Kathryn S. Freeman, <i>A Guide to the Cosmology of William Blake</i>

Abstract

Kathryn S. Freeman’s A Guide to the Cosmology of William Blake, like S. Foster Damon’s A Blake Dictionary, is an encyclopedia of terms, works, characters, and figures relevant to Blake’s corpus, one especially useful to newcomers to Blake’s works who are trying to find their way through the labyrinth of his mythology. Supplements have been published since Damon’s time, including Alexander Gourlay’s “A Glossary of Terms, Names, and Concepts in Blake” in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake (2003), which he republished in expanded form on the William Blake Archive website, but nothing has appeared until now on the scale of the 181 entries Freeman has written. Her guide is neither as comprehensive as Damon’s dictionary nor limited only to entries strictly relevant to Blake’s cosmology, so it is perhaps best understood as her own selective updating of Damon’s entries and a correction of some omissions in Damon, such as a much-needed separate entry for Catherine Blake.