Thinkers Timeline

Niccolò Machiavelli was an Italian writer, diplomat, and political thinker. He was born in 1469 in Florence, then a powerful Italian city-state. His family was middle-ranking and not rich, but his father had a good library. Machiavelli was educated in Latin, history, and the classical writers of ancient Rome. In 1498, at the age of 29, he became a senior official of the Florentine Republic. For the next fourteen years he served as a diplomat and adviser. He travelled across Italy and Europe on missions, meeting popes, kings, and warlords. He watched up close how power actually worked. He saw cruelty, betrayal, and luck shaping politics far more than virtue or law. In 1512 the Republic fell. The Medici family, who had ruled Florence before, returned to power. Machiavelli lost his job. He was suspected of plotting against the Medici, arrested, and tortured. Released and sent into rural exile, he spent his days farming and his evenings writing. In 1513 he wrote The Prince, a short, sharp book of advice for rulers. He hoped it would win him a job back in Florence. It did not. He also wrote a longer work, the Discourses on Livy, a study of Roman republican history, plus comedies, histories, and military essays. He died in 1527, just before the Republic briefly returned. The Prince was published five years after his death. It became one of the most controversial and influential books in the history of political thought.

Michel de Montaigne was a French nobleman and writer who invented the modern essay. He was born in 1533 at the Château de Montaigne in southwest France, near Bordeaux. His family had grown rich through the wine trade and bought their way into the minor nobility. His father had odd ideas about education. He sent the infant Michel to live with peasants for the first three years of his life, so the boy would understand ordinary people. Then he had Latin tutors speak to Michel only in Latin, so the boy grew up speaking Latin as fluently as French. The unusual education shaped him. Montaigne studied law and worked for thirteen years as a magistrate in the Bordeaux high court. He served twice as mayor of Bordeaux. He lived through the French Wars of Religion, a long, brutal series of civil conflicts between Catholics and Protestants that killed thousands and produced famous atrocities like the 1572 Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. The wars shaped his thinking about cruelty, fanaticism, and the limits of human reason. In 1571, aged 38, he retired from public life. He moved to a tower in his château, lined the walls with about a thousand books, and began to write. He called what he wrote 'essais', from the French essayer, meaning 'to try' or 'to test'. They were attempts to think on the page, not finished arguments. He published the first edition of his Essays in 1580 and kept revising and expanding them until his death in 1592. He never quite finished. The book has been read by every educated person in the West for over four hundred years.

William Shakespeare was an English writer. He is often called the greatest writer in the English language. He was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, a small town in England. He died there in 1616. We do not know everything about his life. He came from a fairly ordinary family. His father was a glove-maker and a local official. Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway when he was eighteen. They had three children. At some point Shakespeare moved to London. There he worked in the theatre. He was an actor, a writer, and part-owner of a theatre company. The company built a famous theatre called the Globe. Shakespeare wrote plays for it, and the plays were performed for large, mixed crowds. In about twenty years, Shakespeare wrote around 38 plays and over 150 short poems called sonnets. His plays include tragedies, comedies, and histories. Some of the most famous are 'Hamlet', 'Romeo and Juliet', 'Macbeth', and 'King Lear'. Shakespeare was successful in his own time. He made enough money to buy a large house back in Stratford. After he died, two friends collected his plays into one book, called the First Folio, in 1623. Without that book, many of his plays might have been lost forever.

John Milton was an English poet, political writer, and government official. He wrote one of the greatest poems in the English language, Paradise Lost. He was also one of the most important defenders of free speech, religious liberty, and republican government in the 17th century. He was born in 1608 in London. He died there in 1674, aged 65. He came from a comfortable middle-class family. His father was a scrivener (a kind of legal copyist and money-lender) who loved music. Milton received an unusually thorough education. He studied at St Paul's School in London, then at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he earned his master's degree in 1632. After Cambridge, he spent six years in private study at his father's country house, reading widely in classical Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and modern languages. He became one of the most learned poets in English history. In 1638-1639 he travelled in Italy. He met Galileo, then under house arrest. The meeting impressed him. He returned to England as the country was sliding into civil war. He chose the side of Parliament against King Charles I. He wrote pamphlets defending republican government, religious liberty, and free speech. His pamphlet Areopagitica (1644) is one of the great defences of free expression in any language. When the king was executed in 1649 and a republic established, Milton served as Latin Secretary to the new government. He wrote official letters to foreign powers and defended the regicide in major published works. He went blind in his early forties, possibly from glaucoma, while still in government service. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, Milton was in danger. He went into hiding briefly. He was eventually pardoned but lost his position. He spent his last years in poverty and obscurity, dictating his greatest poems to assistants. Paradise Lost was published in 1667. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes followed in 1671.

Aphra Behn was an English writer. She is the first woman known to have earned her living by writing in English. Almost every fact about her early life is uncertain. She was born around 1640, probably in Kent in the south of England. Her family was not rich. Her father may have been a barber called Johnson. As a young woman, she travelled to Surinam, a small English colony in South America (it later became Dutch). There she seems to have met people whose stories she used later in her writing. By 1664 she was back in England. She married a man called Behn, possibly a German or Dutch merchant. He died or left her within a few years. She then used the name Mrs Behn for the rest of her life. In the 1660s, King Charles II sent her to Antwerp in the Netherlands as a spy. Her job was to get information about English enemies. She sent messages back to London using the code name 'Astrea'. The king did not pay her enough. She ended up in debt. She may have spent time in a debtors' prison in London. From about 1670 she began writing plays. They were witty, often funny, and sometimes about sex. She wrote about 19 plays in total. Her most famous play is The Rover (1677). She also wrote poems, novels, and translations. Her novel Oroonoko (1688) is one of the first novels in English. It tells the story of an African prince sold into slavery. She died on 16 April 1689, aged about 48 or 49. She is buried at Westminster Abbey, a rare honour for a writer. Virginia Woolf later said that every woman who writes owes something to Aphra Behn.

