Domenico Cavalca OP (Vicopisano, c. 1270 – Pisa, October 1342) was an Italian Dominican friar, preacher and writer.

[3] After his earliest childhood education he entered the Dominican house of Saint Catherine of Alexandria in Pisa, where he carried out most of his religious and literary work.

[6] The chronicle tells us that his reputation for saintliness was well founded in his exemplary practice of the Rule, and that, at his death in November, 1342, his funeral procession drew a crowd of the poor and afflicted.

He tells us in the introduction to the Vite that it was his intention to make the vast hagiographic corpus of the Desert Fathers' stories available to the "uomini semplici e non licterati" (simple, uneducated men).

[9] His translation of the Vitae Patrum, soon transposed from the Pisan dialect into Florentine, was the collection of saints' lives most copied in its entirety in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy, and it is preserved in nearly 200 manuscripts.

[11] The popularity of the text continued into the latter half of the 15th century with the invention of the printing press: twenty editions of the Vite were published between 1474 and 1499.

[1] His writing style, characterized by simplicity of syntax and clarity, established him as an artistic model for subsequent centuries.