The Doré Illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy Search Press, £19.00 / €20.50 Gustave Doré (1832-1883), a cradle Catholic born in the conflicted city of Strasbourg,  was an artist whose anxious imagination was suffused with an engagement with the supernatural on many levels. Some years ago, I think in 2006, my wife and I on a visit…

The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri, translated by Charles S. Singleton, introduced by Simone Marchesi and illustrated by Roberto Abbiati Princeton University Press,  £25.00 / €29.99   Around half a century after its original completion, Princeton University Press has re-issued, in a single “handsome edition”, the complete translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy by American scholar Charles …

Dante’s Divine Comedy: A biography Joseph Luzzi Princeton University Press, £20.00 / €24.00   Author Joseph Luzzi, who gained his doctorate at Yale University, is the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard College, a private arts college in the Hudson River Valley, New York, where he also teaches Italian Studies and film.  His new…

The Uses of Idolatry William T. Cavanaugh Oxford University Press,  £97.00 /  €113.59   This book is important and difficult. Important because it orientates us in a changing political landscape, difficult because it does so in a discussion of a complicated topic,  “idolatry”, drawing on profound thinkers, St Augustine and Jean-Luc Marion, in particular. I…

Finding Mangan: The Lives and Afterlives of Ireland’s National Poet Bridget Hourican Gill Books, €22.99 / £17.50   James Clarence Mangan was not always destined to be Ireland’s ‘national poet’. That place at that time in the 1830s had been long and largely filled by Thomas Moore. Today Moore has a large and challenging statue…

The Papers of Maurice FitzGerald, 18th Knight of Kerry: Volume 1:  Disillusioned Unionist; Vol. 11: Rejected Emancipationist, edited by Adrian FitzGerald (Kingdom Books, €50.00 / £43.00)   By Thomas McCarthy The life and public career of the 18th Knight of Kerry, Maurice FitzGerald, spanned the most turbulent last years of the Irish Parliament, the passing of the Act of…

Gaelic and Free: Memoirs of Pádraig O’Callaghan, edited by Elizabeth   Scanlan & Brendan O’Callaghan (Lettertec Publishing, €20.00 / £17. 20 plus p+p; Lettertec, Carrigtwohill, Co. Cork T45 NX81; infor@lettertect.com) J. Anthony Gaughan   Two issues dominated the life of Pádraig O’Callaghan: teaching and promoting the Irish language and striving for “an Ireland, Gaelic and Free”. O’Callaghan was…