SOURCE: "The Women in the Middle: Layers of Love in Dante's Vita Nuova," in Italica, Vol. 61, No. 3, Autumn, 1984, pp. 185-94.

In the following essay, Klemp explores the the ways in which Dante had revised his understanding of his love for Beatrice by the time he wrote the Convivio.

One reason why Dante's contemporary readers, like his modern ones, find his poems difficult is because he is a revisionist author whose later works reinterpret earlier ones. In the Vita Nuova, for example, we meet a "donna gentile" whose identity is not revealed. The Convivio then reflects on Dante's earlier writings, including the Rime and Vita Nuova, and insists that this donna gentile is Filosofia. Finally, the Purgatorio looks back on all of these works and transforms the well-meaning donna into a vain creature. Dante's acts of revisionist literary history prevent us from discussing any of the writings in isolation...