Typology and a Poet

Extract

It is rare that aPh. D. thesis gets turned into a book so readable and so wide-ranging as this one. That it should be well-written is already remarkable in a work of this kind, but even more so is its width of range and scope. Dr Charity, who now lectures on English at York, was bred as a Methodist, so that I suppose he has the bible in his bones, and in due course he made the contact with Dante’s poetry which led to the rather unconventional line of research that bears fruit here. A certain courage, perhaps, was entailed in his virtually staking an academic reputation on a first book addressed to scholars on two quite different fronts, to biblical theologians and to Dantists: the former may be more provoked than disarmed by the author’s warning them that he is ‘a theologian of a sort only . . . and pro tern’, while Dante scholars — even such as can spare time for a little theology – are mostly no better disposed than other specialists to the ‘amateur’. But the result shows that the risk was very well worth taking. This is a remarkable work in many ways – scholarly, perceptive and intelligent, nearly always closely argued, and, so far as I can judge, original.

Its general subject is typology, and this has to do, of course, with symbolic or figurative meanings, particularly in the Bible; and in the Bible considered precisely as an historical narrative.