Fruehe neuzeit
11 cards from across every topic, each citing a source. Tap one to open it in the feed.
- After his death, Bach's choral works were dismissed as old-fashioned for decades.
After Bach's death in 1750 his music was deemed old-fashioned; his great choral works went unheard outside Leipzig. …
- Europe's first printed book: 180 copies, 49 survive.
Around 1454/55 in Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg printed his 42-line Bible, the first major book in Europe made with movable …
- How Gutenberg's press worked, and what was actually new.
Movable type already existed in China and Korea. Gutenberg's trick, around 1440, was the hand mould: a steel punch …
- How a pocket watch solved the longitude problem.
Latitude could be read from the Sun's height, longitude couldn't: you need the time at your home port. Since Earth …
- In 1582, ten days simply vanished from the calendar.
The Julian calendar ran about 11 minutes too long per year; by 1582 the spring equinox had drifted ten days. Pope …
- In blind tests, Stradivarius violins lose to new ones.
Antonio Stradivari built around 1,100 instruments in Cremona between about 1666 and 1737; roughly 650 survive and now …
- Marie Antoinette never said 'Let them eat cake'.
The line, originally 'Let them eat brioche', appears in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 'Confessions', written around 1765 …
- Mozart only wrote half of his most famous work.
When Mozart died in Vienna on 5 December 1791, aged 35, his Requiem in D minor was unfinished: only the Introit was …
- One of the first clinical trials: 12 sailors, 6 treatments.
In 1747, the Scottish ship's surgeon James Lind divided twelve scurvy patients aboard HMS Salisbury into six pairs and …
- The first circumnavigation: 5 ships out, 1 back.
In September 1519, five ships with about 270 men under Ferdinand Magellan left Spain. Magellan himself was killed in …
- The witch hunts were not a medieval phenomenon.
Their fiercest phase ran from 1560 to 1630 – the middle of the Renaissance and early modern era, alongside printing and …