Browse Items (202 total)

The Hanseatic League (or Hansa) was a mercantile organization founded by traders and merchants from Northern Europe in the thirteenth century. It dominated trade in the region between the Netherlands and Poland and imposed monopolies on many of the…

Though Europe in the 18th century was wracked by internal conflict between great powers and there was significant focus among European intellectuals on domestic matters such as economic or agricultural policy, the continent by no means withdrew or…

Minted five years after the marriage of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, this Spanish gold coin represents the increasingly unified economy of the Iberian peninsula. The marriage of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile was perhaps…

The thaler, a coin widely used throughout Europe since the 16th century, was considered by many to be a standard currency of the era. This particular silver coin, however, was minted in 1761 in northern Germany near the end of its popularity. The…

Here we have the frontispiece, or illustration facing the title page, of Thomas Hobbes’s De Cive, commonly translated as “On the citizen.” I have chosen this work as illustrative of the general trends in philosophical writings of the time that…

Among the concessions made by Ferdinand of Aragon as part of his marriage to Isabella of Castile, which began the unification process of Spain, was a clause obligating the united kingdoms to wage war on the Muslim Moors in the south, who were…

Signed by Clamor Adolph Theodor von dem Bussche, this letter legally granted the emancipation of a German serf named Johann Hermann Weymann in 1762. In one notable line, von dem Bussche proclaimed “freyheit; urkundlich meiner eigenhändigen”, or…

The War of Austrian Succession established the dualism of Prussia and Austria which would characterize the empire until its collapse in 1806. At the end of the 30 years war in 1648 very few Germans likely would have been able to predict Prussia’s…

Francis Drake was a prominent English privateer and naval commander under Queen Elizabeth I, favored for his notable skirmishes against the Spanish Armada and his 1580 circumnavigation of the globe. In this letter to Elizabeth, Drake describes his…

Francis Bacon was a natural philosopher from England who introduced the scientific method through two publications, The Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum. To him, the basis of natural philosophy could be found in observation (Wiesner-Hanks,…

The image selected is an engraving of two scenes from John Foxe's Book of Martyrs. The book was originally printed via woodcut, a method of printmaking in which blocks of wood were engraved to depict a certain scene, covered with ink, and then…

“The School of Athens” is considered by many as one of Raphael’s greatest artistic creations. Raphael was drawing on the rebirth of the analytical questioning of the classics and the works of the “ancient” peoples. In this image, Raphael paints some…