" The Revelation of Imagination: From Homer and the Bible through Virgil and Augustine to Dante is a book that will greatly assist any professor who teaches in a humanities or Great Text curriculum, and will enrich the understanding of anyone who wishes to read the classic primary texts that Franke so finely introduces and analyzes. He is lucid writer and a careful scholar (especially impressive is his knowledge of European scholarship on these works). It is a learned work, and belongs on a shelf that includes Auerbach's Mimesis . The book is well organized into five main chapters of equal length (each long, but every page is justified), and unified in its attention to recurring themes: the human acceptance of limits; the relation between transcendence and human freedom; the relational nature of knowing; and, above all, the idea reflected in the book's title, that the human poetic imagination can be the site of transcendent revelation. In returning to these themes, the reader of Franke's book comes away with a sense of the differences and connections among these works, but also a sense of the "wholeness" of the tradition so eloquently discussed in Franke's conclusion. The book itself is best read chapter by chapter, with the primary text close at hand. But, upon completion, the book does form a unified whole. It also makes a persuasive case for the way in which classic humanities texts can be reinterpreted and lived anew by a contemporary reader.

" --Paul Contino, Blanche E. Seaver Professor of Humanities, Pepperdine University.