Facts about the life of Elizabethan poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney
1. Philip Sidney invented the name Pamela. Sidney (1554-1586) was a true ‘Renaissance man’: soldier, statesman, poet, diplomat, and – it would appear – coiner of popular girls’ names. Or at least this one name. Pamela appears in Sidney’s long prose work Arcadia (of which more below). The name means ‘all sweetness’ (from pan meaning all, and mela from the Latin for ‘sweet’ or ‘honey’, whence ‘mellifluous’).