That's the intriguing thesis of a book just bought by executive editor Lauren Marino at the new Penguin Putnam imprint led by Bill Shinker. It's the work of a pair of Greenwich Village psychotherapists, Bonney and Richard Shaub, whose Dante's Path: A Practical Guide to Personal and Spiritual Development suggests that the medieval poet's work offers a uniquely Western-humanist approach to enlightenment. Marino paid six figures to agent William Clark, himself a Dante devotee, for U.S. and Canadian rights; Agnes Krup is handling foreign, except U.K.