Fans pick 100 books like The Two Dantes, and Other Studies

This collaborative volume, resulting from a seminal conference held in Cambridge in 2003, seeks to draw twenty-first-century readers’ attention again towards Dante as a theologian. It is a wonderful medley of essays on Dante and theology, with contributions by Dante scholars key to this theological reappraisal, including Robin Kirkpatrick, Peter Hawkins, and Christian Moevs. The volume concludes with David Ford’s clarion call for theologians to turn to, and learn from, Dante today: ‘Dante as Inspiration for Twenty-First-Century Theology.’  

Just as Dante needed good guides on his epic journey through the afterlife, so contemporary readers typically need reliable companions on their own journeys into Dante’s poem. The best thing, I find, is to read Dante with, and alongside, his commentators. An ideal way to do this is through the invaluable online Dartmouth Dante Project and Dante Lab, which provide the entire texts of more than 75 of these commentaries in a customisable digital workspace. But if you want a book to hand, The Cambridge Companion to Dante’s ‘Commedia’ provides a really helpful overview of Dante’s masterpiece and its core narrative, linguistic, cultural, and doctrinal features, as well as useful introductions to the poem’s composition and reception. 

Some of the most original scholarship on Dante in the past fifty or so years has been historical and contextual. This research enables us to understand Dante’s texts more fully in their own immediate contexts, of course, but it also reflects the fact that many readers of Dante become increasingly interested in the wider contexts – ethical, political, philosophical, theological, economic, literary, cultural, etc. – that Dante’s own poetic masterpiece opens up. In thirty chapters, the collaborative volume Dante in Context exemplifies the best of this historical and contextual work, and provides an invaluable introduction to the world of Dante.   

One of the foremost twentieth-century historians of medieval philosophy, Étienne Gilson took a lifelong interest in Dante, publishing Dante et la philosophie in 1939 (the translation Dante the Philosopher was published in 1946). The book is Gilson’s magisterial attempt to situate Dante’s thought in relation to the competing intellectual currents of his time.

What makes the book particularly fascinating for me is that it is also an anti-thesis, a reaction against another (arguably even better) book, the Dominican Pierre Mandonnet’s Dante le théologien, published in 1935 (a new edition with English translation, Dante the Theologian, will be published shortly). In reading Gilson’s volume, we enter into key debates not only about Dante’s thought but, also, about the very nature of Catholic philosophy and theology. 

After writing La Bella Lingua, I thought I had learned many of Florence’s hidden stories. Botticelli’s Secret proved me wrong. Although we‘ve never met, I think of Joseph Luzzi as a kindred soul who shares my passion for Italy's language, art, and literature. With a scholar’s depth and a writer’s deft touch, he re-creates the brilliance and complexity of the Renaissance and traces its impact through the centuries since. At the same time, Luzzi draws us into a layered mystery that crosses centuries and unfolds in ever richer, deeper dimensions. 

If you haven’t visited Florence, you’ll want to explore Botticelli’s and Dante’s hometown. If you have, you’ll want to return to deepen your appreciation of the city where artists and writers re-invented Western civilization.

This really engaging book shows how Capital, Volume 1 is implicitly modelled on Dante’s Inferno, from the way Marx stages the descent (katabasis) into the hell of the 19th-century factory to the division of the French and English translations into 33 chapters, mirroring the 33 cantos of Dante’s famous poem. Roberts almost makes you forget you’re reading political theory, an effect Marx was aiming for in trying to reach his socialist and working-class audiences.

First I want to say how much I love The Divine Comedy Dante’s Inferno and this graphic novel adaptation by Seymour Chwast is a wonderful version of the tale. If you don’t already know the story I highly suggest you read it in its original text but also be sure to grab this copy as it will really bring the levels of hell to a more comical light. I particularly love the black and white bold art style and humor brought to life here. 

I am fascinated by the contradictions of Tolkien’s women and by the tension between Christian and pagan in his writing.

This book is particularly valuable for its explication of Tolkien’s integration of Marian and Valkyrie imagery, resulting in female characters of transcendental beauty and heroism. And the writing is absorbing and informative.

Hollander's wonderful book is a tribute to the power of music, which can transform ideas and myths into rhythms and feelings that immediately touch the heart. 

A fine poet himself, he relishes the quests of poets and musicians to turn mere words and notes into something divine, as if we could hearken to the gods (whether Christian or pagan). The analysis of particular works of art is always scholarly and penetrating; but more than that, it conveys a poet's love of what great artists have done.

This is a novel about Saint Patrick and the end of an age of magic in Great Britain. What made St. Patrick so effective, spreading his faith where others failed? Might it be that he was first tutored by the mysterious “people of the hollow hills,” north of Hadrian’s Wall? When Patrick went to Ireland, was his brand of Christianity infused with a pagan spirituality based on the wisdom gleaned from Mother Earth herself? Did he combine two systems of religion into a faith that was universal in scope and effectiveness? Did that spirituality manage to make its way to America, long before the voyages of Columbus? And is that the Christianity we so need to recapture today?