← 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
Molière22 decades - 2
John Milton22 decades - 3
Daniel Defoe22 decades - 4
Jean de La Fontaine22 decades - 5
Charles Perrault22 decades - 6
John Donne22 decades - 7
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz21 decades - 8
Pocahontas22 decades
- 9
Jean Racine22 decades - 10
Pierre Corneille22 decades - 11
Mumtaz Mahal9 decades - 12
Ahmed I2 decades - 13
Francisco Quevedo22 decades - 14
Murad IV4 decades - 15
Cyrano de Bergerac0 decades - 16
Ben Jonson22 decades - 17
Pedro Calderón de la Barca22 decades - 18
John Bunyan22 decades - 19
Matsuo Bashō0 decades - 20
John Dryden22 decades - 21
Osman II0 decades - 22
Madame de Sévigné13 decades - 23
Aphra Behn18 decades - 24
Nur Jahan11 decades - 25
Baltasar Gracián14 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.