Locations of events.

Whoever published a coin collection used to do so not only for scholarly reasons. Quite the opposite: an extensive coin collection made its owner gain prestige, which could be used for political purposes – that’s what the last members of the Farnese family did.

The almost forgotten civil war epos by Roman prodigy Lucan experienced a renaissance during the Thirty Years’ War. There’s a good reason why Dutchman Hugo Grotius, a pioneer of international law, published an edition of this work.

Our work changes the way we see the world. This essay by Swiss art critic Gotthard Jedlicka is proof of that. When living in Madrid, he did not fall in love with wine and tapas, but with the summer light which set the city ablaze with colors – almost like a painting.

He’s often called the “father of liberalism”: John Locke. His idea about protecting the freedom of the individual as the main duty of the state made its way into the American Declaration of Independence in the form of the famous demand for “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The Appenzell calendar of the 18th century was something like a cross between BBC Culture and the Daily Mail: an engaging form of mass media to educate peasant communities. It gave readers easy access to the contemporary events of what was, even back then, an increasingly complicated world.