Curated category
15th-century writers in Latin
- Matteo PalmieriMatteo di Marco Palmieri was born in Florence in 1406 into a middle-class family that already knew how to navigate the city's corridors of power.
- Antonio BonfiniAntonio Bonfini arrived at the Hungarian royal court with a scholar's restlessness and a humanist's ambitions, and what he produced there would shape how…
- Manuel ChrysolorasManuel Chrysoloras arrived in Florence in the winter of 1397, carrying something that had been absent from northern Italy for seven centuries. Greek.
- Leon Battista AlbertiLeon Battista Alberti once boasted that he could stand with his feet together and spring clean over a man's head. He claimed he could throw a coin so high…
- John GowerJohn Gower wrote nearly thirty thousand lines of verse in three different languages, and almost nobody knows his name. Born around 1330, he was a personal…
- Conrad CeltesConrad Celtes died in Vienna in 1508, felled by syphilis. He was born on the 1st of February 1459. By the time of his death, admirers called him the…
- Leonardo BruniLeonardo Bruni sat in one of Florence's highest political offices. Still, historian Arthur Field has identified him as an apparent plotter against Cosimo de'…
- Janus PannoniusJanus Pannonius lived under four names. Hungarian speakers knew him as Csezmiczei János. Croatian speakers called him Ivan Česmički.
- Lorenzo VallaLorenzo Valla, born in Rome around 1407, did something that no one else in the Christian world had dared to do: he proved, using the tools of grammar and…
- Filippo BuonaccorsiFilippo Buonaccorsi was born in San Gimignano on the 2nd of May 1437, in the hill town of Tuscany that tourists still flock to today for its medieval towers.
- Nicholas of CusaNicholas of Cusa was born in 1401 in the small town of Kues, tucked into southwestern Germany along the Moselle River, the second child of a prosperous boat…
- Flavio BiondoFlavio Biondo was born in 1392 in Forlì, the capital of the Romagna region, and he spent much of his life trying to rescue a city from its own forgetting.
- Giovanni Pico della MirandolaGiovanni Pico della Mirandola was 23 years old when he announced a challenge to the entire intellectual world. In December 1486, he published 900 theses…
- Poggio BraccioliniGian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini arrived in the village of Terranuova near Arezzo on the 11th of February 1380. His father took him to Florence to pursue…