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During the years 1457-1465 Francesco Filelfo, the first important Western European professor of Greek after Guarino Veronese, composed a remarkable collection of poems in classical Greek. On April 9, 1458 Filelfo claimed in a letter to Girolamo Castelli, Duke Borso d'Este's court poet and personal physician, that he was the first Italian to write Greek poetry. In the same letter Filelfo announced that he fully intended to compose not merely a single verse epistle in Greek, but rather several books of Greek poems: “nec id una epistola quapiam sum facturus, sed libellis, ut spero, compluribus.“ In 1457 Filelfo had already written the distinguished scholar and philosopher from Constantinople, John Argyropulos, to ask for primers on Greek prosody and the Greek dialects, particularly the Aeolic. By July 27, 1465 Filelfo wrote to Cardinal Bessarion in Rome, then the leading figure in Greek emigré circles, informing him that he had just mailed three books of his own Greek poems, amounting to twenty-four hundred lines, to the Cardinal for his appraisal.

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Cassandra Fedele (b. 1465–d. 1558) was the most renowned female scholar of Latin and Greek in Europe by 1500. On her death she left a book of 121 Latin letters and three orations, published posthumously in 1636. She was born to citizen-class parents Angelo Fedele and Barara Leoni in Venice, neither of them scholars. Her father hired a Servite friar, Gasparino Borro, to teach her Latin and Greek. She delivered her first public oration in Latin at the University of Padua in 1487: published in Modena in 1487, Nuremberg in 1488, and Venice in 1489. Fedele delivered her second Latin oration before the doge Agostino Barbarigo and the Venetian senate in 1487. After her marriage to the physician Gian-Maria Mappelli, she disappeared from the public arena until 1556 when she delivered an oration in honor of Queen Bona Sforza of Poland on her arrival in Venice. The biographical tradition attests to her having written poetry and a book titled Ordo scientiarum (The order of the sciences) but no trace of this work survives.