"A brilliant achievement. The range of learning is enormous, both in medieval scientific and philosophical lore and poetry and in the vast secondary literature on Dante. The authors bring the best traditions of Anglo-American formal analysis to bear upon the petrose and produce powerful and original interpretations. . . . This is a book that all serious readers of Dante's poetry--both of the petrose and the Comedy--will want to read."--David Quint, author of Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature

Robert M. Durling was Professor of Italian and English Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is the author of The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic and translator of Petrarch's Lyric Poems. Ronald L. Martinez is Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University and the author of numerous articles on Dante, Boccaccio, and Machiavelli.