50 Books Like Dante's Commedia

This book was a revelation to me in first studying Dante. Here was an author taking Dante’s questions, and his answers to those questions, seriously. A brilliant Cambridge Italianist and a Dominican priest, Kenelm Foster is passionately engaged with the theology of Dante.

In this book, he provides his celebrated account of the ‘Two Dantes,’ one overly committed to paganism, the other devoted to Christianity. He also develops his comparison between Aquinas’s theory of implicit faith (according to which pagans may be saved) and Dante’s strange invention of a section of limbo in which virtuous pagans are, it seems, eternally damned. Although I do not hold now to all of Foster’s provocative assumptions or conclusions, I still find his mode of questioning Dante, and reading Dante historically and theologically, inspirational and exhilarating.  

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. 

This is a genuine classic. Denys Turner almost single-handedly made us re-evaluate the nature of ‘mysticism’ and spirituality. More in particular, he distances himself from typically modern interpretations of mysticism in terms of an immediate experience of God: given the traditional emphasis upon the unknowability of God, Turner argues that mysticism is not about an experience of God, but it offers ‘categories of experience’: the mystic, transformed by faith, hope, and love, relates to the world, others, and self in a radically different way.

Eckhart’s notion of detachment, involving a letting go or renunciation of the possessiveness that characterizes our ordinary dealings with the world, is a prime example. This may not be an easy read for people new to the field, but it deserves a close reading.

I had the advantage of reading an early copy of this book because Catherine is one of my closest friends. She and Jason have put their fingers on the pulse of what happens to your faith when you hit a crisis point or a trauma–and how that doesn’t have to lead to the untangling or shattering of all you believed.

Rather, there is a refining and freedom that comes from facing a mid-faith crisis and it can move you to a place of maturity, seasoning, and unburdened faith. 

I really like anthologies when I get introduced to a new field. I want to know who’s who in the field and what distinguishes each of their contributions. In this comprehensive volume, I found familiar experts whom I had previously studied. However, I was also introduced to new authors in different parts of the world who have innovative insights.

This book is one of the better overviews. And it’s up to date.

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.

Mysterious victorian missionaries with dark secrets in the land of the fae. I truly do not know how to sell this book any better. I tend to recommend gothic literature for historical fiction newbies, since the emotional stakes are always so high and the plots often bend close to horror or fantasy, and this one is no different. The worldbuilding is spectacular, and it plays on the tropes of classic gothic novels in a way that’s knowing, clever, and never dry or stilted. No wonder Ng won the Hugo for best new author when she released this book—it deserves it.

Paul Tillich is my choice for the great theologian of the twentieth century (not Karl Barth, orthodoxy’s hero).

For Tillich, religion is not a matter of creeds but a matter of “ultimate concern,” of what is unconditionally important; “God” is not the Supreme Being, but the “ground of being;” religion is not particular cultural practice but the depth structure of the entire culture; dig deeply enough into art or science or anything, and you will hit theological ground.

His Dynamics of Faith and The Courage to Be are his “greatest hits,” but I love Theology of Culture because it lays all this out with such lucidity. Atheism about the Supreme Being is not the end of theology but the beginning of radical theology.