(1) His great canzone , ‘Donna mi prega,’ which became the subject of learned Latin commentaries, deals with ideas commonly associated with the ‘radical Aristotelianism’ or ‘Averroism’ of his day.(2) Equally commendable is the virtuosity he displayed while experimenting with traditional Western forms like the sonnet and the villanelle, as well as more complex forms such as the canzone and terza rima.(3) Some of these traditions are metric conventions, which are constitutive for certain genres such as Italian and French canzone .(4) But the postBeatrice canzoni discussed in the Convivio are not entirely repudiated in the turn back to Beatrice and sacred love represented by the Commedia, given the role that two of the three play in the poem.(5) These three canzoni were then embedded in a second prose work of Dante's, Il Convivio, which also frames and explicates his lyric verse.
