Prominent figures of the Renaissance, understood as a broadly European era, include philosopher and statesman Niccolò Machiavelli, known for the political treatise The Prince; Francis Bacon, a statesman and philosopher considered the master of the English tongue; the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who developed the theory that the solar system was centred on the Sun; the poets Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio, who laid the foundations for humanism, the mode of thought at the core of the Renaissance; William Shakespeare, considered the greatest English dramatist of all time; astronomer and mathematician Galileo, who helped disprove much medieval-era thinking in science; and the explorers Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Hernán Cortés.
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