Peter Minuit, Pierre Minuit or Peter Minnewit was a Walloon from Wesel, in present-day North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, then part of the Duchy of Clèves. He was the Director-General of the Dutch colony of New Netherland from 1626 until 1633...

Jan Baptist van Helmont was an early modern period Flemish chemist, physiologist, and physician. He worked during the years just after Paracelsus and iatrochemistry, and is sometimes considered to be "the founder of pneumatic chemistry". Va...

Quevedo was a Spanish satirist, novelist and poet and one of the great writers of the Spanish Golden Age. His Los sueños is a brilliant and bitterly satiric account of the inhabitants of hell. Other major works include the philosophical tre...

Frans Hals was the great 17th-century portraitist of the Dutch bourgeoisie of Haarlem, where he spent practically all his life. Hals evolved a technique that was close to impressionism in its looseness, and he painted with increasing freedo...

Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft - Knight in the Order of Saint Michael - was a Dutch historian, poet and playwright from the period known as the Dutch Golden Age. Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft, often abbreviated to P.C. Hooft, was born in Amsterdam...

Massasoit Sachem or Ousamequin was the sachem or leader of the Wampanoag confederacy. Massasoit means Great Sachem. Massasoit's people had been seriously weakened by a series of epidemics and were vulnerable to attacks by the Narraganset...

The calendar used throughout the world today is the Gregorian calendar. It is sometimes called a "Christian" calendar. The Gregorian calendar is the one commonly used today. It was proposed by Aloysius Lilius, a physician from Naples, and a...

Orlando Gibbons was an English composer, virginalist and organist of the late Tudor and early Jacobean periods. He was a leading composer in the England of his day. Gibbons wrote a quantity of keyboard works, around thirty fantasias for vio...

Robert Johnson was an English composer and lutenist of the late Tudor and early Jacobean eras. He is sometimes called "Robert Johnson II" to distinguish him from an earlier Scottish composer. Johnson worked with William Shakespeare providin...

Wallenstein was a Bohemian soldier and politician who gave his services (an army of 30,000 to 100,000 men) during the Danish Period of the Thirty Years' War to Ferdinand II for no charge except the right to plunder the territories that he c...

Girolamo Frescobaldi was a major composer from the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods whose keyboard works rank among the most important of his time. His sacred and secular vocal music is generally assessed to be less important but...

Hugo Grotius, also known as Hugo de Groot, was a jurist in the Dutch Republic. With Francisco de Vitoria and Alberico Gentili he laid the foundations for international law, based on natural law. He was also a philosopher, theologian, Christ...

Giordano Bruno's notorious public death in 1600, at the hands of the Inquisition in Rome, marked the transition from Renaissance philosophy to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. This volume presents new translations of Ca...

Balthazar Gerards (1557-1584) was the assassin of the Dutch independence leader, William the Silent. Gerards was born in Vuillafans, France, at number 3 in the street now called Rue Gerard. He came from a Roman Catholic family with 11 child...

Frederick Henry, prince of Orange; son of William the Silent by Louise de Coligny. He became stadtholder of the United Provinces of the Netherlands upon the death (1625) of his brother Maurice of Nassau. As a minor prince heading a federati...