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Dante also helped to popularize the themes of Provencal poetry in Italy. This type of poetry was written in what is now Provence in south-west France. Provencal troubadours celebrated chivalry and especially courtly love. This style of poetry celebrated an unattainable love and was very influential in the Renaissance in Italy. Dante’s work did much to spread the ideas of ‘courtly love’ across Europe from the 14th to the 16th century.

The publication of the Divine Comedy is often seen as the beginning of the Renaissance and the end of the Late Medieval Period in Italy even though the poem's subject is religion and salvation. It seems contrary to the spirit of the Renaissance that extolled the pleasures of this world and the individual to have started with work focused on religion. Dante did not believe that this world was an antechamber to the next world but had its value and merits.