An Irish Precursor to Dante: A Study on the Vision of Heaven and Hell, Ascribed to the Eighth-Century Irish Saint, Adamna?n in Bloomington, MN

Under the title of "An Irish Precursor of Dante," there has been published recently a study of the vision of Heaven and Hell, ascribed to the Eighth Century Irish Saint Adamnan, with a translation of the Irish text by C. S. Boswell. In the introduction the author says: "The main subject of the poem, the visit of a living man, in person or in vision, to the world of the dead, and his report of what he had seen and heard there, belongs to a class of world-myths than which few arc more widely distributed in place or time, and none have been more fortunate in the place won for them by the masters of literature. "The subject would appear to have possessed a special fascination for the Irish writers at the time when Ireland was the chief intellectual centre of Western Europe, and the constant flux and reflux of Irish teachers and foreign students necessarily tended to spread abroad so much, at any rate, of the compositions of the Irish schools as was in harmony with the tastes and beliefs of Christendom at large.