In 1348, Francesco Petrarch's idealised beloved Laura — almost certainly a real woman he had loved at a distance for over two decades — died during the Black Death in Avignon. Petrarch's anguish at her death transformed his already-ongoing Canzoniere project into a monument of lyric grief. His poems mourning Laura are among the most influential in Western literary history, establishing the conventions of the Petrarchan sonnet that would dominate European poetry for three centuries.

The flea-borne plague that killed Laura arguably shaped the entire course of European lyric poetry. Petrarch's post-plague grief intensified the Canzoniere's meditations on loss, transience, and spiritual longing, making the collection a foundational text for the Renaissance sonnet traditions of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare. The parasitic vector of a disease thus stands, indirectly, behind the conventions of the love sonnet itself — an extraordinary literary consequence of insect transmission.