English Literature: 1300-1600 Authors

Dante Alighieri

"Divine Comedy" is widely considered the greatest literary work composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature. In Italy he is known as il Sommo Poeta (the Supreme Poet) or just il Poeta. He, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are also known as "the three fountains" or "the three crowns." He is also called "the Father of the Italian language."

John Skelton

Appointed tutor to Prince Henry. As rector of Diss he caused great scandal among his parishioners, who thought him, says Anthony Wood, more fit for the stage than for the pew or the pulpit. He was secretly married to a woman who lived in his house, and he had earned the hatred of the Dominican monks by his fierce satire. Consequently he came under the formal censure of Richard Nix, the bishop of the diocese, and appears to have been temporarily suspended.

Thomas Nashe

Considered the greatest of the English Elizabethan pamphleteers. He was also a playwright, poet, and satirist. The remaining decade of his life was dominated by two concerns: finding an adequate patron and participating in controversies, most famously with Richard and Gabriel Harvey. May have contributed to Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy.

Richard Hooker

English Anglican priest and an influential theologian. His defense of the role of redeemed reason informed the theology of the Caroline divines and later provided many members of the Church of England reason with a theological method which combined the claims of revelation, reason and tradition. In retrospect, he has been taken as a founder of Anglican theological thought.

Sir Walter Raleigh

English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, politician, courtier, spy, and explorer. He is also well known for popularizing tobacco in England. He rose rapidly in the favor of Queen Elizabeth I and was knighted in 1585. Instrumental in the English colonization of North America, he was granted a royal patent to explore Virginia, which paved the way for future English settlements. He was imprisoned twice in the Tower of London.

John Donne

His style is characterized by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society and he met that knowledge with sharp criticism.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Known as the Father of English literature. While he achieved fame during his lifetime as an author, philosopher, alchemist and astronomer, composing a scientific treatise on the astrolabe for his ten year-old son Lewis, he also maintained an active career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat. The many jobs that he held in medieval society probably exposed him to many of the types of people he depicted.

Robert Herrick

Lyric poet and cleric. He never married, and none of his love-poems seem to connect directly with any one beloved woman. He loved the richness of sensuality and the variety of life.

Sir Francis Bacon

Philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, orator, essayist, and author. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. After his death, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution. He has been called the creator of empiricism. His works established and popularized inductive methodologies for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method, or simply the scientific method. He famously died by contracting pneumonia while studying the effects of freezing on the preservation of meat.

Ben Jonson

Playwright, poet, and literary critic of the seventeenth century, whose artistry exerted a lasting impact upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularized the comedy of humors. A classically educated, well-read, and cultured man of the English Renaissance with an appetite for controversy.

Sir Philip Sidney

Poet, courtier, and soldier, who is remembered as one of the most prominent figures of the Elizabethan age. Returning to England in 1575, Sidney met Penelope Devereux, the future Lady Rich; though much younger, she would inspire his famous sonnet sequence of the 1580s, "Astrophel and Stella."

William Shakespeare

Poet, playwright and actor, often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon." His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays,154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, the authorship of some of which is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.

John Donne

Poet, satirist, lawyer and a cleric in the Church of England. Considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His works are noted for their strong, sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially compared to that of his contemporaries.

George Gascoigne

Poet, soldier and unsuccessful courtier, considered the most important poet of the early Elizabethan era. He was the first poet to deify Queen Elizabeth I, in effect establishing her cult as a virgin goddess married to her kingdom and subjects.

Elizabeth Cary

Poet, translator, and dramatist. Precocious and studious, known from a young age for a knowledge of languages. Very much in love with poetry and believed it the highest literary form. Many poems have been lost over time but this writer's dedication to poetry is evident throughout their plays.

Edmund Spenser

Recognized as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy and is considered one of the greatest poets in the English language. By 1594, his first wife had died, and in that year he married Elizabeth Boyle, to whom he addressed the sonnet sequence "Amoretti." The marriage itself was celebrated in "Epithalamion."

Henry Howard

The Early of Surrey, and one of the founders of English Renaissance poetry. He and his friend Sir Thomas Wyatt were the first English poets to write in the sonnet form Shakespeare later used, and due to their excellent translations of Petrarch's sonnets, are known as "Fathers of the English Sonnet." The first English poet to publish blank verse.

Arthur Golding

Translator of more than 30 works from Latin into English. What makes him influential and important is his desire to pull Christian symbolism from the text and write in such a way as to make the work accessible to his peers.

George Herbert

Welsh-born English poet, orator, and Anglican priest. His poetry is associated with the writings of the metaphysical poets. He wrote religious poems characterized by a precision of language, a metrical versatility, and an ingenious use of imagery or conceits that was favored by the metaphysical school of poets. Some of his poems have endured as popular hymns.