Dante’s family—the father Alighiero and the mother Bella—was not particularly wealthy or distinguished but was sufficiently well off that Dante could later participate in the republican government of Florence, eligibility for which rested primarily upon economic status. According to Dante’s testimony in La Vita Nuova (The New Life), he first encountered a girl named Beatrice Portinari when they were both eight years of age; he saw her again nine years later in 1283. A decisive encounter in his poetic and intellectual development, this meeting inspired Dante’s unrequited love for Beatrice (who died in 1290) and led him to begin writing poetry. Dante married a woman named Gemma Donati (the marriage contract is dated 1277), and he apparently had four children.

Dante must have enjoyed a very good education, probably from the schools that had grown up around the ecclesiastical centers in Florence—the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella; the Augustinian church of Santo Spirito; and the Franciscan church of Santa Croce. He certainly received stellar training in Latin grammar (he would later compose a number of works in Latin) and must have read extensively in the Latin classics and rhetoric books typically employed in medieval education. The poet also came under the influence of Brunetto Latini (1220—1295), under whose tutelage he probably encountered not only the works of Aristotle and Cicero but also important works written in Old French, such as The Romance of the Rose, and the troubadour lyrics written in Old Provençal. One work attributed to Dante but still contested by some scholars, and probably written between 1285 and 1295, is Il Fiore (The Flower), a series of 232 sonnets summarizing The Romance of the Rose.

The lyric poetry Dante produced between the early 1280s and the mid 1290s holds much greater importance in his poetic development. These ninety or so poems of undoubted attribution represent a kind of artistic workshop for the young aspiring lyric poet. The poems display a variety of metrical forms: sonnets, sestinas, ballate (dance songs with repeating refrains), and canzoni, odelike “songs,” as the name implies, consisting of a number of stanzas and a shorter envoy. Dante considered the canzone to be the noblest form of poetry. This kind of poetry was popular among the major groups of lyric poets Dante admired, imitated, and sometimes criticized: the Provençal troubadours, such as Arnaut Daniel and Bertran de Born; the Sicilian School of poetry that flourished from around 1230 to 1250, the members of which included Pier della Vigna and Giacomo da Lentini, the probable inventor of the sonnet; the Tuscan school led by Guit tone d‘Arezzo; the Bolognese group of poets led by Guido Guin izzelli; and what came to be known as the dolce stil novo poets (the “sweet new style”), a group of Tuscans including not only Bonagiunta da Lucca, Cino da Pistoia, and Guido Calvacanti, but also Dante himself. Dante places a number of these individuals in The Divine Comedy as testimony to his own literary development and to his argument that poetry represents one of humanity’s most noble callings.

Had Dante stopped writing poetry with his lyric production and never composed The Divine Comedy, he would be remembered only by medievalists as the author of a moderately interesting Latin treatise on political theory, De Monarchia (On Monarchy), completed during the last decade of his life, and an unfinished Latin treatise on vernacular language and its use in poetry, De vulgari eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular Tongue), probably written between 1302 and 1305. Without The Divine Comedy, there would have been little reason for Dante to have composed his unfinished Italian Il Convivio (The Banquet), a philosophical consideration of poetry that is also inspired by religion. In fact, rather than being admired for the often abstract and ethereal love lyrics typical of the “sweet new style” (another historical label that would not have existed without The Divine Comedy, since the term itself comes from a line in his epic poem), Dante would be recognized primarily for La Vita Nuova and four explicitly sensual lyrics called the rime petrose (literally the “rocky rhymes”) that reveal his interest in metrical experimentation and a highly sophisticated understanding that the courtly love celebrated by the Provençal poets—often Dante’s models—was firmly based on requited lust rather than unrequited love. Such a poetic reputation would not have attracted much critical attention during the past six centuries from anyone but highly specialized scholars.

Dante’s love poetry, however, led to the stroke of genius that ultimately saved him from so unremarkable a future. Dante had the immensely clever idea of taking thirty-one of the lyric poems he had composed treating an unrequited love for a girl named Beatrice and of setting them within a prose frame. Although not widely read and immediately eclipsed by the appearance of his great epic, La Vita Nuova (probably completed around 1293) represents a fundamental step forward in Dante’s poetic and intellectual development. The Italian prose framework of the work allowed Dante to comment on his own work. The idea of a poet who presents a series of poems on love and then includes his own readings of the works was a unique invention that flirts with a postmodern conception of literature as an ironic revisitation of what has been written in the past. La Vita Nuova represents a precocious first step toward Dante’s decision to become the protagonist hero of an epic poem filled with self-critical images of its author. This little work already contains the key distinction in The Divine Comedy between protagonist and narrator, who are the same person but are viewed from different perspectives. But even more important was the revolutionary role of Beatrice in La Vita Nuova. By the addition of the prose commentary, Dante projects Beatrice as one whose name, life, and effects upon the narrator are associated with blessing and salvation and especially with the number nine (the square of three, the number of the Trinity). Her death nearly destroys the narrator of La Vita Nuova, but in the process of mourning, Dante envisions a Beatrice who has become a figuration of Christ and a guide to his salvation even before her dramatic appearance in The Divine Comedy.

Did Beatrice really exist? We know that there was a real person named Beatrice Portinari who died around the time Dante says his Beatrice did. Did she really have such an influence upon the young Dante, or does Dante simply invent this conceit in order to embark on a revolutionary treatment of a woman’s role in a poet’s life? It is impossible to prove or disprove this influence, for we only have Dante’s word. Whether or not the young Dante was so struck by Beatrice at the age of eight that she led him to poetic glory, Dante states that this early innamoramento transformed his life and mind. In the process, Dante raised the poetry of praise, the most traditional role of medieval love poetry, to the highest possible level, surpassing the traditional claims of courtly poetry that a woman’s love (sexual or chaste) refined a man. Dante affirmed that a woman’s love could lead a man or a poet to God, and this bordered on blasphemy. It was, at the same time, a step back from the avowed sensuality of troubadour lyrics and the creation of a literary relationship between the lover and his beloved that would later come to be labeled “platonic.”

For approximately a decade between the time La Vita Nuova was completed and his exile from Florence in 1302, Dante divided his activities between writing and active participation in the communal government. In 1289 Dante took part as a cavalryman in the battle of Campaldino, in which the Florentine Guelphs were victorious against the Ghibellines of the nearby Tuscan city of Arezzo. Guelph and Ghibelline traditionally refer to Italian political factions allied, respectively, to the papacy and to the Holy Roman Empire.