At the very beginning of her second novel Valperga (1823), set in the Italy of the early 14 th century, Mary Shelley resumes the traditional imagery which opposes the Middle Ages to the Renaissance by comparing the former to a long night, and the latter to dawn and the birth of light: The other nations of Europe were yet immersed in barbarism, when Italy, where the light of civilization had never been wholly eclipsed, began to emerge from the darkness of the ruin of the Western Empire, and to catch from the East the returning rays of literature and science.