Curated category
Christian humanists
- John MiltonJohn Milton sold the rights to one of the greatest poems in the English language for five pounds. On the 27th of April 1667, he handed Paradise Lost to the…
- John WesleyOn the evening of the 24th of May 1738, John Wesley went very unwillingly to a religious society on Aldersgate Street in London.
- Thomas MoreThomas More climbed the scaffold at Tower Hill on the 6th of July 1535 and, finding the structure so rickety it might collapse, told the waiting official: "I…
- John WycliffeJohn Wycliffe died in his church at Lutterworth, but the men who hated him would not let his body rest. In 1428, more than forty years after his death, his…
- Aleksandr SolzhenitsynOn the 9th of May 1945, all of Moscow erupted in fireworks and searchlights to mark Germany's surrender. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn watched those…
- ErasmusDesiderius Erasmus woke before dawn, ink already on his fingers, and on a busy day he wrote or answered as many as forty letters in his own hand.
- Leon Battista AlbertiLeon Battista Alberti once boasted that he could stand with his feet together and spring clean over a man's head. He claimed he could throw a coin so high…
- PetrarchPetrarch was born in Arezzo on the 20th of July 1304, and by the time he died seventy years later, he had reshaped what it meant to be a thinking, feeling…
- Huldrych ZwingliHuldrych Zwingli celebrated his first Mass in his hometown of Wildhaus on the 29th of September 1506, a young priest who, by his own admission, had studied…
- Michel de MontaigneMichel de Montaigne was born on the 28th of February 1533 at the family estate, Chateau de Montaigne, in the Guyenne region of France.
- William TyndaleWilliam Tyndale died with a prayer on his lips. Tied to a stake outside Brussels in the autumn of 1536, he called out in a loud voice: "Lord!
- Blaise PascalBlaise Pascal was born on the 19th of June, 1623, in Clermont-Ferrand, in France's Auvergne region by the Massif Central, and he died 39 years later having…
- Søren KierkegaardSøren Aabye Kierkegaard was born on the 5th of May 1813 in Copenhagen, the youngest of seven children in a family that was both prosperous and haunted.
- Lorenzo VallaLorenzo Valla entered the world in Rome around 1407. His father Luciave della Valla worked as a lawyer within the Papal Curia.
- Giovanni Pico della MirandolaGiovanni Pico della Mirandola was 23 years old when he announced a challenge to the entire intellectual world. In December 1486, he published 900 theses…