Muses​

• Holy Bible: Douay-Rheims Version (Charlotte, North Carolina: Saint Benedict Press, 2009)​

• The Complete Old English Poems, trans. Craig Williamson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017)

• The Heliand: The Saxon Gospel, trans. G. Ronald Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)

• Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mother Columba Hart (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1990)

• Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey Into God, The Tree of Life, The Life of St. Francis, trans. Ewert Cousins (New York: Paulist Press, 1978)

• Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso —many translations!

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo, trans. J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Del Rey, 1980)​

• ​Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (London: Penguin Books, 1978)

• Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (1627) https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2434/2434-h/2434-h.htm

• Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda, The Mystical City of God, trans. Fiscar Marison, 4 vols. (Chicago: 1912)

• Angelus Silesius, The Sorcerers’ Stone: Alchemical Poems, trans. Rachel A. Lott (Eugene, Oregon: Resource Publications, 2022)​

• Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

• Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mortal Beauty, God’s Grace: Major Poems and Spiritual Writings, ed. John F. Thornton and Susan B. Varenne (New York: Vintage Books, 2003)

• Dorothy Sayers, Murder Must Advertise (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933); The Man Born to be King: A Play-Cycle on the Life of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (1941-42)

• James Joyce, Finnegans Wake  (London: Faber and Faber, 1939)

• J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (London: Allen & Unwin, 1954-55)

• Frank Herbert, Dune (Boston: Chilton Books, 1965)

• Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters (1988), Witches Abroad (1991), Lords and Ladies (1992), Maskerade (1995), and Carpe Jugulum (1998)

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Backstory

• C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Oxford History of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944)

• C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964)

• Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972)

• Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979)

• Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 2019)

• Marshall McLuhan, The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, ed. W. Terence Gordon (Gingko Press, 2006)

• Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Barbara Harshav and Jonathan Chipman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006) 

• Anthony Esolen, Ironies of Faith: The Laughter at the Heart of Christian Literature (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2007)

• Peter Schäfer, The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012)

• Malcolm Guite, Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination (London: Routledge, 2016)

• Jan Ziolkowski, The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2018)

• Meredith Veldman, The British Jesus, 1850-1970 (London: Routledge, 2022)

• Ben Reinhard, The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination (Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2025)

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Alchemy

• Aurora Consurgens: A Document attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the problem of opposites in alchemy, ed. with commentary by Marie-Louise von Franz (first published 1966; Toronto: Inner City Books, 2000)

• Deborah E. Harkness, John Dee‘s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

• Alexander Roob, The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy and Mysticism (Köln: Taschen, 2001)

• Lawrence M. Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013)​

• Michael Hoffman, The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome (Coeur d’Alene, Idaho: Independent History and Research, 2017)

• Urszula Szulakowska, The Alchemical Virgin Mary in the Religious and Political Context of the Renaissance (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017)

• Splendor Solis: Harley MS. 3469, ed. Thomas Hofmeier, Peter Kidd, and Jörg Völlnagel (Barcelona: M. Moliero, 2020)

• Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005)

• Spike Bucklow, The Alchemy of Paint: Art, Science and Secrets from the Middle Ages (Sheffield: Marion Boyars, 2009)

• Spike Bucklow, The Anatomy of Riches: Sir Robert Paston’s Treasure (London: Reaktion Books, 2018)

• Spike Bucklow, Red: The Art and Science of a Colour (London: Reaktion Books, 2016)

• Spike Bucklow, The Year: An Ecology of the Zodiac (London: Reaktion Books, 2025)

• James Hannam, God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations for Modern Science (London: Icon Books, 2009)

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Spices and Pirates

• Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1968)

• Pirates of the Caribbean I-V (2003-2017)

• Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008)

• Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life (New York: Anchor Books, 2010)

• David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, London: Melville House, 2011, 2014); The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn, London: Melville House, 2015)

• Benjamin Breen, The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019)

• Kris Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Global Piracy on the High Seas, 1500-1750, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016)

• David Blackbourn, Germany in the World: A Global History, 1500-2000 (New York: Liveright, 2023)

• Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005)

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Mythology

• Rudolph Steiner, Christianity as Mystical Fact: And the Mysteries of Antiquity (1914)

• G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1925)

• Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (1928)

• Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1936)

• Joseph Campbell, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Unlocking James Joyce’s Masterpiece (1944)

• Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York: Vanguard, 1951)

• René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986)

• René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001)

• Richard Keller Simon,  “Star Wars and the Faerie Queene,“ inTrash Culture: Popular Culture and the Great Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999): 29-37.

• G. Ronald Murphy, The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms’ Magic Fairy Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)

• Jan Ziolkowski, Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007)

• Margaret Barker, The Great Lady: Restoring Her Story (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2023)

• Jonathan S. McIntosh, The Flame Imperishable: Tolkien, St. Thomas, and the Metaphysics of Faërie (Kettering, Ohio: Angelico Press, 2017)

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Symbolism​

• The Aberdeen Bestiary, University of Aberdeen MS 24, https://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/

• Henry Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904; 1913) and The Education of Henry Adams (1907; 1918)

• Émile Mâle, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century, trans. Dora Nussey (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1913).

• Robert Graves, The White Goddess (New York: Noonday Press, 1966)

• Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, trans. Marc Sebanc and E.M. Macierowski, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998-2009)

• Gerhart B. Ladner, God, Cosmos, and Humankind: The World of Early Christian Symbolism, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995)

• Jeffrey Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); and The Diagram as Paradigm: Cross-Cultural Approaches, ed. with David J. Roxburgh and Linda Safran (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2022)

• [Valentin Tomberg], Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, trans. Robert Powell, with afterword by Cardinal Hans Urs von Balthasar (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1985, 2002)

• Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrior: Symbols in Architecture, Theology, and Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001)

• Peter Schäfer, Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine Images of God from the Bible to the Early Kabbalah (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)

• Michael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)

• Michael Martin, The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2015)

• Jean Hani, The Black Virgin: A Marian Mystery (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2016)

• Anthony Esolen, In the Beginning Was the Word: An Annotated Reading of the Prologue of John (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2021)

• Marla Segol, Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021)

• Margot E. Fassler, Cosmos, Liturgy, and the Arts in the Twelfth Century: Hildegard’s Illuminated Scivias (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

• Sebastian Morello, Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries: Recovering the Sacred Mystery at the Heart of Reality (Lincoln, Nebraska: Os Justi Press, 2024)

• Robert J. Dobie, The Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien: Mythopoeia and the Recovery of Creation (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2024)

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Media Wizardry

• Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964); The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951)

• Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art  (Kitchen Sink Press, 1993)

• Herbert L. Kessler, Seeing Medieval Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004)

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UPDATED August 27, 2025. To be continued...

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