 The second basic complication that hinders any straightforward assessment of the Divine Comedy’s treatment of the nature of philosophy is that Dante’s choice to deploy Beatrice as the ultimate and explicit guarantor of the veracity and salvific potential of the text invokes and transforms the meaning of his entire corpus of writings. That is, because Beatrice and donna gentile are simultaneously real women and yet also allegorical tropes as early as the Vita Nuova, the Divine Comedy’s reinvention of Beatrice calls upon the reader to return to Dante’s earlier texts while also hindering any clear sense of what those texts have to offer in terms of their claims on the reader’s interpretation of the Divine Comedy. Moreover, it must also be kept in mind that the Divine Comedy’s pilgrim is a fictionalized depiction of the same person who, relative to the setting of the Divine Comedy, had already written the Vita Nuova but had not yet begun writing the Convivio, the De vulgari eloquentia, and the Monarchia, and this also contributes to the strange relationship that the Divine Comedy constructs between itself and Dante’s prior writings. Indeed, a great deal of scholarly attention and debate has centered around a handful of passages in the Divine Comedy that may be considered palinodes to Vita Nuova and Convivio [see, for example, Freccero 1973; Hollander 1975, 1990; Jacoff, 1980; Pertile 1993; Scott 1990, 1991, 1995; Ascoli 1995; Dronke 1997; and Aleksander 2011a].