SOURCE: "New Life," in In Praise of Love: An Introduction to the Love-Poetry of the Renaissance, The Macmillan Company, 1958, pp. 256-72.

Valency argues that the Vita Nuova is the work in which Dante first moved beyond the conventional "dolce stil nuovo" (sweet new style) into a visionary idealism that found its mature expression in the Divina Commedia.

The action of the Vita Nuova developed as naturally out of the songs of the dolce stil as the drama of true love out of the troubadour chansons. We have no difficulty in identifying the plot of Dante's early masterpiece. It is the old story, adapted conformably with the new setting and the new age in which it was rooted.

The Vita Nuova reflects in detail the changes which had come over the chivalric tradition in its process of naturalization in the Italian cities. It is urban in its environment and...