The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader’s Guide to the “Divine Comedy” (University of Chicago Press, 2009)

The Divine Comedy‘s earliest commentators and Giovanni Boccaccio’s public lectures on it in the fourteenth century inaugurated a tradition of interpreting and explicating the poem that has been carried on by Dante scholars down to the present day. Based on original research and written in lively prose, The Complete Danteworlds contributes to this tradition with a new scholarly commentary that covers the entire Divine Comedy.

Unique among Dante commentaries, the entries in this book are conceived and arranged according to the geography of Dante’s afterlife: Rather than line by line notes, over 240 entries follow the path traveled by Dante and his guides as they descend through the circles of Hell, climb the terraces of Mount Purgatory, and traverse the spheres of Paradise. This geographical organization, truer to Dante’s visual imagination than a purely textual ordering, has born fruitful scholarly results by providing new information and critical insights on topics that received only partial or scattered treatment in earlier commentaries. 

Integrating an extensive original commentary with tested pedagogical features, this multi-purpose book is a valuable resource for researchers, teachers, students, and other motivated readers of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Reviews

Dante Studies are in safe hands when such energy and creativity is brought to bear on the Comedy. . . . This book deserves a wide audience, both inside and outside the academy. – Notes and Queries

Under the author’s skillful guidance, the world of Dante’s creative output is lucidly explored and engagingly presented. – Forum Italicum

It stands out from the large corpus of Dante reference works in its organizational style, accessibility for the non-specialist, and the comprehensiveness of the related website. – Comitatus

In a culture of headlines, sound bites, excerpts, slogans, and other fragments of reality, The Complete Danteworlds allows readers the opportunity to come to grips with a text intensely and complexly engaged in relating the part to the whole. – Modern Language Studies