A crucial aspect of Dante’s power as a thinker is how he makes evident the development of his ideas across the long arc of his career. Thus, a reader can see how Dante received an idea from his many auctores and then makes it his amalgamated own by the end of the Commedia. By this process, concepts expressed in simple terms easily bear the weight of constant reconsideration by his readers. In Filippa Modesto’s study of the idea of friendship, amicizia, she brings her readers’ attention to the concept of friendship as it develops from Dante’s earliest writings through the Commedia. Modesto gives an account of the idea of classical and Christian friendship that Dante received through the philosophical tradition—from Aristotle and Cicero among the ancients, to Boethius, Augustine, and Aquinas among Christian thinkers—and then she considers how Dante blends and incorporates these threads into his writings. The book is divided into seven short chapters: one introductory, three dedicated to mapping the registers of the concept of friendship from Aristotle to Aquinas, and three that analyze the concept in Dante’s writings, the Vita Nova, Convivio, Inferno 2, and Purgatorio 30 and 31. All along, her summary and discussion of the various ideas of friendship are accompanied by copious endnote citations from the original sources, with nearly 85 pages of endnotes for 130 pages of text.

This discussion of Dante’s sources makes for a rich tool for Dante scholars who want to reconsider the idea of friendship, and this alone makes Modesto’s book a welcome contribution to Dante studies. However, her attempt to cover so much intellectual territory, even before getting to Dante, leads to an at times cursory gloss of these philosophers and of Dante’s conversations with them. For example, when discussing Boethius and his influence on Dante’s idea of friendship, she comes to this conclusion: “Boethius’s notion of love as the original cause of all things . . . is the seed of Dante’s idea of love.” Perhaps, but Dante scholars are a difficult group to convince of such absolute assertions.

Even when her attention turns to Dante’s texts and his treatment of friendship, at times she moves too fast across waters made deep by years of critical excavation. Her short treatment of Brunetto Latini as Dante’s “friend and teacher” (86) shows how Dante uses many terms of endearment to define his fellow Florentine, but none of those terms are amico. Indeed, as Modesto herself points out, Dante defines Latini as a father figure. But Modesto does not question if a father can be a friend, even when she had previously cited (56) section 20 of Cicero’s De Amicitia where the author categorically separates friends and relatives. Dante could indeed have seen Latini as a father and as a friend, but Modesto does not give this figure, and others, enough critical attention to make her case.

When Modesto drills down deeply her work results in compelling discoveries. This is particularly the case in her discussions of Guido Cavalcanti, Statius, and, most importantly, with Beatrice. In her discussion of Calvacanti in the Vita Nova and then in Inferno 10, her reconsideration of Guido as Dante’s “primo amico” offers fresh insight into how Dante enacts his poetic project in terms of a developing concept of Christian friendship: if Guido is Dante’s first friend, Beatrice will become, in the fullness of time, his last and truest one.

At the center of Modesto’s critical effort lies her assertion that Dante figures his relationship with Beatrice from the Vita Nova through the Commedia as a friendship, all the while developing his concept of what friendship entails. In particular, Modesto considers how Dante’s succession of guides and fellow poets, from Guido Cavalcanti, Virgil, Statius, Forese Donati, Guido Guinizelli, Beatrice, and, finally, Saint Bernard, map Dante’s evolving understanding of friendship. Modesto’s work around this argument, both her long and insightful treatment of Beatrice’s use of the specific phrase “amico mio” to characterize Dante to Virgil in Inferno 2 (v. 61) as well as her analysis of Beatrice’s distant attitude toward Dante as they meet in Purgatorio 30, constitutes a novel contribution to the understanding of Dante’s treatment of Beatrice. Here Modesto’s close attention to Dante’s language helps her ground her philosophical argument in Dante’s poetic language. This analysis could have expanded by looking more closely at the vernacular poetic traditions that often inform Dante conceptually just as much as the philosophers.

Modesto’s study on Dante’s development of the idea of friendship throughout his literary works covers a great deal of territory in the field of Dante scholarship. Even if, at times, we are led too quickly across this fertile terrain, the journey offers the reader keen new perspectives on Dante and his friends.