Europe reorganising its intellectual and religious life.
11 topics · 10 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Praise of Folly
Desiderius Erasmus · 1509
A satire narrated by Folly herself argues that human institutions, including the Church's own rituals and scholastic learning, run on self-deception…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
On the Freedom of a Christian
Martin Luther · 1520
Argues that a Christian is made free by faith alone yet bound to serve others through love, the paradox at the centre of Luther's break with a church…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
Jacob Burckhardt · 1860
Invented the Renaissance as a period and the idea of the self-fashioning individual — hugely influential and steadily qualified since.
+3 more at this level
10 works
Desiderius Erasmus
A satire narrated by Folly herself argues that human institutions, including the Church's own rituals and scholastic learning, run on self-deception and vanity far more than on the reason they claim.
about 2.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Theodore Low De Vinne
Weighs the evidence against rival claims for Coster of Haarlem and others to argue Gutenberg's Mainz workshop was where movable type was actually invented, and reconstructs the technical steps that made it possible.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Martin Luther
Argues that a Christian is made free by faith alone yet bound to serve others through love, the paradox at the centre of Luther's break with a church he believed had made salvation a matter of purchasable works.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Giorgio Vasari
Tells the Renaissance as a story of art reborn and perfected through successive generations, inventing both art history and the idea of the artist as individual genius.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Knox
Knox's own account of Scotland's Calvinist Reformation, arguing it was a godly rebellion against an idolatrous crown rather than the political revolt his opponents called it.
about 11 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Galileo Galilei
Stages a debate between a Copernican, a defender of Ptolemy and a neutral layman to argue heliocentrism is not merely a calculating device but a true description of the world.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jacob Burckhardt
Invented the Renaissance as a period and the idea of the self-fashioning individual — hugely influential and steadily qualified since.
about 14 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Niccolò Machiavelli
A history of Florence commissioned by the Medici that nonetheless argues the city's internal factional violence, not fortune, was the enduring engine of its politics.
link checked 17 Sept 2026J. Waterworth
The official doctrinal and disciplinary decrees by which the Catholic Church answered the Protestant Reformation, reaffirming transubstantiation and clerical celibacy while reforming clerical education and abuses.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026James Westfall Thompson
Argues that France's sixteenth-century religious wars were fought as much over rival noble factions' access to royal power as over Catholic and Huguenot doctrine, culminating in the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre.
link checked 17 Sept 2026