Sir Francis Bacon achieved fame as an English philosopher, statesman, and essayist. He was knighted in 1603, created Baron Verulam in 1618, and finally created Viscount St Albans in 1621; the peerage titles became extinct upon his death. He...

Giordano Bruno was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, poet, and cosmological theorist. He is known for his cosmological theories, which conceptually extended the then-novel Copernican model. He proposed that the stars w...

William Gilbert, also known as Gilberd, was an English physician, physicist and natural philosopher. He was an early Copernican, and passionately rejected both the prevailing Aristotelian philosophy and the Scholastic method of university t...

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Lord of Montaigne was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance, known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. His work is noted for its merging of casual anecdotes and autobiogra...

John Dee was a noted British mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I. He also devoted much of his life to alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy. Dee straddled the worlds of science and...

Giulio "Delminio" Camillo was an Italian philosopher. He is best known for his Theatre of Memory, described in his posthumously published work L’Idea del Theatro. Camillo notes that L’Idea del Theathro is concerned with ‘the eternal aspect...

Sir Thomas More, known to Catholics as Saint Thomas More since 1935, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman, and noted Renaissance humanist. He was an important councillor to Henry VIII of England and was Lord Chancell...

Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was an Italian historian, politician, diplomat, philosopher, humanist, and writer based in Florence during the Renaissance. He was for many years an official in the Florentine Republic, with responsibilit...

Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, known as Erasmus or Erasmus of Rotterdam, was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, social critic, teacher, and theologian. Erasmus was a classical scholar and wrote in a pure Latin style. Among h...

Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was an Italian Renaissance philosopher. He is famed for the events of 1486, when at the age of 23, he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy and magic against all comers...

Leon Battista Alberti was an Italian author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, cryptographer and general Renaissance humanist polymath. Although he is often characterized as an "architect" exclusively, as James Beck ha...

Edward, called the Philosopher or the Eloquent, was King of Portugal and the Algarve and second Lord of Ceuta from 1433 until his death. He was the son of John I of Portugal and his wife, Philippa of Lancaster, a daughter of John of Gaunt....

Jan Hus, sometimes Anglicized as John Hus or John Huss, was a Czech priest, philosopher, Master, dean and rector at Charles University in Prague, church reformer, founder of Hussitism, a seminal figure in the Bohemian Reformation and a key...

Saint Catherine of Siena was a tertiary of the Dominican Order and a Scholastic philosopher and theologian. She also worked to bring the papacy of Gregory XI back to Rome from its displacement in France, and to establish peace among the Ita...

Geoffrey Chaucer, known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to be buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. While he achieved fame during his...