How did Beatrice feel about Dante?

by Gullible_Weakness_47

I know that they never married, but did she have any reaction to his poems about her?

HiggetyFlough

This question has a simple but disappointing answer: she would have had no reaction to his poems because they were published after her death. Dante's La Vita Nuova, his first collection of poetry which both introduced Beatrice as the object of a decades-long infatuation and even includes his reactions to Beatrice's death, was published in 1294 CE, while Beatrice Portinari is accepted as dying in 1290 CE. Dante himself notes that he only truly interacted with Beatrice twice, once when they were both nine years of age, and again at age eighteen when she greeted Dante on the street. It should be noted that Dante was writing in the genre of Courtly Love poetry, which emphasized and romanticized infatuation and one's desire for unattainable love. Thus, when Dante claims that his reaction to her greeting him for the first time was that he "felt such bliss that [he] withdrew from people as if [he] were drunk, away to the solitude of [his] room, and settled down to think about this most graceful of women," there is a possibility that he was writing hyperbolically. Beatrice Portinari herself left no primary sources or really any record at all regarding her personality and appearance outside of Dante's work, with the only other source for her existence being the will of her father, which mentions her marriage to the banker Simone dei Bardi, a member of the prestigious house of Bardi in Florence.