"Reading Dante" is a sublime book, the work of a scholar who has spent fifty years studying, translating and editing the works of Dante Alighieri and his contemporaries in fourteenth century Italy. Prue Shaw seems to know her way around late medieval Florence and Tuscany as well as the byways of University College, London her academic home base. This is a book that one feels lucky if he encounters something like it every five years--beautifully written, packed with the result of a lifetime of scholarship and presented in a distinctive but easy to follow manner, organized thematically instead of the more typical "and then he went to the next circle where Virgil said...". 
 Even though "The Divine Comedy" is a narrative poem, Prue Shaw dispenses with a plot summary, a good idea since it would become simple chronology in inferior language or just a list of sins and horrors that await sinners. She shows us the experience of the journey, the sense of being at the pilgrim's side as he is gradually changed by what he sees, hears, and feels, as he moves from a man 'lost in a dark wood" to one who is "turned by the Love that moves the...stars." Shaw deals with some of thorny questions of literary theory; for example the liquid identities of Dante as author, Dante as character, a pilgrim who writes poetry and Dante the author of the poem we are reading not by explaining theory--often an excellent way to kill the reader's interest--but by showing how the various guises adopted by Dante shift and fuse into each other depending on theme. A masterful performance, taking a fourteenth-century allegorical poem on sin and redemption, written in a medieval Florentine vernacular following the theology of the time and letting the reader discover its heretofore hidden beauties. 
 She makes a supremely difficult undertaking, given the remoteness of the historical and cultural period in which Dante writes and the complexity of his language seem, if not easy then less difficult. Most importantly "Reading Dante" succeeds in persuading on to do exactly that: begin or continue reading Dante.