Philip the Bold (Dutch: Filips de Stoute French: Philippe le Hardi), also Philip II, Duke of Burgundy (January 15, 1342, Pontoise – April 27, 1404, Halle), was the fourth and youngest son of King John II of France and his wife, Bonne of Luxembourg. By his marriage to Margaret III, Countess of Flanders, he also became Count Philip II of Flanders, Count Philip IV of Artois and Count-Palatine Philip IV of Burgundy. He was the founder of the Burgundian branch of the House of Valois.

Born in 1342, Philip gained his cognomen the Bold when, at the age of 14, he fought beside and was captured with his father at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. He was created Duke of Touraine in 1360, but in 1363, as a reward for his behaviour at Poitiers, he returned this to the crown, receiving instead from his father the Duchy of Burgundy in apanage, which his father had been Duke of since the death of Philip of Rouvres in 1361. Philip would rule the Duchy until his death.

On 19 June 1369, Philip married the 19 year old Margaret of Dampierre, the daughter of Louis II, Count of Flanders, who would become the heiress of Flanders, Brabant, Artois, and the Free County of Burgundy after the death of her brother in 1376. Margaret was the widow of his stepbrother, Philip of Rouvres, Duke of Burgundy, Count Palatine of Burgundy, and Count of Artois, Boulogne and Auvergne. The two had been betrothed and married as children, she at seven years old, he at 11 years old; he died when he was about 15 and she about 11. Their marriage was without issue. As her father's eventual heiress, Margaret would bring rich possessions to her husband and to their children.

Claus Sluter (born 1340s in Haarlem; died in 1405 or 1406, Dijon) was a sculptor of Dutch origin. He was the most important northern European sculptor of his age and is considered a pioneer of the "northern realism" of the Early Netherlandish painting that came into full flower with the work of Jan van Eyck and others in the next generation.

Sluter probably worked in Brussels before moving to the Burgundian capital of Dijon, where from 1385 to 1389 he was the assistant of Jean de Marville, Court Sculptor to Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. From 1389 to his death he was Court Sculptor himself, with the rank of valet de chambre. He was succeeded by his nephew Claus de Werve.

He restored the monumental scale and naturalism of the classical era to figural sculpture. His later work is highly emotional, using facial expressions, figural stance, and drapery; this can be particularly seen in the heavy folds of cloth that so many later imitators draped around their figures. His most famous surviving work is the Well of Moses (1395–1403), created for the Carthusian monastery of Champmol built by Philip the Bold just outside Dijon (at the time - now part of the city). Sluter was also responsible for the main part of the work on Philip's tomb, which (restored and partly reconstructed) has been moved to the former ducal palace in Dijon.

Philip Berber (born 1958) is an Irish millionaire and philanthropist. He is well known for his former company, CyBerCorp, which he sold for $488 million dollars in 2000 and his subsequent philanthropy through his and his wife's charity, A Glimmer of Hope Foundation.

Berber was born in Dublin in 1958. He attended Wesley College, Dublin in South Dublin. Following school, he attended University College Dublin and studied for a Business Communication degree. In addition to Berber, 'The Class of '79' would boast a number of other high flying business and political figures. He was also in the same classes as Dan O'Connell^{[disambiguation needed ]} and Brian MacCaba, the latter with whom he would form one of his first companies in 1984.

In 1984 he set up a high-tech London-based company, Financia, which was bought in 1991 by Frontier Financial of Houston.

Berber set up CyBerCorp in 1995. It was one of the first online trading firms for retail investors. He would sell the firm to Charles Schwab in 2000 for $488 million dollars.

Christine de Pizan (also seen as de Pisan) (1363 – c. 1430) was a Venetian-born late medieval author who challenged misogyny and stereotypes prevalent in the late medieval culture. As a poet, she was well known and highly regarded in her own day; she completed 41 works during her 30 year career (1399–1429), and can be regarded as Europe’s first professional woman writer. She married in 1380, at the age of 15 and was widowed 10 years later. Much of the impetus for her writing came from her need to earn a living for herself and her three children. She spent most of her childhood and all of her adult life based in Paris and then the abbey at Poissy, and wrote entirely in her adoptive tongue of Middle French.

Her early courtly poetry is marked by her knowledge of aristocratic custom and fashion of the day, particularly involving women and the practice of chivalry. Her early and later allegorical and didactic treatises reflect both autobiographical information about her life and views and also her own individualized and humanist approach to the scholastic learned tradition of mythology, legend, and history she inherited from clerical scholars and to the genres and courtly or scholastic subjects of contemporary French and Italian poets she admired. Supported and encouraged by important royal French and English patrons, she influenced 15th-century English poetry. Her success stems from a wide range of innovative writing and rhetorical techniques that critically challenged renowned male writers, such as Jean de Meun who incorporated misogynist beliefs within their literary works.

Gilles de Binche (called Binchois), also known as Gilles de Bins (ca. 1400 – 20 September 1460), was a Franco-Flemish composer, one of the earliest members of the Burgundian School, and one of the three most famous composers of the early 15th century. While often ranked behind his contemporaries Guillaume Dufay and John Dunstaple, at least by contemporary scholars, his influence was arguably greater than either, since his works were cited, borrowed and used as source material more often than those by any other composer of the time.

Binchois was probably from Mons, the son of Jean and Johanna de Binche, who may have been from the nearby town of Binche. His father was a councillor to Duke Guillaume IV of Hainault, and also had a position in a church in Mons. Nothing is known about Gilles until 1419, when he became organist at the church of Ste. Waudru in Mons. In 1423 went to live in Lille. Around this time he may have been a soldier in the service of the Burgundians, or perhaps the English Earl of Suffolk, as indicated by a line in the memorial motet written on his death by Ockeghem.