Alessandro Vettori has poured his many years of studies into this very knowledgeable monograph on the concept of prayer in Dante's Comedy. Beginning with his introduction, “Pilgrimage and Exile,” Vettori sets out to connect prayer and pilgrimage from a spiritual perspective, both having been powerful forms of penance and sanctification throughout the Middle Ages. The journey of spiritual progression undertaken by Dante the pilgrim is a crucial part of the Comedy. It allows the poet-pilgrim to achieve the final vision of God in the Trinity by resolving the tension of his personal struggles in exile, as Vettori reiterates in his conclusion, “Prayer as Desire to Be Elsewhere.”

Dante's peregrinations, transfigured in his poetic pilgrimage, reflect the itinerant nature of Christian existence that leads to the final meeting with the divine. In late medieval society, in fact, pilgrimage, like prayer, established a connection between the finite and the infinite, a model that is represented by the transgressive and revolutionary influence of the Mendicant orders. As in Dante, the Mendicants’ desired changes were supposed to occur from within the institution of the church, by stripping it of—or better liberating it from—its monetary and political powers. Those devotional motives emerge from Dante's choice of the jubilee year 1300 as a setting for the poet-pilgrim's journey, as the jubilee was “an opportunity for indulgence for all Christendom, and pilgrimage to Rome” (4). Since prayer is the privileged form of communication of the finite with the infinite, it is the form of address chosen by the poet-pilgrim at significant moments in his journey, particularly when human souls prove incapable interlocutors. For that reason, the Comedy also features prayer's opposite, blasphemy, in Inferno, as well as many different occurrences of prayer in Purgatorio and Paradiso.

The study is divided into five chapters that examine the appearances of prayer in Dante's journey. We begin in Inferno, where prayer is inevitably absent and the only perverted contact with God is through cursing and blasphemy (chapter 1), and move to the prayer of ascent in Purgatorio (chapter 2), with particular focus on the collection of psalms adopted by the Christian liturgy from the Hebrew Bible. Vettori devotes specific attention to the purification process in Purgatorio 10, 11, and 12, which associate pride—the gravest and most regrettable sin from Dante's theological perspective—with artistic and poetic achievements. Chapter 4 examines intercessory prayer, which creates a synergy that brings together penitent souls and devout humans, culminating in the prodigious procession and liturgy of repentance that takes place in the biblical Garden of Eden at the end of Purgatorio.

The final chapter, “Dancing Souls in Paradiso,” establishes that heavenly prayer expresses itself primarily through singing, since music is by definition more spiritual and harmonious than words alone and is traditionally the language of angels. As evidence of the beatitude that fills them, and despite the fact that they do not possess a physical body, the blessed souls also dance. Vettori examines their dancing as expression of their perfect communion among themselves, as well as with God, and as a highly symbolic act of liturgical celebration from a spiritual and anthropological perspective. The souls’ melodious chant and harmonious dance reproduce the divine arrangement of Paradiso, featured alongside more conventional types of prayer, such as the canonical verbal prayers of the Christian liturgy. This is seen, for example, in the Ave Maria at the beginning of the canticle (Paradiso 3) and at its end, when Bernard of Clairvaux's prayer introduces the final ascent to the vision of God (Paradiso 33) to demonstrate that Dante's entire pilgrimage happens under the protection of Mary.

This work is a robust examination of prayer (and its opposite, blasphemy) as a fundamental structural element in the Comedy. Vettori's study advances an acute interpretative hypothesis on the liturgical and sacramental functions of prayer and its effects, both aesthetic and poetic, on the pilgrim-protagonist, on souls themselves, and on Dante's readers, in a balance between the wish to be elsewhere, the wish to be reunited with the world above, and the historical and political realities in which the poem is deeply rooted.