← Fame through time1600-1699
The 17th century
Whose working lives fell in the 17th century. Books are measured from 1800 and readers from 2015, so for this period we can say who lived then, not who was talked about then.
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 17th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Claudio Monteverdi14 decades - 2
Henry Purcell22 decades - 3
Jean-Baptiste Lully6 decades - 4Johann Pachelbel9 decades
- 5
Arcangelo Corelli20 decades - 6
Dieterich Buxtehude1 decades - 7
Carlo Gesualdo20 decades - 8
Alessandro Scarlatti21 decades - 9
Heinrich Schütz20 decades - 10
Marc-Antoine Charpentier9 decades - 11
Marin Marais8 decades - 12
Michael Praetorius15 decades - 13
Heinrich Biber4 decades - 14
Girolamo Frescobaldi17 decades - 15
Gregorio Allegri16 decades - 16
Orlando Gibbons20 decades - 17
Barbara Strozzi5 decades - 18
Joachim Neander14 decades - 19
Johann Joseph Fux9 decades - 20
Johann Ambrosius Bach0 decades - 21
Francesco Cavalli22 decades - 22
Alessandro Stradella17 decades - 23
Francesca Caccini9 decades - 24
Maurice, Landgrave of Hesse-Kasselnot measured- - 25
Ferdinando de' Medici, Grand Prince of Tuscany22 decades
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.