Browse Items (202 total)

This coin was a common currency for the Papal states during the mid to late 15th century. Politically currency was important to the Papal States so they could continue to hold sway over the italian city states and rest of Europe. However between…

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…

In the 1600s the young Dutch Republic was the envy of Europe. Despite their small size and decentralized government structure, the United Provinces of the Netherlands managed to make themselves the middlemen of the world in the 17th century by…

Westminster Abbey is certainly not a structure built during the Protestant Reformation, nor the English Reformations, but its history is inextricably entangled with Protestantism and Anglicanism, so it has earned its spot in this era. The original…

This large architectural project took Michelangelo and many assistants four decades to complete from the date of its commissioning. In fact, it was completed in a radically different form than originally envisioned over thirty years after its…

An Introduction to "Maritime History in Early Modern Europe (1492-1807)."

No exploration of maritime history in the early modern period would be complete without a look at the largest driver of maritime trade during the later part of this period, the trade in human slaves. The history of African slavery in the Americas…

Fort Bourtange (Vesting Bourtange in Dutch) is a textbook example of the “star fort” or “bastion” fortification type which grew to prominence in the later Renaissance. Construction began during the Dutch Revolt in 1580 under the orders of William of…

The story of Adam and Eve being expelled by God from the Garden of Eden because of Eve's vulnerability to the temptation of the forbidden fruit is one of the opening stories of the Bible. It lays the foundation of roles of women in Christianity:…

In A Vindication of the Rights of the Women, written by Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792, Wollstonecraft responded to the thoughts of some education theorists who didn’t think women should receive proper education. She argued that by giving women proper…