Dr. David Allen White analyses the person and poetry of Petrarch, who arguably introduced the literary forms of the High Middle Ages in the 14th century, specifically the sonnet. Petrarch is contrasted with Dante, and in Petrarch is seen the beginning Humanism, the beginning of the loss of the Christian sense of immortality in Western culture. Taken from: Christianity in the Late Middle Ages-Early Renaissance - 1996 VonHildebrand Institute