Katherine Barnes’s book on Christopher Brennan (1870 – 1932) is unusual in the Australian academy in that the work does not much concern itself with postmodern theory, or the kinds of questions that might arise from Brennan’s oeuvre for a modern reader. It bypasses the more familiar kind of enquiry, such as the intriguing questions that Brennan might be seen to raise in relationship to psychoanalysis, and whether or not he might conceivably have been a first-wave feminist. It is something quite different: an enlivening scholarly engagement with Brennan’s sources, especially those available to him in Australia, in particular his esoteric sources.

The form of Barnes’s book may owe something to the fact that it is published by Brill (a religious studies publisher specialising in ancient cultures, and non-Eurocentric) in a series entitled ‘Texts and Studies in Western Esotericism’, edited by Wouter J. Hanegraaff, a Dutch professor of religious studies who has written on Western Gnosticism and gender in religion. That Brennan was deeply engaged with the most avant-garde post-religious philosophical/mystical thought of his time, in a number of languages, is clearly established by this analysis; whether or not his work was ground-breaking is not as clearly argued. That he forms an important bridge between Romanticism and modernism (in radical thought, but not in stylistics) in the Australian poetic canon, and precisely the contribution he made to debates, is also clearly advanced.