Five early-modern turning points
Luther, Copernicus, Westphalia, Kant, and where it all began.
5 questions. Pick an answer to see the explanation. Share your result at the end.
What did Martin Luther do on 31 October 1517 that triggered the Reformation?
Luther's 95 Theses — a list of objections to the Catholic Church's practice of selling indulgences — were (by tradition) posted on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517. He did later translate the New Testament into German (published 1522) and marry the former nun Katharina von Bora (1525), but those events are not the symbolic starting point of the Reformation.
What major scientific work was published in 1543, conventionally marking the start of the Scientific Revolution?
Copernicus's *De Revolutionibus*, published as he was dying in 1543, proposed that the Earth orbited the Sun rather than the reverse. Galileo's *Dialogue* was 1632 (and led to his trial); Kepler's *Astronomia Nova* was 1609 (the first two laws of planetary motion); Newton's *Principia* was 1687 (and ends the Scientific Revolution rather than starting it). 1543 also saw Vesalius's *De Humani Corporis Fabrica*, the foundational text of modern anatomy.
Which 1648 treaty ended the Thirty Years' War and established the foundations of the modern European state system?
The Peace of Westphalia (24 October 1648) consisted of two linked treaties signed at Münster and Osnabrück. It ended the Thirty Years' War, recognized Dutch and Swiss independence, and established the principle of sovereign territorial states — the 'Westphalian system' that still names the modern international order. Versailles is 1919 (WWI); Tordesillas is 1494 (Spanish-Portuguese New World division); Augsburg is 1555 (the earlier and inadequate Lutheran-Catholic settlement).
Whose 1784 essay 'What Is Enlightenment?' provided the movement's most famous summary, *Sapere aude* ('Dare to know')?
Kant's 1784 essay *Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?* offered the standard summary of the movement's self-conception: the application of independent reasoning to all questions, captured by the slogan *Sapere aude* — 'Dare to know.' Voltaire died in 1778; Rousseau in 1778; Hume in 1776 — none of them wrote this essay.
Where is the Italian Renaissance conventionally said to have begun?
The conventional date for the start of the Italian Renaissance is the early 14th century in Florence, with the early humanists (Petrarch, Boccaccio) and proto-Renaissance painters (Giotto). The mature 15th-century Florentine Renaissance under the Medici — Brunelleschi's dome, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo's early work — is the period most associated with the term.