The rise of an educated merchant class created a market for literature as well as art. Florentine poet Petrarch (1304– 1374) is credited with being the first great writer of the Renaissance. His introspective verse, which broke from the past in making poetry more personal, more about humanist notions of individual feelings and less about impersonal moral lessons, had a great influence of the writers to follow. While Petrarch shaped the style of poetry, fellow Italian Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) shaped the style of prose in his funny and bawdy stories in the Decameron. Less introspective than Petrarch, Boccaccio nevertheless presented a dynamic and detailed description of the people of the time, which made his work a model for subsequent novelists.

Nonfiction writers of influence include Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527), a Florentine historian whose political treatise The Prince (c. 1513) is considered one of the first works of...