Matsuo Bashō was a Japanese poet of the Edo period, widely regarded as the greatest master of haiku and one of the foundational figures in all of Japanese literature. He transformed haiku from a witty social pastime into a refined literary art form capable of profound spiritual and aesthetic depth. He was born Matsuo Kinsaku in 1644 near Ueno in Iga Province (modern western Mie Prefecture). His father was a low-ranking samurai serving a local lord. Bashō later took the name Matsuo Chūemon Munefusa. As a young man he entered the service of Tōdō Yoshitada, son of the local lord. Yoshitada shared his passion for poetry, and the two studied haikai together. Yoshitada died suddenly in 1666 when Bashō was about twenty-two. The grief-stricken Bashō left his samurai position and eventually made his way to Edo (modern Tokyo), the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate. There he immersed himself in literary circles and by the 1670s had become a respected poet and teacher. In 1680 he withdrew from urban Edo to a small hut by a banana tree (bashō in Japanese), from which he took the poetic name by which he is now known. He took up the study of Zen Buddhism under the priest Butchō and adopted an increasingly ascetic life. From 1684 he began a series of long walking journeys across Japan, recorded in travel diaries that combined prose and haiku: Nozarashi Kikō (Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton, 1684), Kashima Kikō (1687), Oi no Kobumi (Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel, 1688), Sarashina Kikō (1688), and his masterpiece Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North, completed 1694). The last documented a 2,400-kilometre journey through northern Honshu in 1689 with his disciple Kawai Sora. He returned to Edo in 1691, set out again in 1694 for Kyushu, fell ill on the way, and died in Osaka on 28 November 1694. He was 50.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695) was a poet, dramatist, scholar, and nun of colonial New Spain, widely regarded as the finest writer of the Spanish Baroque in the Americas. She was born Juana Ramírez de Asbaje in San Miguel Nepantla, a village near Mexico City, the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish captain and a Creole woman of Spanish descent. She taught herself to read at the age of three, devoured the books in her grandfather's library, and begged her mother to let her dress as a boy so she could attend university — which was closed to women. At sixteen she became a lady-in-waiting at the viceregal court of New Spain, where she astonished scholars with her learning. Rather than marry, she entered a convent in 1669, first the Carmelites and then the Hieronymites, where she could continue her studies and writing. Her cell became one of the great intellectual centres of the Americas, filled with books, musical and scientific instruments, and a stream of visitors. She wrote love poetry, religious verse, philosophical essays, plays, and comic dramas in Spanish, Latin, Nahuatl, and the Afro-Mexican creole of her time. In the early 1690s, church authorities pressured her to abandon secular studies. She signed a statement of submission in her own blood, sold her library of some four thousand books, and died in 1695 while nursing her sisters through an epidemic.

Voltaire was a French writer, philosopher, and campaigner who became the most famous voice of the European Enlightenment. His real name was François-Marie Arouet. He was born in Paris in 1694 to a middle-class family. As a young man, he wrote sharp poems and plays that mocked powerful people. Twice he was put in the Bastille prison for his words. He took the pen name 'Voltaire' around 1718. In his twenties he spent two years in exile in England. He admired the freer politics, the religious tolerance, and the science of Newton. Back in France, he spent his life writing across many forms: tragedies, histories, poems, novels, scientific essays, philosophical books, and thousands of letters. He wrote so much that his collected works fill more than 70 large volumes. He was always in trouble with the French government and the Catholic Church. To stay safe, he moved often. He spent years at the court of King Frederick the Great of Prussia, then in Switzerland, then in his own large estate at Ferney near the Swiss border. From Ferney, in his sixties and seventies, he became Europe's most famous writer. He defended people wrongly accused by the courts. He campaigned against torture, religious persecution, and superstition. He died in Paris in 1778, at the age of 83, treated like a hero by huge crowds. Eleven years later, his ideas helped fuel the French Revolution.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was a British writer, philosopher, and early advocate for women's rights. She grew up in poverty and educated herself by reading widely and working as a teacher and governess. In 1792 she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman — one of the first serious arguments that women deserved the same education and political rights as men. She died at the age of 38, shortly after giving birth to her daughter Mary, who would later write Frankenstein. Wollstonecraft's ideas were ignored or mocked for much of the century after her death, but she is now recognised as one of the founders of modern feminism.

Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was an English novelist whose Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, written when she was eighteen years old, is widely regarded as the founding work of science fiction and one of the most influential novels in the English language. She was born in London to William Godwin, the political philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her mother died days after giving birth to her, and Mary grew up in a household filled with books and visitors from the radical circles of her father. At sixteen she eloped with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the summer of 1816, during a cold and rainy holiday at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, Lord Byron proposed that each member of their company write a ghost story. Over the following months Mary wrote Frankenstein, published in 1818. Her life was marked by loss: three of her four children died in infancy or childhood, her husband drowned in 1822, and she was left at twenty-four to raise her surviving son alone and to support herself by writing. She produced further novels, including The Last Man, a post-apocalyptic narrative written after Percy's death, as well as travel writing, short stories, biographical essays, and careful editions of her husband's poetry. She died of a brain tumour in 1851, aged fifty-three.