Browse the index
Filter by category and discipline, then by continent, country and century of birth. Countries not yet represented can be drafted at the research desk.
Category
Disciplines in Literature & Letters
Novelists, poets, philosophers, theologians, New Thought authors, historians and the students of language itself.
Era
Countries (85)
14 figures
Leonardo da Vinci
1452 – 1519Proved that art and science are one act of looking.
Niccolò Machiavelli
1469 – 1527The Prince separated political analysis from moral instruction.
Miguel de Cervantes
1547 – 1616Don Quixote, the first modern novel and the most translated after the Bible.
Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti
1556 – 1627Timbuktu's greatest scholar; wrote over 40 works and argued against enslavement of Muslims.
William Shakespeare
1564 – 1616Built the language most of the planet now negotiates in.
Thomas Hobbes
1588 – 1679Leviathan founded the modern theory of sovereignty and the social contract.
René Descartes
1596 – 1650Cogito ergo sum and coordinate geometry.
Blaise Pascal
1623 – 1662Probability theory, hydrostatics, and a mechanical calculator at nineteen.
John Locke
1632 – 1704Consent, property and toleration — the template for liberal constitutions.
Baruch Spinoza
1632 – 1677Ethics identified God with Nature and grounded secular democratic thought.
Matsuo Bashō
1644 – 1694Perfected haiku and the travel journal in The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
1646 – 1716Calculus notation we still use, and binary arithmetic.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
1648 – 1695The nun who argued for women's right to learn — and was silenced for it.
Voltaire
1694 – 1778Weaponised satire for tolerance and free expression.