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Trial and Execution of Marie Antoinette
The trial and execution of Marie Antoinette (1755-1793), formerly the queen of France, was among the opening events of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution (1789-1799). Accused of a series of crimes that included conspiring with...
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Marie de France
Marie de France (wrote c. 1160-1215 CE) was a multilingual poet and translator, the first female poet of France, and a highly influential literary voice of 12th-century CE Europe. She is credited with establishing the literary genre of chivalric...
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Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was an English philosopher and liberal social reformer best known as the founder of utilitarianism based on the greatest happiness principle, that is, rationally judging the success of a law by considering how many...
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Retreat of the Ten Thousand, Battle of Cunaxa
"Retreat of the Ten-Thousand" (French: "Épisode de la retraite des Dix-Mille"), 1842 CE. The painting depicts the retreat of Cyrus the Younger's Greek mercenaries after the Battle of Cunaxa in 401 BCE. Painted by the French artist Jean-Adrien...
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Marie Antoinette
Marie Antoinette (l. 1755-1793) was the queen of France during the turbulent final years of the Ancien Régime and the subsequent French Revolution (1789-1799). With the ascension of her husband Louis XVI of France (r. 1774-1792), she became...
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Marie Durand
Marie Durand (c. 1715-1776) stands apart in French Protestant history for her courage in the struggle for freedom of conscience. She was imprisoned for 38 years in the Tower of Constance at Aigues-Mortes in the south of France, liberated...
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Louis XVII of France
Louis XVII of France was the regnal name of Louis-Charles de France (l. 1785-1795), the younger son of King Louis XVI of France (r. 1774-1792) and Queen Marie Antoinette (l. 1755-1793). Although Louis-Charles never actually reigned as king...
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Grief & Consolation in Chaucer's Book of the Duchess
In Geoffrey Chaucer's first major work, The Book of the Duchess (c. 1370 CE), two genres of medieval literature are combined – the French poetic convention of courtly love and the high medieval dream vision – to create a poem of enduring...
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Guinevere
Guinevere is the Queen of Britain, wife of King Arthur, and lover of Sir Lancelot in the Arthurian Legends best known in their standardized form from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur (1469 CE). She first appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth's...
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Eleanor of Aquitaine
Eleanor of Aquitaine (l. c. 1122-1204 CE) was one of the most impressive and powerful figures of the High Middle Ages (1000-1300 CE) – male or female – whose influence shaped the politics, art, medieval literature, and perception of women...