Jordan of Saxony, Libellus de principiis Ordinis Praedicatorum, trans. Simon Tugwell

Jordan of Saxony's Libellus de principiis Ordinis Praedicatorum (On the Beginnings of the Order of Preachers), written by Dominic de Guzman's own successor as head of the order within a few years of his death, in Simon Tugwell's scholarly translation for the Classics of Western Spirituality series, is the earliest connected account of Dominic's life and the founding of the Dominican order. Its strength is that Jordan knew Dominic personally and wrote from direct memory of the order's first years. Its limit is that it is a memoir written to serve the young order's own sense of its origins, not an independent biography.