Renaissance/Reformation/Scientific Revolution Timeline

Inquisition

1184

The Inquisition, in historical ecclesiastical terminology also referred to as the "Holy Inquisition", was a group of institutions within the Catholic Church whose aim was to combat heresy. The Inquisition started in 12th-century France to combat religious dissent, particularly among the Cathars and the Waldensians.

Petrarch

Jul 20, 1304

Petrarch enjoyed life in Avignon. Petrarch has a passion for poetry. His earliest poem was about his passing mother. And there is a famous description of him and his brother as dandies in its polished courtly world. But he was also making a name there for his scholarship and the elegance of his culture.

Perspective

1415

Perspective is the art of drawing solid objects on a two-dimensional surface so as to give the right impression of their height, width, depth, and position in relation to each other when viewed from a particular point.

Albrecht Durer

May 21, 1471

Albrecht is a painter and printmaker generally regarded as the greatest German Renaissance artist. His vast body of work includes altarpieces and religious works, numerous portraits and self-portraits, and copper engravings.

Copernicus

Feb 19, 1473

Copernicus was a mathematician and astronomer who proposed that the sun was stationary in the center of the universe. Disturbed by the failure of Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the universe to follow Aristotle’s requirement for the uniform circular motion of all celestial bodies and determined to eliminate Ptolemy’s equant, an imaginary point around which the bodies seemed to follow that requirement, Copernicus decided that he could achieve his goal only through a heliocentric model.

Thomas More

Feb 7, 1478

"Thomas is venerated in the Catholic Church as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman, and noted Renaissance humanist. He also served Henry VIII as Lord High Chancellor of England from October 1529 to May 1532."

Raphael

Apr 6, 1483

Raphael is a Italian master painter and architect of the Italian High Renaissance. Raphael is best known for his Madonnas and for his large figure compositions in the Vatican. His work is admired for it's clarity of form, ease of composition, and visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur.

Thomas Cranmer

Jul 2, 1489

Thomas Cranmer was the first Protestant archbishop of Canterbury (1533–56), adviser to the English kings Henry VIII and Edward VI. he put the English Bible in parish churches, drew up the Book of Common Prayer, and composed a litany that remains in use today. Denounced by the Catholic queen Mary I for promoting Protestantism, he was convicted of heresy and burned at the stake.

John Calvin

Jul 10, 1509

John Calvin was the leading French Protestant reformer and the most important figure in the second generation of the Protestant Reformation. His interpretation of Christianity, advanced above all in his Institutio Christianae religionis (1536 but elaborated in later editions; Institutes of the Christian Religion). The Calvinist form of Protestantism is widely thought to have had a major impact on the formation of the modern world

Sale of Indulgences

1517

In the teaching of the Catholic Church, an indulgence is "a way to reduce the amount of punishment one has to undergo for sins".The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes an indulgence as "a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain prescribed conditions through the action of the Church which, as the minister of redemption.

Council of Trent

1545

The Council of Trent, held between 1545 and 1563 in Trent, was the 19th ecumenical council of the Catholic Church. Prompted by the Protestant Reformation, it has been described as the embodiment of the Counter-Reformation. The Council issued condemnations of what it defined to be heresies committed by proponents of Protestantism, and also issued key statements and clarifications of the Church's doctrine and teachings, including scripture, the Biblical canon,

Scientific Method

1561

The scientific method is an empirical method of acquiring knowledge that has characterized the development of science since at least the 17th century. It involves careful observation, applying rigorous skepticism about what is observed, given that cognitive assumptions can distort how one interprets the observation.

William Shakespeare

1564

William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon".

Rene Descartes

Mar 31, 1596

Rene Descartes was a creative mathematician of the first order, an important scientific thinker, and an original metaphysician. During the course of his life, he was a mathematician first, a natural scientist or “natural philosopher” second, and a metaphysician third. In mathematics, he developed the techniques that made possible algebraic (or “analytic”) geometry.

Francis Bacon

Apr 9, 1626

A lawyer, statesman, philosopher, and master of the English tongue, he is remembered in literary terms for the sharp worldly wisdom of a few dozen essays; by students of constitutional history for his power as a speaker in Parliament and in famous trials and as James I’s lord chancellor; and intellectually as a man who claimed all knowledge as his province and, after a magisterial survey, urgently advocated new ways by which man might establish a legitimate command.