As a side product of our work to familiarize Abbé de Rancé to the German speaking, we ran into this english book, which is out of print. It also contains an evaluation of his main work ¿De la Sainteté et les Devoirs¿..¿ This is a reissue and the German version will also be avalilable soon by the translator and editor Jochen Michels. Read what the author has to say in his Foreword: WHEN I FIRST BEGAN to study Rancé, my concern was primarily historical, and the nature of my research into archive material so specialised that my first book (A.J.de Rancé, Oxford, 1974) was mainly addressed to scholars. By the time I had finished my second book an edition of his letters, I had come to realise that the subject was much more relevant to the interests of non-specialists than I had originally believed. Simply reading out his letters to monastic audiences was a remarkable experience for me; it was as if a quite new person was being revealed under a name all too familiar to the older religious and largely unknown, or antipathetic, to the younger. Everywhere I have been encouraged, to put in book form what I had tried to communicate. This book is the result.