When Saint Francis Saved the Church by Jon M Sweeney (Ave Maria Press, £15.99). Sweeney instructs the reader to “wipe clean the slate of your cultural and religious imagination and forget those half-formed legends” about Francis of Assisi. Instead of a saint “that we can easily imagine inviting to tea”, we are shown a radical, “unpredictable puzzle” of a man who “transformed the whole notion of sanctity”. Francis’s “spirit still animates us nearly 800 years after his death” and, especially under the current pope, Sweeney sees much evidence of how St Francis’s legacy can help us “discover how to make our story better today.”
Saint Giuseppe Moscati by Antoni Tripodoro SJ (Ignatius/ Gracewing, £11.50). Not well enough known in this country, St Giuseppe Moscati, affectionately named the “doctor of the poor”, exemplifies the very best of the medical profession. Born in southern Italy in 1880 and dying in 1927, his life was dedicated both to medical research – he was the first doctor in Naples to experiment with insulin – and to his patients, many of whom were too poor to pay him. He lived as simply as he could, giving all his surplus money to alleviate suffering, as well as choosing the lay celibate life.
Tales from the Long Twelfth Century by Richard Huscroft (Yale, £20). Rather than rehashing all the old dynastic stories, Huscroft looks at one of England’s more chaotic periods through a series of emblematic figures. This period has, more than most, been mined and misrepresented by half-baked popular history and fact-ignoring historical fiction. Setting the record straight is difficult, especially when dealing with figures lower down the social ladder who left so few traces, but Huscroft is an enthusiastic and reliable guide.
Grace by Michele Guinness (Hodder, £18.99). Having discovered a trunk of old letters, diaries, journals and notebooks in her attic, Michele Guinness has written a sympathetic life of their author – her husband’s late grandmother, who was married to the famous Victorian evangelist Henry Grattan Guinness. Married to a man 40 years her senior, Grace was left a widow with two sons 10 years later. This biography describes how a woman of strong views, enquiring mind and attractive personality raised her sons, ran a successful hotel and became an early feminist ahead of her time.
Yevgeny Onegin by Alexander Pushkin (Pushkin Press, £15). One of the foremost works of European literature and a keystone of the Russian national consciousness, Pushkin’s Yevgeny Onegin is held in the same regard in Russia as King Lear is in Britain. This handsome volume contains a new translation of the epic novel in verse by Anthony Briggs (whose rendering of War and Peace is equally magnificent). Briggs’s translation is sharp and lyrical, drawing out the humour, horror and philosophy in this seminal work which has inspired generations of readers.
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