Definitions

Renaissance Humanism was an intellectual movement typified by a revived interest in the classical world and studies which focussed not on religion but on what it is to be human. Its origins went back to 14th-century Italy and such authors...

William Bradford (l. 1590-1657 CE) was one of the leading members of the congregation of pilgrims who came to North America aboard the Mayflower, a signer of the Mayflower Compact, and the second governor of the Plymouth Colony after the...

Decimus Junius Juvenalis (l. c. 55-138 CE), better known as Juvenal, was a Roman satirist. He wrote five books, containing 16 satires, each of which criticized a different element of Roman society, whether it was poor housing, the patron/client...

The Mayflower Compact is the agreement between the 41 male passengers of the ship Mayflower establishing the form of government of the Plymouth Colony (1620-1691), signed on 11 November 1620 off the coast of present-day Massachusetts, USA...

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) was an Italian poet, writer, and scholar. His most famous and influential work is the Decameron, completed by 1353, in which his ten characters present 100 tales of everyday life. The book covers all manner...

John Carver (l. 1584-1621 CE) was one of the leaders of the Mayflower expedition, first signer of the Mayflower Compact, and first governor of Plymouth Colony. He was a prominent member of the separatist congregation of Leiden, the Netherlands...

Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1469-1536) was a Dutch humanist scholar considered one of the greatest thinkers of the Renaissance. A prolific writer who made full use of the printing press, he produced editions of classical authors, educational treatises...

Christopher Jones (l. c. 1570-1622 CE) was the English captain and quarter-owner of the Mayflower, the cargo ship that brought the religious separatists (now known as pilgrims) to the New World in 1620 CE. Little is known of Jones' life prior...

The Plymouth Colony (1620-1691) was the first English settlement in the region of modern-day New England in the United States, settled by the religious Separatists known as the “pilgrims” who crossed the Atlantic Ocean on the Mayflower in...

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543 CE) was a Polish astronomer who famously proposed that the Earth and other planets revolved around the Sun in a heliocentric system and not, as then widely thought, in a geocentric system where the Earth is...