Browse Items (202 total)

Shortly after the publication of Martin Luther’s complaints against the Catholic Church in the early 16th century, Protestant religions rapidly spread across the European continent through printed documents as well as traveling preachers…

After 1450, humanism began to spread from its roots in Florence -- long regarded as a hub for scholars -- to Vienna, Heidelberg, and the royal seats of England, France, and Spain (Wiesner-Hanks, 140). Scholars traveled all over Europe, carrying their…

“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…

This engraving of Martin Luther depicts him mostly likely after he wrote the 95 thesis. The engraving of Martin Luther is shaped as an oval with Latin and Dutch sentences below it talking about Luther’s beliefs. This piece was likely used as…

A religious educator as depicted in this picture, Angela Merici (1474-1540) was the founder of the Company of St.Ursula, “a group of lay single women and widows [who are] dedicated to the poor” (Wiesner-Hanks, 189). The company “received papal…

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.…

When Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean in 1492, he may not have found a heretofore undiscovered land, however, he did set into play a series of events that would forever alter the shape of history. Early accounts of the Spanish conquest…

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…

The Andean city of Cusco, located in modern-day Peru, was the capital of the Incan empire from the 13th century until the Spanish arrival in 1533. Coricancha (literally "gold enclosure") was the Incan empire's most important temple complex,…

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…

This map of Flanders and Hainaut was constructed by Mercator following surveys by Jacob van Deventer. The above engraving is one of many engravings of this map, which became the standard map for the region. Historians have postulated that the…

The Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial (usually referred to simply as “El Escorial”) might be seen as the physical embodiment of the Spanish Golden Age. At once austere and ornate, martial and scholarly, tradition-stamped and forward-looking, it…