Kenelm Foster’s new book is a collection of essays written between 1959 and 1977. With one exception, all these studies have aspects of Dante’s work as their subject. The book falls readily into three parts. Chapters 1-5 deal with general topics: “An Introduction to the Inferno”, “Courtly Love and Christianity” (the only non-Dantean topic, but, obviously, very relevant to the main subject), “Dante and Eros”, “St Thomas and Dante”, and “Dante’s Vision of God”. Chapters 6-9 are readings of various cantos of the Comedy (and one of the pleasing features of the book is the successful retention in these and other essays of the semi-informality of the lecture style): Inferno XIX, Purgatorio XVII, Paradiso X and XIX. Chapters 10-12 consist of one long essay (over a third of the work) from which the book gets its title, on the presence of morally good pagans in Limbo, and on the philosophical and theological assumptions which lie behind this unusual idea.

I cannot summarise here the main themes of this rich and varied book. But since I want to recommend it warmly to specialists and non-specialists alike, let me try to specify some features which lead me to do so. Specialists particularly will gain from Father Fsoter’s interpretation of certain passages which run counter to commonly received opinion: lucid expositions combined with detailed accounts of where and why he finds other critics’ views unsatisfactory, as for instance on Par. XIX 64-66 (“Lume non è ...” pp. 149-152). Of particular value to the non-specialist are the apparently casual but in fact careful and judicious outlines of political, literary and theological developments (e.g. pp. 34-36, 87-88, 152-54).