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About Christine De Pizan we can say that she was married at 15 and a widow at 25. In order to support herself and her children, she turned to writing as a way to generate income. She worked for the French royal court, producing many popular works about women’s roles in the aristocracy.She also wrote poetry, biographies and essays, the most notable of which is “Le Débat Sur Le Roman de la Rose,” which fiercely retorts Jean de Meun’s ideas about women in his poem, “Romance of the Rose.” With her training in logic and rhetoric, she was able to gain respect from both men and women all over Europe.

Very little is known about Marie de France, except that she was born and lived during the 12th century. According to Judy Shoaf, who translated much of her poetry, “She may have been an aristocratic woman, perhaps a nun, living in England but from France.” She published several poems, including a collection of poetry called “Lais,” and is considered one of the founders of French romantic poetry.  At a time when few women were education, Marie de France not only wrote, but established, a form of poetry that remained popular for many years.

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Geoffrey Chaucer was an English writer, philosopher, diplomat, and poet, best known for being the author of the Canterbury Tales. He is considered the most important English poet of the Middle Ages and the first to be buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. On the other hand, Sir Thomas Malory was an English writer whose identity remains uncertain but whose name is famous as that of the author of Le Morte Darthur, the first prose account in English of the rise and fall of the legendary king Arthur and the fellowship of the Round Table.

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Khayyám was a Persian poet, philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician – a ‘Renaissance man’ four centuries before the Renaissance even came into being. was a polymath, known for his contributions to mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and Persian poetry. He was born in Nishapur, the initial capital of the Seljuk Empire. As a scholar, he was contemporary with the rule of the Seljuk dynasty around the time of the First Crusade. The earliest allusion to Omar Khayyam's poetry is from the historian Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani, a younger contemporary of Khayyam, who explicitly identifies him as both a poet and a scientist (Kharidat al-qasr, 1174).

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Marco Polo was an Italian traveller who was born in 1254. He dictated stories of his travels throughout Europe and Asia to a cellmate after he was imprisoned during a war between Venice and Genoa, and the Travels was born. It became, by medieval standards, a bestseller, 150 years before the invention of the first modern printing press.

His account of his adventures sometimes has to be taken with a pinch of salt and is sometimes a little dull and slow-moving, but is a valuable insight into the medieval world (and Polo probably saw more of the world than anyone else living at the time). It’s one of the finest medieval books out there, for sheer breadth of geographical coverage!