Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Age of Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, was a period of intellectual and cultural flourishing in Europe and Western civilization that emerged in the late 17th century and peaked in the 18th. It emphasized reason, empirical evidence, and the scientific method, and promoted individual liberty, religious tolerance, progress, and natural rights.
The Enlightenment emerged in the late 17th century and reached its peak in the 18th century. Some date its beginning to the publication of Descartes' Discourse on the Method in 1637 or Newton's Principia Mathematica in 1687, while European historians traditionally placed its start at the death of Louis XIV in 1715. Many now date its end to the early 19th century, with the latest proposed year being the death of Immanuel Kant in 1804.
Key Enlightenment figures included Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Denis Diderot, and Cesare Beccaria. Earlier philosophers who influenced the movement included Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and Baruch Spinoza.
The Encyclopedie was one of the most influential Enlightenment publications, compiled by Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, and a team of 150 others. It was published between 1751 and 1772 in 35 volumes and helped spread Enlightenment ideas across Europe and beyond.
Enlightenment ideas undermined the authority of monarchies and religious officials and paved the way for the political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. The movement has been frequently linked to the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, and Locke's theory of natural rights influenced the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
The rights of women and nonwhite people were generally overlooked in Enlightenment philosophy, which was often explicitly Eurocentric, and scientific racism first emerged during this time. Many European countries deliberately excluded Enlightenment philosophies from the question of slavery, and European nations and the United States refused to support the Haitian Revolution, a slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue that ran from 1791 to 1804.
Enlightened absolutism described absolute monarchs who tried to apply Enlightenment thought on religious and political tolerance, often to build stronger states. These enlightened despots included Frederick the Great of Prussia, Catherine the Great of Russia, Leopold II of Tuscany, and Joseph II of Austria.