For a number of years I have been teaching early Italian literature in a Faculty of Modern Languages, working with students who have a relatively limited knowledge either of the language or of medieval culture, and giving regular public lectures for people who are not studying Italian at all but who want to know more about Dante. In this time I have become ever more conscious of the exceptionally close link between Dante's fiction and his ideas, and have increasingly felt the need to read the Comedy in the light of the poet's own beliefs about the nature of language, art, morality, history and God. For better or worse, this work has grown out of my teaching and the consequences will be obvious at every turn.

If the book has a motto over and above its five epigraphs, it is the much-quoted injunction of E. M. Forster: ‘Only connect’. It presents many individual philosophical concepts which become clearer as they are reintegrated into their system. The exposition of Dante's ideas is always related to a reading of one or more episodes in the Comedy. Each episode is interpreted in the light of its place in the whole poem which is itself set in the context of Dante's other works. And all the time I am trying to make connections between an early fourteenth-century poem and a reader in the late twentieth century.