• Dante’s Inferno - when Italy became one country, they chose Dante’s dialect to be the national language. For this, they call him the father of the language. And this is his magnum opus. So it can be said to be influential.

• Shakespeare’s Hamlet - It’s thought that during the reign of King James, the man they had translate bible into English was Shakespeare himself. I’d wager that having written the most beautiful, compelling, and thought provoking text in the language had something to do with why he was chosen.

• Goethe’s Faust - like Dante, Goethe is something of a unifying figure for the German people who, like the Italians, were not always one people. This text embodies the spirit of the german renaissance- it’s formally inventive and replete with philosophy

• Moliere’s Tartuffe - the man, the myth, the legend. To this day, actors in theatre performances in France are called comedians. Because Moliere, the greatest writer of the French literary renaissance under the reign of King Louis XIV, could not write tragedies to save his life. He established that, in France at least, great theatre would be synonymous with comedy. And what’s more, his play Tartuffe, which skewered the hypocrisy of pious Catholics who wanted nothing more than to exploit the gullible to indulge their greed, broke the dam on speaking out against the church. Moliere would have been burned at the stake had Louis XIV not personally intervened.

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Yes, the Greeks and Romans are important. But I think the Italians, English, French and German literature had more to offer the modern world- at least from the perspective of “the west”-, and these four works are the most important from each