While innumerable readers have taken up the invitation to sit down and eat at the medieval poet Dante Alighieri's (1265–1321) banquet of knowledge in the seven hundred years since he first set himself to preparing it, very few of them seem to have asked why Dante insisted on setting a table and feeding his audience to begin with. From the very first dream of the Vita nuova in which the beloved feeds on the poet's heart, to the clearly pronounced table of the Convivio, to the encounter with Ugolino who chews on his enemy's head in Inferno 33, to the vision of salvation in Paradiso 24 described by Beatrice as the “gran cena/del benedetto Agnello” (great feast of the blessed Lamb; Par. 24.1–2), many of the poet's best known verses rely on food or eating. Dante's Gluttons: Food and Society from the Convivio to the Comedy explores how Dante uses food to articulate and reinforce, criticize and condemn, and at times consciously manipulate the social, political, and cultural values of his time. Combining medieval history, food studies, and literary criticism, Dante's Gluttons historicizes food and eating in Dante, beginning with his earliest collected poetry and arriving at the end of his major work. By interrogating the contemporary cultural associations of “gluttons” and “gluttony”—the figures Dante characterizes by the foods they consume and how they consume them—this book establishes how one of the world's preeminent authors uses the intimacy and universality of food as a cultural touchstone, communicating through a gastronomic language rooted in the deeply human relationship with material sustenance. Using the language of food, Dante establishes our responsibility to create and sustain community through the act of nourishment and giving of the self.