The volume explores contemporary theories related to a vision of Dante and his Commedia that is ‘[made] open to interpretation, unbound from the shackles of completion and wholeness haunting it’, whereby the authors interrogate the teleological status of the Commedia, probe canonical assumptions, and question the wholeness and all-encompassing status that generations of commentators have assigned to the poem. Dante emerges as a writer–reader of extraordinarily broad appetite, whose fashioning of his masterwork in the vernacular reveals his hybrid approach, stylistic plurality, and traversing of literary boundaries. The authors challenge interpretations of Dante’s oeuvre, foregrounding the collective influence and interconnectivity of his complete works, and reminding the reader how a number of these works, such as the Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia, are often overshadowed and relegated to ‘minor’ status by the prodigious achievement of the Commedia.

The chapters offer philological, historical, and religious frames for reading the poem, highlight post-colonial, feminist, and queer studies, explore art history and philology, and give comprehensive accounts of Dante’s trajectory in translation studies, reception, and adaptation, as well as providing other compelling perspectives. A multivalent critical lens is in evidence across all seven categories of the volume in which the second and third, and the fifth and sixth, categories function as diptychs: I, ‘Texts and Textuality’; II, ‘Dialogues’ and III, ‘Transforming Knowledge’; IV, ‘Space(s) and Places’; V, ‘A Passionate Selfhood’ and VI, ‘A Non-linear Dante’; VII, ‘Nachleben’.

The introductory essay by the co-editors portrays a Dante who ‘situates himself always in “our” present – the present of reading’, thus offering a counterpoint suggestive of transmutability. There follows a discussion in Part I of reading, writing, and editing in Dante’s day, and engagement with textual practices across time, with Parts II and III examining the myriad ways in which Dante transforms existing cultural and intellectual practices in order to create new forms of knowledge transmission. Part IV delves into the question of physical and spatial locations and the momentum and counter-motion imbuing Dante’s exilic quest, while Parts V and VI highlight the notion of fluidity by exploring selfhood and relationality in Dante’s writings aligned to notions of difference, subjectivity, and the challenging of paradigms expressive of narrow posturing. In Part VII, entitled Nachleben (indebted to art historian and cultural theorist Aby Warburg), the focus is on transformation and revelation in underscoring the latent quality of Dante’s masterwork.

In Part I, Justin Steinberg’s portrayal of the Poet as a scriba Dei outlines an ‘unnerving’ authorial persona. Lina Bolzoni offers an analysis of the art of memory as personal and prophetic in the Vita Nova, maturing to an impassioned memory in the Commedia. This chapter is complemented by Mary Carruthers’ detailed discussion about memory and Luca Fiorentini’s positioning of the practice of commentary, which is at the heart of Dante’s authorship and reception by glossators. Martin Eisner’s chapter on Dante’s material context and manuscript culture links to Fabio Zinelli’s analysis of the manuscript tradition by means of which Dante’s texts ‘altered and moved through time and space’, ultimately positing the notion of ‘a continuum vision of literature’. Fiorentini captures the nature of figuration and the approach of the commentary tradition to Dante’s allegorical dimension. Akash Kumar elicits the intersection of Dante Studies and Digital Humanities and speculates that Dante’s Commedia draws digital scholars to it through its ‘attention to embodied experience’. He summarises the history of digital Dante projects commencing with Robert Hollander’s pioneering work, the Dartmouth Dante Project, and concludes with a future focus on game design and virtual experience linked to the Commedia.

In Part II, Zygmunt G. Barański discusses the classics and Dante’s esteemed predecessors, highlighting how Dante’s hybrid work in exile is not ultimately imitative but sets out to create a new centre of poetic achievement. Antonio Montefusco addresses Dante’s encounter and ongoing relationship with the Roman de la Rose and the Detto-Fiore diptych, while William Burgwinkle explicates Dante’s engagement with the poetry of the troubadours, and Roberto Rea looks at the links between the poet and the lyric tradition. Fabian Alfie explicates the influences of vernacular comic literature on Dante, including vernacular comic tropes and scatological humour. Gervase Rosser’s discussion of visual culture argues against representations of an aniconic Dante and proffers ‘a dynamic interrelationship between word and image, in Dante and in the cultural world he inhabited, which was intimate and profound’. Part III ranges over questions of Dante and the encyclopedist tradition, medical knowledge, visual theory, the law, political life, philosophy and theology, and religion and poetry, always with a view to the original, irreverent, hybrid, and convergent approaches expressed by Dante and lucidly explicated by this section’s authors: Franziska Meier, Natascia Tonelli, Simon Gilson, Diego Quaglioni, Tristan Kay, Pasquale Porro, Alessandro Vettori, and Elena Lombardi.

In ‘Space(s) and Places’ (Part IV), the contributions by Giuliano Milani, Elisa Brilli, Karla Mallette, Brenda Deen Schildgen, Johannes Bartuschat, Theodore J. Cachey Jr, and Peter Hawkins span Dante’s relationship with cities, notions of civitas/community (predominantly in Rome and Florence), the influence of the Mediterranean in his works, his engagement with the East, and the central question of exile, deemed ‘the foundation for Dante’s mission’, whereby Dante’s wanderings and spatial dislocations are the catalyst for his creation of a cosmological poem and a challenging Other World. In Part V, Gragnolati explores the concept of eschatological anthropology and the complexities inherent in the notion of embodiment in the Commedia, while Heather Webb sheds light on Dante’s linguistic panoply. Bernard McGinn’s discussion of mysticism and ineffable consciousness offers valuable insights. Lastly, Cary Howie analyses the notions of Dante’s plasticity, the resurrected flesh, and the experience of divine awakening. In their analysis of a ‘non-linear Dante’ in Part VI, Nicolò Crisafi, Jennifer Rushworth, Southerden, and Teodolinda Barolini offer stimulating commentary on the poem’s narrative structure, its ‘openness to futures, alternatives, and paradoxes’, the presence of ‘footprints, traces, vestigia’, and the poet’s intensification of the lyric mode that reaches its zenith in the third canticle, and a case is made by Barolini for evidence of Dante’s ferm voler.

In Part VII, the authors trace the history of translation of the Commedia in English (Martin McLaughlin), Dante’s inspiring influence in the performing arts (Rossend Arqués Corominas) and on screen (John David Rhodes), and Dante as a precursor in relation to a selection of modernist authors (Daniela Caselli), including twentieth-century Afro-Caribbean writers (Jason Allen-Paisant). In ‘Dante and the Shoah’, Lino Pertile captures the bizarre appropriation and manipulation of the figure of Dante at the hands of the Italian fascist propaganda machinery, set against the legacy of Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, author of Se questo è un uomo (‘If This Is a Man’). There follows Cestaro’s discussion that considers both the queer in the Commedia and a range of queer engagement over the centuries. Fittingly, the Handbook is dedicated to the memory of distinguished scholar Marguerite Waller, whose chapter, ‘A Decolonial Feminist Dante: Imperial Historiography and Gender’, draws the collection to a close. Waller argues that in the ‘development of a “decolonial” alternative to the historiography and sex/gender system upon which imperial sovereignty depends’, Dante’s Commedia proposes ‘interactive, nonhierarchical, nonexclusionary relation and community’.

The seven-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death in 2021 is being marked by a diversity of international and local events interspersed throughout the year. A brilliant endeavour, the Handbook constitutes a remarkable and edifying contribution, not only to the myriad seven-hundredth-anniversary celebrations but as a portal for new generations of readers to discover the sommo Poeta and his achievement.