E.R. Dodds was one of the greats of twentieth-century study of ancient Græco-Roman religion. He wrote The Greeks and the Irrational, a book which many will know, if for no other reason than that it put theurgy on the map of respectable (or semi-respectable) Anglophone classics. Dodds was also a long-time paranormal researcher, member of the modernist, somewhat radical Dublin intelligentsia, a lover of the cannabis, and generally surprisingly hip gentleman for someone who made his mark at Oxford before the war.

A new volume of collected essays, reviewed here, gives a number of perspectives on Dodds’ life, work, and legacy.

Christopher Stray, C. B. R. Pelling, S.J. Harrison, Rediscovering E.R. Dodds: scholarship, education, poetry, and the paranormal. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.