Johann Joachim Winckelmann was a German art historian and archaeologist. He was a pioneering Hellenist who first articulated the difference between Greek, Greco-Roman and Roman art. "The prophet and founding hero of modern archaeology", Win...

Empress Maria Theresa was the first and only female head of the Habsburg dynasty. She was Archduchess of Austria, and Queen of Hungary and Bohemia and ruler of other territories from 1740 until her death. She also became the Holy Roman Empr...

Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. Until 1759 he was also co-editor with Denis Diderot of the Encyclopédie. D'Alembert's formula for obtaining solutions to t...

Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe and sometimes regarded as the first novel in English. The book is a fictional autobiography of the title character, an English castaway who spends 28 years on a remote island, encountering savages,...

The Honourable Thomas Gage was a British general, best known for his many years of service in North America, including his role as military commander in the early days of the American War of Independence. Born to an aristocratic family in E...

Charles Edward Stuart, commonly known in Britain during his lifetime as The Young Pretender, and often referred to in retrospective accounts as Bonnie Prince Charlie, was the second Jacobite pretender to the thrones of England, Scotland, an...

Charles Bonnet, Swiss naturalist and philosophical writer. In 1760 he described a condition now called Charles Bonnet Syndrome, in which vivid, complex visual hallucinations (fictive visual percepts) occur in psychologically normal people....

Baron Munchausen is a fictional German nobleman created by the German writer Rudolf Erich Raspe in his 1785 book Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia. The character is loosely based on a real baron,...

Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson marchioness de Pompadour was the mistress of Louis XV. Educated in art and literature, she married Charles-Guillaume Le Normant d'Étoiles in 1741 and became admired by Parisian society and by the king, who installe...

Samuel Adams was a statesman, political philosopher, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. As a politician in colonial Massachusetts, Adams was a leader of the movement that became the American Revolution, and was one of the...

Sir William Blackstone was an English jurist, judge and Tory politician of the eighteenth century. He is most noted for writing the Commentaries on the Laws of England. In February 1766 he published the first volume of Commentaries on the L...

Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach was a French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist and a prominent figure in the French Enlightenment. He was born Paul Heinrich Dietrich in Edesheim, near Landau in the Rhenish Palatinate, but lived an...

Adam Smith was a Scottish moral philosopher, pioneer of political economy, and a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. Smith is best known for two classic works: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and An Inquiry into the Nature a...

Sir Joshua Reynolds, English portrait painter and aesthetician who dominated English artistic life in the middle and late 18th century. Through his art and teaching, he attempted to lead British painting away from the indigenous anecdotal p...

Adam Ferguson was a Scottish philosopher, social scientist and historian of the Scottish Enlightenment. He is sometimes called "the father of modern sociology." Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) drew on classical autho...