The third volume in the series Lectura Dantis Americana is Maria Picchio Simonelli's study of Inferno III. Primarily philological in its focus, the book examines in detail a number of the cruces found in this canto, which initiates the voyage to the underworld in Dante's poem.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

The California Lectura Dantis is the long-awaited companion to the three-volume verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum of Dante's Divine Comedy. Mandelbaum's translation, with facing original text and with illustrations by Barry Moser, has been praised by Robert Fagles as "exactly what we have waited for these years, a Dante with clarity, eloquence, terror, and profoundly moving depths," and by the late James Merrill as "lucid and strong . . . with rich orchestration . . . overall sweep and felicity . . . and countless free, brilliant, utterly Dantesque strokes." Charles Simic called the work "a miracle. A lesson in the art of translation and a model (an encyclopedia) for poets. The full range and richness of American English is displayed as perhaps never before." This collection of commentaries on the first part of the Comedy consists of commissioned essays, one for each canto, by a distinguished group of international scholar-critics. Readers of Dante will find this Inferno volume an enlightening and indispensable guide, the kind of lucid commentary that is truly adapted to the general reader as well as the student and scholar.

In the ancient world, friendship was a virtue of great philosophical importance. Aristotle wrote extensively about it, as did Cicero. Their conception of friendship as a relationship based on reason and virtue was transformed by Christianity into a connection based on the mutual love of an individual and God. In Dante’s Idea of Friendship, Filippa Modesto offers sharp readings of the Commedia, Vita Nuova, and Convivio that demonstrate Dante’s interest in that theme. Drawing on a lucid and wide-ranging examination of the literature on friendship, she shows how he weaved together the contradictory classical and the Christian concepts of friendship into a harmonious synthesis in which friendship became a handmaiden to salvation and happiness. A fresh, perceptive interpretation of Dante’s works, Dante’s Idea of Friendship will engage medievalists, classicists, and scholars of friendship throughout the ages.