If the first Italian vernacular poetry of the thirteenth century seamlessly translates the lyrical concept of joi into gioia, the trecento authors Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio transcend the lyrical language of phantasmatic joie d’amour and deploy a new vocabulary. Both Dante and Petrarch create a new form of lyricism in attempting to place lyrics within linear narratives that lead to a form of happiness (beatitudine) or self-knowledge. Moments of love’s joy, however, are characterised by their self-forgetfulness and their lyrical or atemporal escape from narrative. The chapter shows how the three authors posit joy at the crux of important poetic and epistemological questions of concealment and revelation, reinventing the language of love’s joy as one of transcendence. In Dante’s Paradiso, the feeling of joy is the key to Dante’s apprehension of the inapprehensible, whereas Boccaccio uses the phantasmatic nature of lyrical joy to parallel it with spiritual revelation.