Cultural and Intellectual History - AP European History

Sir Francis Bacon is the man who pioneered the scientific method. It was meant to serve as a pathway for all scientists to objectively observe, and theorize reasons for, natural phenomena in the world.

Thomas Malthus was an Enlightenment-Era British philosopher and economic writer. In his famous work, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus argued that, if the population continued to grow, it would outstrip the supply of food and lead to widespread famine and starvation. Together with Adam Smith and David Ricardo, he remains one of the most influential economic thinkers from this time period.

The invention of the internet has dramatically changed the availability of information, education, and free communication for people around the world. Now everyone with access to the internet has the potential to acquire as much knowledge as they could possibly synthesize in a lifetime (or a million lifetimes). This has opened up human society by allowing greater opportunity and understanding. This sudden widespread dissemination of information may be compared with the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. The introduction of the printing press to Europe allowed works of literature to be printed en masse and shared with a much wider audience than would previously have been possible. The telegraph might have been a reasonable answer, but it was invented in the nineteenth century.

During the dying decades of the Russian Tsarist Empire, the government mandated that all education be carried out in Russian, regardless of the ability of the students in various parts of the multinational empire to understand the language. This, predictably, was unpopular throughout the empire and impeded the ability of non-Russian-speaking citizens to achieve in education and improve their lives. When Lenin came to power, he instituted his “nationalities reforms,” which allowed schools to teach students in their native languages.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (known as CERN, an acronym of its French name) was established in 1954 as a collaborative scientific effort of the member nations of the European Union. It is now, debatably, the most innovative institution on Earth, and is undertaking experiments to ascertain the nature of elemental matter. In 2015, CERN's greatest contribution to mankind has probably been the invention of the internet. Originally invented to help scientists communicate data to one another more efficiently, it has since spread globally and promotes education and understanding around the world.

The first university in Europe was founded in the eleventh century in Bologna, a city in Italy. It is important to note that from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, Italy dramatically led the way in university education. Apart from Oxford and Cambridge, in England, Paris, in France, and Salamanca, in Spain, almost all of the earliest universities were founded in Italy. Italy was the wealthiest region of Europe at this time and the center of European learning from the twelfth century on.

Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, is most responsible for making the Bible available to the common people. Indeed, all of these men, except perhaps Lorenzo the Magnificent, would have had a vested interest in not making the Bible available to the common people— some, like Leo X, even worked actively to prevent this from happening. The printing press allowed the Bible to be reproduced in large quantities and in a wide range of languages. This greatly advanced the capabilities and potential of the Protestant Reformation.

An interesting quirk of history is that the Renaissance movement arose from the dedicated copywork of thousands of unknown and unrecognized monks, who through the centuries had been making copies by hand of numerous important works of philosophy, theocracy, mathematics, science, and history (and many others). The secularization of learning that began with the Humanist movement owes a great debt to the work of these silent monks.

Diderot wrote, collated, edited, and published the Encyclopedie in the middle of the eighteenth century. It was the first organized attempt to collect of “the sum of human knowledge” that had been undertaken. Diderot stated that his goal in writing it was to “change the way people think.” He believed that members of general public could be elevated simply by introducing them to new information and providing them with a resource to educate themselves. It is true that Diderot hoped also to influence the Enlightened Despots of Europe, but his primary goal was simply to spread knowledge around the continent.

After the creation of the Royal Society in London and the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, the two institutions began circulating scientific journals. This gave isolated academics and laypeople access to the newest scientific theories, research, experiments, and ideas, and was important for contributing to the spread of knowledge around Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Royal Society of London was founded in the 1660s by King Charles II. It was created to advance the collective understanding of the natural world by providing funding to scientists, by providing scientists with a place to meet and collate resources, and by giving British scientists a platform from which to disseminate information around Europe.

During the Medieval Era, medical understanding was extremely rudimentary by our modern standards. A second-century Greek physician named Galen believed that the humor body contained four humors: yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm. He believed all diseases were caused by an imbalance in these humors, and his understanding spread around European society so that by the Medieval Era it was the dominant understanding of medical science.

Francesco Guicciardini wrote The History of Italy during the Italian Renaissance. Guicciardini’s most famous work was intended as a contemporary history of Italy during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and was intended for as wide an audience as possible. Guicciardini is responsible for advancing the study of history with his revolutionary historiography and is rightly credited with spreading an understanding of Renaissance Italian history around Europe.

Scholasticism was the dominant method of teaching among academics beginning around the eleventh century and continuing until the Scientific Revolution. It arose out of the European tradition of monastic learning but was widely criticized by humanists during the Renaissance. The humanists derided scholasticism for being based on reverence for traditional and authoritative sources rather than being based on human reason and observation.

Lorenzo Valla was an Italian humanist who lived during the fifteenth century. He is most famous for disproving the validity of the Donation of Constantine through an analysis of vernacular language and context. The Donation of Constantine was a document said to be dated to the fourth century whereby the Roman Emperor Constantine donated the entirety of the Western Roman Empire to the Catholic Church. Obviously, asserting the authenticity of this document served the interests of the Catholic Church, and they were thus disinclined to accept the arguments made by Valla. Nonetheless, Valla's arguments were adopted by other humanists and the fraudulent nature of the Donation of Constantine was eventually accepted.

A Salon served as a gathering place for philosophical thinkers. It was the setting for them to discuss the government, society, and the human condition.

John Calvin was one of the primary leaders of the Protestant Reformation. His Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536) describe the tenets of his theology, including the concept of predestination.

Rudyard Kipling wrote many famous works of British literature at the turn of the twentieth century. They often centered around the British imperial experience, particularly in India. Although he was widely beloved in his time period and his works continue to be influential to this day, he has often been criticized in the last century for his belief in the "civilizing" missions of British imperialism.

Duma were assembled councils created by Czar Nicholas II. While they were assembled to appease, and ostensibly give voice to, the people, the Duma were largely weakened by the fact that the Tzar retained the power to disband them, so although they attempted to represent common people's interests, they were still totally under the power of the Tzar, who would frequently dissolve them for suggesting actions with which he did not agree.

Punch and Judy, imported from Italian comedic theater, was a popular marionette show in France, Britain, and the United States during the 18th century. It became more popular with children as the target audience in 19th century Britain.