Critically selected by leading scholars in the field, this collection of facsimile reprints integrates a wide range of Dante scholarship in eight thematic volumes, illuminating the cosmos of Dante and providing the knowledge of a full range of fundamental ideas, issues, events and beliefs that characterized the world view of Dante's age. No work, with the exception of the Bible, has necessitated and been the recipient of more interpretive commentary than has the Divine Comedy . The identification of characters and historical events, the explanation of references and images, the citation of sources, the explication of moral concepts, the interpretation of allegorical figures - all these attempts to understand the whole of the Comedy and its constituent parts have produced a prodigious body of secondary literature edited here in eight volumes for their exceptional quality and importance.