Locations of events.

In the middle of the 19th c., there were more tourists than residents in Paris – says writer Louis Desnoyers. He and his colleagues portrayed foreigners in Paris with sharp words. The supposedly non-political text is an image of Paris society shortly before the revolution.

In the middle of the Ottoman Wars of the 17th century, Venice conquered the Peloponnese in a swift attack. A Venetian book by publisher Girolamo Albrizzi detailed the peninsula’s military and economic state at the time – and did so very much in the interest of the political regime.

What is a human being? A finely tuned machine that perishes once the heart stops beating? Or is there a divine spark in mankind? Will our soul still be there when our bodies fall dead to the ground? In 1767, a book dealt with this very question – and it became the most widely-read book in Germany at that time.

Luther wasn’t the only German critic of the church. Ulrich von Hutten also voiced criticism, however not in the form of academic papers, but with a sharp quill and in form of elegant Latin poetry that no one had mastered like he did.

At the end of the 18th century, the German states increasingly took over the organisation of the education of midwives with the help of doctors. A manual published with the intention of helping women in case there was no doctor present bears witness to this development.