The Book of the Lover and the Beloved

📙 Lull (c.1232-c.1315) was a mathematician, polymath, philosopher, logician, Franciscan tertiary and writer from the Kingdom of Majorca. His romantic novel Blanquerna (c.1283), of which Llibre d'Amic e d'Amat forms a part, is credited as the first major work of Catalan literature, and possibly the first European novel. Recently surfaced manuscripts show his work to have predated by several centuries prominent work on elections theory and he is also considered a pioneer of computation theory. Since his first writings there has been confusion in the church as to whether he was a saint or a heretic. A canonization process had been open in the Vatican since the reign of Philip II who was one of the promoters of this process, despite Lull's works being prohibited by the Spanish Inquisition under Philip who considered that "non-initiates could not understand them." Within the Franciscan Order Lull is honoured as a martyr and he was beatified in 1847 by Pope Pius IX. This English translation was first published in 1923 and includes an introductory essay by the translator.