This collection of ten essays explores the fundamentally Franciscan aspects of Dante's artistic vision and cultural foundation, and in the process touches upon a wide range of related topics in medieval Italian culture. For example, the book's first essay, by V. S. Benfell, provides an insightful evaluation of Dante's indebtedness to the writings of Peter John Olivi, and also places the writings of the great Spiritual Franciscan in the context of previous writers on the Apocalypse, including Joachim of Fiore. Elvira Giosi makes the case that the presentation of the mysterious ‘five hundred ten and five’ in Purgatorio 33 is consistent with the way in which early Franciscans spoke of their founder, in part by exploring medieval Christian and Jewish exegesis on a range of relevant biblical passages. William R. Cook and Ronald B. Herzman, in a thoughtful exploration of the life of the saint as seen in Franciscan sources and as presented in Paradiso 11, demonstrate the importance of Francis's poverty, humility and simplicity to Dante's post-conversion identity and self-presentation. Brenda Wirkus draws similar conclusions from her reading of the Vita nuova, placing Dante's process of self-individuation in that work in the Bonaventuran tradition. Giuseppe Mazzotta places a perceptive close reading of the encounter with the Franciscan Guido da Montefeltro in Inferno 27 in a wider cultural context that includes the anti-fraternal disputes at the University of Paris, and places his analysis of the presentation of St Francis in Paradiso 11 and St Dominic in Paradiso 12 in the context of Franciscan, especially Bonaventuran, spirituality. Alessandro Vettori provides another reading of this latter passage, emphasising the ‘binary, chiastic structure’ of the treatment of the two saints. Tonia Bernardi Triggiano moves from an analysis of Dante's encounter with the Franciscan nun Piccarda Donati in Paradiso 3, to the importance of women's religious houses in the cultural life of central Italy in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, to an examination of the specific case of Batista da Montefeltro-Malatesta, a Clarissan writer influenced by the Commedia. Santa Casciani demonstrates the importance of the Commedia, and especially of Inferno 27, to the work of the great fifteenth-century Franciscan preacher, Bernardino da Siena. Amanda Quantz presents a Franciscan reading of the whole of Paradiso, and Lucia Trainor traces a palindromic trope in the writings of Francis, Dante and Chaucer. Specific passages from the Commedia, central to the Francis-Dante nexus, recur in several of the essays, which provide, in their ensemble, a subtle and insightful reading of them: the apocalyptic imagery of Inferno 19 and Purgatorio 32, Inferno 27, Paradiso 3 and Paradiso 10–14. This collection (especially when combined with Nicholas Havely's book, also titled Dante and the Franciscans and published two years previously) goes far to advance our understanding of the too often underestimated Franciscan aspects of Dante's artistic vision and cultural formation.