Francesco Petrarca was a pioneering Italian scholar, famed as the Renaissances first poet laureate and the father of Humanism.
Sir Philip Sidney was an influential Elizabethan poet, courtier, and soldier, renowned for his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella and his role in the Protestant cause.
Thomas Occleve was an English poet and clerk of the Privy Seal, best known for his insightful and moralistic works in the late Middle Ages.