, "having transcribed the book of the Dialogue, added at the end of it some epistles; and another larger collection was made, also by him as I think, in a certain volume which exists in the library of the Certosa at Pavia. Buonconti also collected not a few, as may be seen by an ancient copy in his writing, which was among the most notable things left by the Cardinal Volunnio Bandinelli, and now belongs to the Signor Volunnio, his nephew and heir. We have another abundant collection in an ancient manuscript preserved in the library of St. Pantaleo at Rome; and this is one of the most faithful of all those I have seen in its orthography and style; and as far as can be judged by the character of the writing, the scribe must have been contemporary with the Saint. But the blessed Raymond of Capua, her confessor, left to the Dominicans of Siena two very large volumes of her letters neatly copied out on parchment, in which nearly all those collected by the others are contained. And these most precious documents are rendered more valuable by the testimony given to their authenticity by the blessed Tomaso Caffarini in the above cited reports made at Venice."[25] The epistles were first printed by Aldus in 1500, just 180 years after Catherine's death, and afterwards in many other editions, all, according to Gigli, exceedingly incorrect, and requiring much critical care both in the restoration of the text to its original Tuscan purity, and in the arrangement of the letters, as far as possible, in their due chronological order. This, however, is made subsidiary in Gigli's edition to a division of them according to the persons to whom they were addressed. Thus those to the two Popes, Gregory XI. and Urban VI., come first; then those written to cardinals; then those to bishops and other ecclesiastical authorities; and lastly those to private individuals.