The monograph provides a comprehensive study on the thought of the well-known Florentine humanist Cristoforo Landino (1425 [1424 according to the Florentine style]–1498), professor of poetry and oratory at the Florentine Studium and prolific writer both in Latin and in the vernacular. After his youthful poetry, his literary production is entirely in prose. It includes works of moral philosophy, university prolusions, lecture drafts, and organic commentaries on Latin classics and on Dante's Comedy, as well as two translations into the Italian vernacular. McNair explicitly excludes from his analysis the two latter works, the printed commentary on Horace, and the so-called Formulario di epistole missive e responsive (whose attribution to Landino, however, has been dismissed by Maria Cristina Acocella, “Il Formulario di epistole missive e responsive di Bartolomeo Miniatore: Un secolo di fortuna editoriale,” La Bibliofilia 113.3 [2011]: 257–92).

The volume consists of a systematic analysis of Landino's works. This is conducted in chronological order and from a philosophical perspective, so as to offer an overall understanding of the development of Landino's thought over time, by highlighting the recurrence and evolution of key themes and by examining the author's use of philosophical sources. After an introductory section, chapter 2, “The Xandra,” discusses the only early poetic collection by Landino. It considers three long-lasting concepts in his works: divine inspiration; the elevation from earthly to divine things; and the ideal of the civis poeta. Chapter 3 is dedicated to the 1450s–60s university courses on Cicero's Tusculanae Disputationes, Petrarch's Canzoniere, and Virgil's Aeneid; here McNair individuates the early appearance of principles and methods that will be further developed in later works. For example, the idea of the absolute preeminence of poetry over other disciplines and the allegorical interpretation of Virgil's books 1–6 within the framework of a threefold system of lives—voluptuous, active, speculative—corresponding to the stages in Aeneas's journey: Troy, Carthage, Italy.

Chapters 4–5 respectively deal with Landino's two main philosophical works, the De anima and books 1–2 of the Disputationes Camaldulenses, while chapter 6 focuses on the subsequent Camaldulenses books (3–4), which contain an allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid (1–6) based on the principles set forth in the first section of the dialogue. These concepts, in turn, plunge their roots into the De anima. McNair makes the point that this work is crucial to understand Landino's allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid—not only in the Disputationes but also in the later printed commentary of Virgil—as well as of Dante's Comedy (1481). Moreover, McNair points out that the analysis of the sources used by Landino in these philosophical works reveals—within the context of a strongly encyclopedical attitude—a significant influence of Augustine, Macrobius, and especially of Aristotelian authors such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas (along with contemporaries such as Argyropous); on the other hand, McNair demonstrates quite a remarkable independence from Ficino's works on Plato, compared to what it is commonly assumed by scholars. Finally, chapters 7–8 analyze the printed commentaries on Virgil's Aeneid and Dante's Comedy (1488, 1481).

In the conclusion of the monograph, assessing all the evidence gathered, McNair casts a shadow of doubt on the scholarly tendency to label Landino as a Neoplatonist strongly influenced by Ficino, and suggests the need to carefully consider the attraction exerted on his thought by Aristotelian and Scholastic authors, as well as by Dante's moral and theological conceptions, so that “the most accurate label would be that he is a Dantean who tries to gather principles from many sources” (206).

These conclusions of McNair's work contribute to the scholarly understanding not only of Landino's independent thought but more broadly of the fifteenth-century Florentine philosophical humus (however, perhaps a greater effort would have been appreciated to relate these acquisitions to recent—or relatively recent—bibliographies on the topic). A particularly valuable aspect of the volume is the use of primary manuscript sources for Landino's unedited lectures (whose transcription, however, could have been standardized to some extent, to facilitate their use by readers, and should have been corrected when the manuscripts are incorrect). Moreover, the study of Landino's textual sources is notable: the important findings obtained by McNair using a purely philosophical and intellectual history approach will probably be enlarged thanks to philological research on the autograph zibaldoni preserved in the Riccardiana Library, which are not considered in the volume.