In his inordinately influential essay, Charles S. Singleton considers Beatrice in terms of her Christological allegorical relevance to the Dantean project. The poet's retrospection of the events of Beatrice's life and death signify a revelation of Christian caritas (Singleton, 75; 111-113). With differences in modulation, virtually all critical responses after Singleton posit Beatrice as the ineluctable point of alterity (beatitude) to which Dante's writing tends. Some recent work has tended to diminish the overtly theological comportment granted to Beatrice by Singleton's essay, but the insistence on Beatrice as the figure for Dante's epiphanic experience of writing nevertheless remains (cf. Harrison, 44).
A recent tendency has been to emphasize that Beatrice was entirely imagined by Dante and that any vestigial identification with an historical person would be at best superfluous and at worst misleading. Giorgio Agamben makes the claim that for the stilnovists the amatory experience is unequivocally an experience of the absolute primordiality of the event of poetic discourse over biographical events (Agamben, 478-479). Beatrice is thus construed as nothing more than a figuration of beatitude. Textual validation for this claim comes from her introduction as "la gloriosa donna de la mia mente, la quale fu chiamata da molti Beatrice li quali non sapeano che si chiamare" (VN: II.1; emphasis added). The name Beatrice is thus a name given in ignorance to a divine effect.