Letters of the Madiai and Visits to Their Prisons
[Religion]. Madiai, Francesco and Rosa Madiai. Letters Of The Madiai And Visits To Their Prisons, by the Misses Stenhouse, with an Introductory Note by R. Maxwell Hanna. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, (circa 1854).
8vo.; two color lithograph portraits of the Madiais; green cloth, elaborately stamped in gilt and blind.
First American edition of this correspondence preserved by two English ladies who paid visits of solace to this husband and wife imprisoned for the illegal distribution of vernacular Bibles. The first English translation of these letters, along with their Italian originals, was published in London by J. Nesbit & Co. in 1853; an editorial note in the American editions explains that the Presbyterian Board felt it neither “necessary” nor “expedient to give more than a specimen of the style of each of the parties, in the original Italian.” The second English edition, published in 1854, followed this model, dropping the Italian letters.
Rosa and Francesco Madiai were arrested in Tuscany in 1852 for violating Pius IX’s papal encyclical against distribution of copies of the scriptures in vernacular translations. They had provided a 16-year old boy with French and Italian translations of the Bible, and taught their 20-year old Italian servant how to read so she could enjoy the Diodati Bible in her native tongue. Francesco was sentenced to 50 months imprisonment at hard labor and his wife received a sentence of 45 months imprisonment, and the difference in their treatment shows in these letters. R. Maxwell Hanna writes in his introductory note that it would be unjust to judge Francesco by “the few disjointed sentences which he was able to write in a time of shattered health and of great nervous depression,” in contrast to “the more intrepid and impetuous spirit of his Roman wife.”
Hanna also states the evangelic purpose of this publication:
It is in the earnest hope that these letters, and the brief notes that accompany them, may serve the cause of God in increasing the faith, and strengthening the hope, and quickening the love of others ... with that unassuming simplicity and singleness of eye to God’s glory, which have characterized them throughout, they have left these memorials of the days of trial to the judgment of their benefactors, to be used in any way that may tend to the honour and the praise of Him who has so kept them from falling.
And though “[n]o one will expect to find literary merit of any kind in the private letters of two humble Italian prisoners,” the “beauty and graphic power” of them derives from “the influence of the word of God in refining and elevating the minds of those who ‘search the Scriptures,’ in which are the words of eternal life.” He adds, “But something far nobler will be found here—the expression of a faith and hope which no persecution would subdue, and the breathings of a spirit renewed in holiness by the Spirit of God.”
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