On Good Friday in 1327, the Italian scholar and poet Francesco Petrarch saw a woman he called 'Laura' at the Church of Sainte-Claire in Avignon, France. This encounter sparked a lifelong, unreciprocated passion that endured for decades, even after Laura succumbed to the Black Death in 1348. Petrarch's obsessive, idealized devotion to this mysterious woman occurred during the Avignon Papacy, a period of major geopolitical and religious shifts in Europe.

This singular love affair inspired Petrarch's 'Canzoniere' (Songbook), a collection of 366 poems that perfected the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet structure. This poetic innovation established the dominant standard for Renaissance lyric poetry across Europe, directly inspiring later English masters like Thomas Wyatt, William Shakespeare, and Edmund Spenser.