Enlightenment: Did you mean...?

Cats in the Middle Ages were generally disapproved of, regarded as, at best, useful pests and, at worst, agents of Satan, owing to the medieval Church and its association of the cat with evil. Prior to the widespread acceptance of Christianity...

The English historian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) wrote and published his seminal work History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire between 1776 and 1788. The dominant theme of Gibbon's six-volume work is that the fall of the Roman Empire...

Buddhism, in Korean Bulgyo, was introduced by monks who visited and studied in China and then brought back various Buddhist sects during the Three Kingdoms period. It became the official state religion in all Three Kingdoms and subsequent...

Buddhist monasteries have been part of the Japanese cultural landscape ever since the 7th century CE, and they remained both powerful and socially important institutions right through the medieval period. Today, many of Japan's finest examples...

An 1814 oil painting by Anocet Lemonnier showing the Parisian salon of Madame Geoffrin (1699-1777). Original title: Une soirée chez Mme Geoffrin. The sitters include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Montesquieu, and Fontenelle. Madame...

The frontispiece of the Encyclopedia, a massive multi-volume work first published in 1751 and chiefly edited by Diderot (1713-1784). The figure in the centre is Truth whose light radiates forth and disperses the clouds of ignorance. Engraved...

An oil-on-canvas portrait of the French philosopher, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689-1755). It is estimated to have been made around the late-18th century by Jacques-Antoine Dassier. (Museum of the History...

An oil-on-canvas 1768 portrait of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) by Johann Gottlieb Becker. (Schiller-Nationalmuseum, Marbach am Neckar, Germany)

A portrait by the French painter, Maurice Quentin de La Tour of François-Marie Arouet or Voltaire (1694-1778 CE), the French philosopher and historian. It was finished in 1735. The portrait was done in Rococo style using pastels and showing...

A 1754 oil on canvas portrait by Allan Ramsay of the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776). (National Galleries Scotland)