K. P. Clarke, Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Reading Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024, xxv, 278 pp., 12 colored images.

I hope that the author will forgive me for reviewing his book although I am not a Dante specialist. Instead, I approached it in the way as his intended readers would and recognized with great respect the considerable value of this monograph for the teaching of Dante’s Commedia. Based on long-term experiences with this late medieval poem (concluded ca. 1322) in his university classes, Clarke offers a most sensible, pedagogically smart concept of how to help beginners to understand this masterpiece of world literature from the ground up, that is, working with the basic aspects of Dante’s language. Clarke wants to offer a solid introduction to this work in its original fourteenth-century Italian, and for that reason he went down to the fundamental level of parsing Dante’s text in minute details.