Renaissance Literature

Dante Alighieri

Dante

An Italian poet whose “Divina Commedia” (The Divine Comedy) is considered one of the greatest masterpieces of world literature. Written in Dante’s regional (Tuscan) dialect, this philosophical poem defined the Italian language as a literary one, and established the Tuscan dialect as the standard for Italian. He was the first to use the vernacular in poetry instead of the almost universally used Latin.

Dante

Francesco Petrarca

Petrarca

An Italian scholar and poet in Renaissance Italy, and one of the earliest Humanists.

Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism".

Petrarca

He is famous for his poetry, especially the Canzoniere and the Trionfi.

Petrarch's sonnets style became an important model for Italian literature for three centuries.

He is also known for being the first to develop the concept of the “Dark Ages”

Canzoniere

A collection of poems by Petrarca

Though the majority of his work was in Latin, but this was written in vernacular

Giovanni Boccaccio

Giovanni

An Italian author, poet, and, along with Petrarch, the earliest Renaissance humanist.

Giovanni

His best-known work, Decameron, subtitled Prince Galehaut examines characters as spirited and realistic individuals with their virtues and faults. He wrote both in Latin and in the vernacular, raising, together with Petrarch, vernacular literature to the status of the Latin one.

A Tale from the Decameron

William Shakespeare

• An English poet and dramatist, considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time.

• Shakespeare utilized his knowledge of Greek and Roman classics when writing his plays, before the renaissance, these texts had been suppressed by the Church.

• He focused on creating “human” characters with psychological complexity

• The upheaval in the accepted social hierarchy allowed Shakespeare to explore the humanity of every character regardless of their social position.