Created sometime around the plague outbreak, this set of engravings show the suffering and response of Roman authorities to the spread of disease through the city in 1656. Rome, like the rest of Italy, underwent steep population and economic decline…
Spanish artist Juan de Mesa created this print in 1610, and it features three images from the life and death of Saint Ignatius of Loyola as part of a larger series on the life of Ignatius. Ignatius experienced a deeply spiritual conversion experience…
Pictured in this engraving is Marie Angélique Arnauld, who served as abbess of the Abbey of Port-Royal near Paris. She was a leading proponent of Jansenism, a theological movement in seventeenth century France. It emphasized the reading of Scripture…
Before beginning the discussion of education in Early Modern Europe, Medieval education should be examined. There was institutionalized education before the development of universities, but it took a very different form. In medieval Europe, the power…
This is an illustration of a building at the University of Wittenberg, which was founded in 1502 by Frederick the Wise, a powerful elector in the Holy Roman Empire (“Wittenberg”). Like many universities, it was created from a pre-existing monastery.…
One of the key parts of the Spanish economy in the New World following its conquest was the use of indigenous labor. This system was termed the encomienda system. One of the loudest voices against this system was Bartolomé de las Casas, a former…
This manuscript was an anatomical manual drawn by Juan Valverde de Amusco, a Spaniard born in 1525. Very few of the images were Valverde’s originals, only 4 of 42, but all were corrected to create a more accurate image of the dissected human body…
In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, Spain didn’t develop a major Protestant sect. Instead, many Protestant ideas were erased from public consciousness by the Spanish Inquisition, which encouraged the censure of texts and the murder or…
This collage of colored papers combines to accurately form a sunflower, a flower originally from Mexico that was introduced to Europe in the late 16th century. Botanists and herbalists recorded this flower, and it was grown by John Gerard in 1597 who…