This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

The third volume in the series Lectura Dantis Americana is Maria Picchio Simonelli's study of Inferno III. Primarily philological in its focus, the book examines in detail a number of the cruces found in this canto, which initiates the voyage to the underworld in Dante's poem.