First published in 1995. The Critical Heritage series collects together a large body of criticism on major figures in literature. Each volume presents the contemporary responses to a particular writer, enabling the student to follow the formation of critical attitudes to the writer's work and its place within a literary tradition. This collection of critical writings about Dante, many of them published here in English for the first time, tries to offer a balanced survey of the poet's reception in both time and space. Its scope therefore differs from that of its main predecessors in both English and Italian.