1300 - 1650

8 min read

73 Petrarch

Francesco Petrarca was born in Italy in 1304.  He became a priest and subsequently gained the friendship of Giacomo Colonna, a Roman nobleman and ecclesiastic, living for some years under his patronage. With his first large scale work, Africa— an epic in Latin, Petrarch emerged as a European celebrity. At the same time his skill in writing sonnets in Italian became increasingly evident.  He traveled widely, served as an ambassador, and was a prolific letter writer. He collected manuscripts on his travels and was a prime mover in the recovery of knowledge from writers of Rome and Greece.

74 Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) was born in Paris, France, to a Florentine father and a French mother.  A Florentine scholar, poet, and literary critic, Boccaccio is best known as the author of The Decameron, a collection of 100 stories which deal with humanity in all of its homely disorder, covering the plots and trials of lovers, adventures, tragedies, moral homilies, and descriptions of natural beauty. Boccaccio also wrote lyric poetry and The Genealogy of the Gods, a fifteen-volume encyclopedia of Greek and Roman mythology, which included a defense of poetry. 

75 Hafiz

Hafiz (1320-1391) was the pen-name of Shams-ud din Mahommed, one of the greatest of Persian lyric poets. He spent most of his life at Shiraz, where he was born. He began as a student of poetry and theology, enrolled in the Sufic order of Dervishes, and became a professor of Koranic exegesis. This may account for his pen-name, which means “one who remembers”—a term technically applied to a person who has learned the Koran by heart. However, Hafiz’s freewheeling lifestyle and love of wine caused him to be censured by his monastic colleagues.  

76 Ibn Khaldun

Abu Zaid ibn Mahommed ibn Mahommed ibn Khaldun was born in 1332 in Tunis. He studied various branches of Arabic learning and held high positions in Tunis, Granada, Fez, and Cairo, where he became a judge of Muslim law in 1384. He wrote A Universal History, which deals primarily with the history of the Arabs of Spain and Africa. In his introduction, he puts forward his views on the science of history and the development of society.

80 Erasmus

Desidrius Erasmus, the illegitimate son of a priest,  was born in 1466. He was ordained a priest in 1492 but left the monastic life two years later. He went to Paris to study theology in 1495, and to England in 1499, where he became a close friend of the humanists John Colet and Thomas More. Erasmus traveled widely and was a prolific letter writer. Some extracts from his letters and from Praise of Folly are given here. 

81 Machiavelli

Niccolo Machiavelli was born in Florence in 1469. He entered public life in 1494 as a clerk, later becoming a secretary of Florence, exercising control over departments of interior and war. In 1512,  he wrote 'The Prince', which sets out rules for government of a principality. Machiavelli was motivated by a concern for the good of the people through stability in government. He recognized, however, that a prince must be ready to be cruel and devious, because in the long run this is often kinder than to expose citizens to the turmoil, riots, or invasions that can occur under a weak ruler.

82 Copernicus

Nicolaus Copernicus (Mikolaj Kopernik) was born in Torun, Poland, in 1473. He studied liberal arts, mathematics and optics at the University of Krakow, canon law at Bologna, and medicine at Padua.  He returned to become canon of Frauenberg in 1512, but was not an ordained priest. He was occupied instead with administrative and political affairs and with providing medical assistance to local citizens. His major work on the heliocentric view of the solar system (The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) was published in 1543, shortly before his sudden death in May of that year. Copernicus argued that the earth rotates daily on its axis, that the Moon rotates around the earth, and that the earth-moon system rotates about the sun. He saw nature as a harmonious whole that is disturbed only by violence: that things left in accordance with nature preserve themselves in their own best arrangement. 

84 Rabelais

Francois Rabelais was born in Chinon, France, in about 1494. He was ordained a priest and embarked on a life of study in a Franciscan monastery. There he developed a strong interest in humanism, exploring Greek philosophy and literature. In 1530 he left the monastery  to study medicine at the University of Montpellier, where he received a bachelor’s degree. He became a physician at Lyon but as his interests turned increasingly to literature he began his series of satirical books on the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel, for which he is most famous.

85 Elizabethan Poets

By the time of Chaucer (1343-1400) the English language had begun to emerge in its modern form, although we find his verse difficult to read today. Nevertheless, Chaucer’s genius established English as a new language of literature and was a primary influence on poets of the Fifteenth Century. With the English renaissance of the Sixteenth Century, the language had moved much closer to its modern form, Chaucer came to be regarded as the English Homer, and a new flowering of poetry took place in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

87 Montaigne

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born in the family chateau near Bordeaux in 1533 and was given special training by his father, who would not let him hear any other tongue than Latin—the language of learning—until he was six. He was then sent to the humanistic college de Guienne at Bordeaux. In 1568 he published a French translation of  Natural Theology or the Book of Creatures by Raimond Sebond, a Spanish theologian who taught at Toulouse. Three years later he retired to his chateau and took up the life of essayist, providing a portrait of himself and his era.

88 Chong Ch'ol

The Korean poet Chong Ch’ol (1536-1593) mastered two classical forms of Korean poetry—the kasa and the sijo. The latter, a short popular song, appeared early in the Korean Yi Dynasty. It can be regarded either as a poem of six short lines or as one of three long lines that each have a pause in the middle. The sijo extracts given here reflect Chong Ch’ol's  career. Some relate to his experience as an administrator in the government; others deal with his experiences as an ex-administrator, exiled to the countryside. His concern for doing what was right, and his ability to get entangled in partisan politics, caused his career to alternate in this fashion.

89 Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born in 1547 in Alcala de Henares, Spain.  By the age of 22, he had contributed to a volume on Philipp II’ s third wife. He subsequently enrolled in the army and sailed in the armada under Don John of Austria. He was wounded and later was taken as a slave by Barbary Corsairs.  Cervantes’ family was able to buy his release in 1580. It may have been about ten years later that he started writing the history of Don Quixote, a comic novel so successful that three pirated editions were immediately issued.

91 Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, England, in 1564, and emerged into prominence as a playwright when he wrote the three Henry IV plays in 1591 and 1592, followed by Richard III in 1593, and Richard II in 1594 or 1595. Thereafter there was an outpouring of plays that finally ceased with the Tempest in 1612.  In his early experience of writing about the struggles for the English crown, and of the civil wars and rebellions that ensued, Shakespeare developed his thoughts on the nature of kingly rule, the mayhem that followed usurpation of power, the suffering brought by wars, and the elusiveness of the concept of honor.

92 Bacon

 Bacon entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and matriculated two years later.  In  1579 his father died, and Bacon, having only a small income, studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1582. In 1584 he was elected to Parliament. By 1619 he had risen to the position of Lord Chancellor with the title Baron Verulam. Bacon's ambition was to produce a new beginning for the investigation of  nature, entitled in Latin, Magna Instauratio. This was to be in six parts, but only the first two, The Advancement of Learning and the Novum Organum were completed.

93 Galileo

94 Harvey