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From a Puritan family background, Locke was educated at Oxford and became a physician, although he never established a general medical practice. He lived a quiet and contemplative life. He [...]

Although his family background was Puritan rather than royalist, Pepys (pronounced 'Peeps') was able to keep his position in the admiralty office after the Restoration. Like most English people, he [...]

The son of a poor tinker, (that is, a traveling mender of pots and pans,) John Bunyan produced one of the most popular and influential books of the Restoration period [...]

of the day, especially by Francis Bacon, whose secretary and disciple Hobbes had become. He applied the type of systematic and skeptical thinking that Bacon advocated to the study of [...]

After receiving legal training Bacon entered government service while Elizabeth I was still Queen of England. During the reign of King James I, Bacon rose to be lord chancellor of [...]

Burton, a widely read and learned man, spent his entire adult life at Oxford University. He had no other interest but books, no other activities than reading, studying, and writing. [...]

The one great exception to the trend toward natural simplicity of expression was the Authorized Version of the Holy Bible, commissioned by King James I to correct and supersede the [...]

A staunch Protestant, Hoby was educated at Cambridge University and traveled widely in Germany, France, and especially in Italy, where he encountered the courtesy book Il Cortegiano, or The Courtier. [...]

Lyly was a student at Oxford University in the early 1570s, when the study of rhetoric was reaching a superrefined state. After taking an M.A., Lyly went to London in [...]

During this era, philosophy encompassed what we now call science. Newton was the most creative scientific thinker of the Enlightenment. It was he who discovered that all motions in nature, [...]

The educator Ascham was a scholar of Latin and Greek at Cambridge, but he insisted that studying the great writers in these languages was only a way to gain clarity [...]