Browse

Early Modern (1450 CE - 1800 CE)

The Whole Duty of Woman image thumbnail
Source

The Whole Duty of Woman

The following selection comes from a late 17th-century English advice book for women.

Title pages of travel narrative image thumbnail
Source

Peter Kolb Travel Narrative 2

Peter Kolb was a German astronomer and mathematician who lived at the Cape from 1705 to 1713. He was initially sponsored by a German baron to make astronomical observations in pursuit of a way to calculate longitude accurately.

Title pages of travel narrative thumbnail
Source

Peter Kolb Travel Narrative 1

Peter Kolb was a German astronomer and mathematician who lived at the Cape from 1705 to 1713. He was initially sponsored by a German baron to make astronomical observations in pursuit of a way to calculate longitude accurately.

Image of a fort
Source

Journal of Jan van Riebeeck

Krotoa, called Eva by the Dutch, is the first Khoikhoi woman to appear in the European records of the early settlement at the Cape as an individual personality and active participant in cultural and economic exchange.

Children in the Slave Trade Table thumbnail
Source

Children in the Slave Trade Table

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM, edited by David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, contains the best quantitative evidence to date on the number of Africans sold into the slave trade.

Swaddled Children Terra Cotta Bas-Reliefs thumbnail image
Source

Swaddled Children Terra Cotta Bas-Reliefs

These images of swaddled infants come from a series of 10 glazed terra cotta bas-reliefs known as the "bambini." Andrea della Robbia sculpted them between 1463 and 1466 to adorn the Ospedale degli Innocenti, or Foundling Hospital, in Florence, Italy.

Puppeteers Painting image thumbnail
Source

Puppeteers Painting

This is an ink painting on a scroll by Hanabusa Itchô (born Taga Shinkô), a Japanese artist of the early Tokugawa period (1600–1868). Tokugawa artists typically used pen names and Itchô used several names at different times as an artist and poet.

Emperor Jahangir Weighing His Son Khurram in Gold image thumbnail
Source

Emperor Jahangir Weighing His Son Khurram in Gold

The finely detailed miniature painting in an album created for the Emperor Jahangir (reigned 1605–1627) of the Mughal Empire in India shows a ceremony initiated by Jahangir's father, Akbar the Great (reigned 1556-1605), Jahangir's father.

Thumbnail of print
Source

Refractory (Clergy) Going to the Promised Land

Many refractory clergy left France to join other detractors, as this print shows, or wishfully encourages. However, this is an ambiguous image, which leaves open the possibility that rather than joining foreign monarchies, the clergy are crossing the river leading to Hell.

Thumbnail of print
Source

Procession of Refractory Clergy

Of particular interest in this caricature of refractory clergy here are the long noses, traditionally used to caricature Jews, that suggest the refractory clergy were not of the people. This image shows resistant clergy marching in their last procession.