Cultural and Intellectual History - AP European History

Angered by the Pope's refusal to grant him a divorce from his wife, Henry VIII declared that England would leave the Catholic Church and would now be part of the newly created Church of England, with Henry as the head of the church. He subsequently granted himself a divorce from his wife and took a new bride.

John Calvin was influential in reforming the church as a pastor in Geneva, Strasbourg, and Worms. Martin Luther was a church reformer who predated Calvin, and was primarily responsible for the development of Protestantism.

In 1517 Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of a church. The document was formally named his "Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences." The 95 theses were a set of questions and propositions meant to spark debate regarding the practices of the Catholic Church.

The Battle of Bosworth was the final battle of the War of the Roses. This battle was between the then King Richard III of York, and Henry Tudor of the House of Lancaster. Henry Tudor defeated Richard III, and took the crown, becoming King Henry VII of England

There were many important people involved in the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther sparked the reformation when he nailed his 95 theses to the door of a German Church. John Calvin and John Wesley were major leader of later sects (Presbyterian and Methodist) of the Protestant Church that developed.

Kepler, Copernicus, and Galileo were all notable astronomers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Collectively they did a great deal to advance our understanding of the Earth’s place in the solar system and in the universe. Copernicus was the first to prove, mathematically (his work improved upon by Kepler), that the sun, not the Earth, was the centre of the solar system. For their efforts, all three of these men had to fear intense church retribution when publishing their works.

Following the Renaissance in the 1400's academic thought was reborn in Europe. This combined with the modern tool of the Printing Press, which allowed academics to read the works of others from far away, and the legacy of Alchemists, who sought to expand human understanding, helped to push great academics of the time to discover and create. The Enlightenment was an 18th century philosophical movement that included such seminal thinkers as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Copernicus is famed for being the one to come up with the idea of heliocentricity. This means he was the one to first propose the idea that the universe revolved around the Sun rather than around the world. Galileo is often thought of as the father of this idea, but he was actually a follower of Copernicus and he simply popularized the idea.

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.

Galileo was the man who championed the idea of Heliocentricity. While he often gets credit for first proposing the theory, it was actually Copernicus who first proposed the theory. Galileo was an ardent believer in the theory though, and pushed it publicly, causing the backlash from the Catholic Church which made him even more famous.

Sir Isaac Newton was one of, if not the, defining academic of all time. He is credited with the invention of many academic fields including Physics and Calculus. He is not, however, credited with the invention of trigonometry, which has a history too diverse and complicated to be credited to a single person. Trigonomic functions have been found in the artifacts of numerous ancient civilizations, including Egypt, China, and India.

Due to the plethora of scientific and academic fields that the Scientific Revolution help to create, there was a major upswing in the number of people who returned to academic study, thus giving rise to the Enlightenment, which saw the educational systems of Europe become more widespread.

The Guillotine was the machine used to behead the people of France who were put to death during the French Revolution. The Guillotine remained the primary method of execution in France until 1981 when Capital Punishment was abolished in France. The other methods listed here were used, but not in France.

Copernicus wrote On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in the sixteenth century, and this work was published after his death. This work described a heliocentric model of the universe, in which the sun was posited as the center of the universe, with the planets revolving around it. Copernicus's model implicitly disputed the accuracy of the prevailing scientific model, the Ptolemaic or geocentric model, in which the earth was the center of the universe. Also, note that Copernicus's model did not recognize that planetary motion was elliptical.

In 1600, William Gilbert published his groundbreaking work on magnetism, specifically in regard to the magnetic nature of the Earth’s atmosphere. This made navigation and the use of compasses far easier and more reliable and allowed European explorers and traders to push further afield and to have much greater faith in the security of their journeys.

All of these people made notable contributions to mankind’s understanding of the nature of the solar system and the universe, but the discovery that planets move in elliptical orbits, as opposed to perfect circles as was initially believed, was made by Johannes Kepler in the seventeenth century.

Analytical geometry is the study of geometry that employs a coordinate system and marries geometry and algebra in a way previously not understood by European mathematicians. The work was pioneered by René Descartes in his work La Géométrie. It laid the foundation for the invention of calculus a few decades later by Isaac Newton and Wilhelm Leibniz.

For much of history, from the time when Aristotle lived until the Scientific Revolution, it was assumed that light travelled instantaneously. However, Galileo postulated, correctly as it turns out, that all we can deduce is that light travels faster than the speed of sound, but does not necessarily travel instantaneously.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is considered to be the world’s first microbiologist. He greatly improved the capabilities of microscopes, and in doing so, opened up the world of the microscopic to human examination for the first time in human history. Among other things, he is believed to be the first human being to observe single-celled organisms, bacteria, yeast, and blood cells.