This introductory chapter provides an overview of the key milestones that have historically shaped the doctrine of furor poeticus. The concept is not attested before the fifth century BC, when it emerges among the pre-Socratic philosophers, but it is Plato who, in dialogues such as the Ion and the Phaedrus, gives the theory its definitive form, embedding it within a broader framework that identifies up to four types of furor. In its Peripatetic reception, and later in the Roman world, Platonic ideas concerning the divine origins of poetic inspiration were increasingly naturalised and reinterpreted: this can be seen, for instance, in the pseudo-Aristotelian notion of melancholy or in Horace’s influential concept of ingenium. During the Middle Ages, the idea of Christian creation gradually supplanted these earlier models, culminating in the fully developed concept of the poeta theologus, particularly in the works of Italian authors such as Dante, Mussato, and Petrarch. In the second half of the fifteenth century, the humanist Marsilio Ficino, founder of the Florentine Neoplatonic school, redefined these traditions, producing the most influential philosophical-theological synthesis of furor poeticus, which would have far-reaching effects throughout the European Renaissance and beyond.