Things to investigate, suggested by Jacques Barzun's From Dawn To Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life: 1500 to the Present.
Albigenses … heretics exterminated in France.
Luther's Table Talk, edited by Preserved Smith.
Arminius: redemption was for all souls … predesination is conditional, not absolute.
Montaigne's Diary of 1580-81
Rupert Croft-Cooke's Through Spain with Don Quixote
Samuel Eliot Morison's Christopher Columbus, Mariner
discovery of silver at Potosi (upper Peru, now Bolivia) in 1545
Anonymous' La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes (trans. by W. S. Merwin)
history of surnames: James Pennethorne Hughes' Is Thy Name Wart?
Fracastoro's epic about syphillis: Syphilus
Utopians: Thomas More's Utopia, Tommaso Campanella's The City of the Sun, and Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis
Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time
Charles Ross' Richard III
4 great Italian Renaissance epics: 1 Boiardo's Orlando In Love 2 Pulci's Morgan the Great 3 Ariosto's Orlando Furioso 4 Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered
Camoens' Lusiads … hero is Vasco de Gama (Leonard Bacon's verse trans.)
Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia
Claudio Monteverdi, founder of opera
great operas: Monteverdi's Poppea, Rameau's Indes Galantes, Handel's Xerxes, Gluck's two Iphigeneias, Mozarts', Beethoven's Fidelio, Spontini's Vestale, Weber's Freyschutz, Berlioz's Les Troyens, Rossini's Comte Ory, Wagner's Tristan, Verdi's Otello, Moussorgsky's Boris Godunov, Chabrier's Gwendolyn, Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd
Anna von Schurman, the most learned woman of her time
F. Sherwood Taylor's The Alchemists
Cardano … geology & mathematics … predicted date of his own death
Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy
invention of the middle ages: (a) Nathan Edelman, 'Early uses of medium aevum, moyen age, middle ages.' Romanic Review, Fall 1998, pp. 327, and (b) George Gordon, 'Medium Aevum and Middle Age.' Society for Pure English, Tract 19, 1925.
medieval folks were NOT afraid that the world would end in 1000 CE: George L. Burr, 'The Year 1000 and the Antecedents of the Crusades.' American Historical Review, April 1901, pp. 429 ff.
John H. Mundy and Peter Riesenberg's The Medieval Town
David S. Landes' A Revolution in Time
Norman Cantor's Medieval Lives
English Civil War … at Leicester, Royalists led a massacre … at Naseby, Puritans slaughtered camp followers in revenge
William Haller's The Rise of Puritanism: The Way to the New Jerusalem
Athenais de Mortemart, Marquise de Montespan … mistress to Louis XIV … black mass by priest Guibourg to assure she would be in the king's favor
Fenelon's Letter to Louis XIV and Dialogues of the Dead
Cartouche the thief
Jonathan Wild the thief, written about in novels by Fielding and Defoe
Orffyreus Wheel, invented by Johann Bessler
Vauban, builder of fortresses
Defoe's The Journal of the Plague Year and The Year of the Great Wind
Dr. Thomas Dover, aka Dr. Quicksilver, rescuer of Alexander Selkirk, the model for Robinson Crusoe
Charles Scribner III's Rubens
Racine's Phaedra, trans. by Robert Lowell
La Fontaine's fables, trans. by Howard Shapiro
Saint-Evremond's essays: On the Right Conduct of Life, Of Pleasures, Of Loves
La Rochefoucauld's Maxims or Moral Reflections
Pierre Bayle's Dictionary
Voltaire's A Portable Philosophic Dictionary (73 entries in totum)
Bishop Berkeley's Commonplace Book
Voltaire's 'The Lisbon Earthquake', trans. by Anthony Hecht
Klinger's play, Sturm und Drang
Royall Tyler's play, The Contrast
Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto
Matthew Gregory Lewis (AKA Monk Lewis): Ambrosio, AKA The Monk
Winckelmann was the victim of a homosexual murderer
Count Cagliostro, performer of miraculous cures
Peter Paret's Understanding War
Charles Downer Hazen's The French Revolution
Albert Goodwin's The French Revolution
Simon Schama's Citizens
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's 16 notebooks
Christopher Herold's Bonaparte in Egypt
Restif de la Bretonne's Paris Nights
Vidocq's (criminal then policeman) The Memoirs (Bohn, 1854)
Germaine de Stael
premiere of Victor Hugo's play Hernani overthrew the rules of language on the stage
Norman Longmate's King Cholera
Harold Nicolson's Good Behavior: Being a Study of Certain Types of Civility
Hazlitt's Winterslow, ed. by W. C. Hazlitt
Hazlitt's The Liber Amoris
Hazlitt's The Spirit of the Times
Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America
Gustave de Beaumont's essays on America, found in his novel, Marie
De Quincey's essay, 'The English Mail Coach'
Flaubert's Dictionary of Accepted Ideas
L. T. C. Rolt's The Railway Revolution
Carroll L. V. Meeks' The Railroad Station
Raymond Postgate's 1848: The Story of a Year
Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861)
Bakunin the anarchist
Flaubert's Sentimental Education, trans. Perdita Burlingame
Roger L. Williams' The Horror of Life (about Baudelaire)
Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey
G. M. Young's Victorian England: Portrait of an Age
Steven Marcus' The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography
Jacques Barzun's Race: A Study in Superstition
Henry George's 'Progress and Poverty'
Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War
Nellie Bly (Elisabeth Seaman) around the world in 80 days
The disappearance of the Mary Celeste
Floyd Clymer's Scrapbook of Early Advertising Art
Steffan Linder's The Harried Leisure Class
George du Maurier's Trilby (origin of the character Svengali)
Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi (King Ubu)
Mallarme's 'Brise Marine' ('Sea Breeze')
Anatole France's Penguin Island
Michael Goodwin's Nineteenth-Century Opinion
Wm. James' Principles of Psychology
George Allen Morgan's What Nietzsche Means
John Philip Sousa's marches
G. Lowes Dickinson's A Modern Symposium: Basic Political Viewpoints Debated
Homer Lea, an American hunchback who was a general in the Chinese army
Shaw's Common Sense About the War
Calvin Tomkins' The World of Marcel Duchamp
Raymond Loewy's Industrial Design
Catalogue of Crime, ed. by Jacques Barzun and W. H. Taylor
Dorothy Sayers' The Mind of the Maker
James Agate's Ego (diary in 9 volumes), esp. The Later Ego (combines vol's. 8 & 9)
Philip K. Howard's The Death of Common Sense
Lawrence Cremin's The Transformation of the School
Humphrey Jennings' Pandemonium
Christopher J. Herold's Bonaparte in Egypt