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History - Early Modern (c. 1450-1750)
184 public-domain history - early modern (c. 1450-1750) books, summarised. Page 1 of 4.
The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli
To understand the mechanics of power is to study the cold, often brutal, architecture of human ambition.
Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes
Humanity’s natural state is a war of all against all, and only a single, absolute authority can provide the safety required for civilization to endure.
Second Treatise of Government
John Locke
True liberty requires that we govern ourselves through consent rather than force. Discover why the original social contract remains the only legitimate foundation for any just and enduring civil society.
The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765
J. E. (Jan Ernst) Heeres
The vast, silent coastline of a "Southland" waits, mapped by Dutch sailors who touched its edges, mistook its promise, and left behind only names on charts and the wreckage of wooden ships.
Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences
René Descartes
To think clearly is to dismantle the architecture of received wisdom, brick by brick, until only the unshakeable foundation remains. This journey demands nothing less than the total reconstruction of one’s own mind.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
David Hume
To understand the world, we must first accept that our most certain beliefs are not products of logic, but habits of the mind—instincts evolved to help us survive in an uncertain universe.
The Superstitions of Witchcraft
Howard Williams
Fear of witches begins as a tale of marvels and ends as a history of courts, prisons, and fires. The book tracks how superstition hardens into law and how law, in turn, feeds superstition.
The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783
A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
A state’s ultimate wealth and empire do not rest on marching armies alone, but on controlling the fluid highway of the world’s oceans.
Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664)
Robert Boyle
A series of meticulous physical and chemical trials dismantles traditional Aristotelian and scholastic theories, revealing that light and hue are mechanical properties governed by surface texture, refraction, and chemical composition.
Daemonologie
King of England James I
A monarch’s urgent defense of supernatural reality lays bare the theological, legal, and human terrors of early modern witchcraft.
The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli
A clear-eyed manual of political survival strips away medieval moralizing to reveal how power is seized, held, and lost. It offers cold instructions for securing a state in an unpredictable world.
Doctrina Christiana: The first book printed in the Philippines, Manila, 1593
Unknown
A long-lost sixteenth-century catechism created in Manila reveals the convergence of European missionary zeal, indigenous Tagalog language, and Chinese block-printing craftsmanship.
Machiavelli, Volume I
Niccolò Machiavelli
Statecraft requires an unyielding gaze at human nature, where the defense of a realm demands both meticulous military discipline and the calculated exercise of sovereign authority.
A general history of the pyrates
Johnson, Charles, active 1724-1731
The golden age of maritime plunder was a brutal reality, not a romantic myth, forged in the wake of war and tempered by the gallows. These accounts strip away the legend to reveal the desperate, often violent, machinery of the pirate life.
Early Theories of Translation
Flora Ross Amos
Early theories of translation were rarely codified as rigid laws, but rather emerged as shifting, incidental reflections of the translator's struggle to balance fidelity with the limitations of the English language. This study examines how those evolving perspectives shaped the way classics were brought into the…
The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898
Unknown
A sprawling archive of colonial administration, these documents reveal the friction between faith and conquest in the early Philippines. They offer a rare, unvarnished look at how a distant empire attempted to govern a world it barely understood.
A treatise of the cohabitacyon of the faithfull with the vnfaithfull.: Whereunto is added. A sermon made of the confessing of Christe and his gospell, and of the denyinge of the same
Pietro Martire Vermigli
HOOK This work confronts the painful dilemma of conscience during times of persecution, asking whether a believer may safely hide their faith or participate in rituals they fundamentally reject to survive.
A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama 1497-1499
Ernest Georg Ravenstein
The first maritime expedition to reach India from Europe by sailing around Africa reveals a world of unexpected encounters, precarious diplomacy, and the rigid, enduring ambition of a kingdom determined to dominate global spice trade routes.
History of Florence and of the Affairs of Italy: From the Earliest Times to the Death of Lorenzo the Magnificent
Niccolò Machiavelli
This is a cool-headed, autopsy-like examination of how a vibrant republic gradually surrenders its freedom to the relentless machinery of faction, greed, and individual ambition.
The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume 33, 1519-1522: Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the Catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the close of the nineteenth century
Antonio Pigafetta
A primary source record of the first circumnavigation of the globe reveals how European expansion collided with complex island societies in the sixteenth century.
The first voyage round the world, by Magellan
Antonio Pigafetta
Five wooden ships set sail into uncharted oceans on a desperate attempt to encircle the globe, facing cold mutinies, starvation, and deadly skirmishes before a single battered vessel returns home.
The Augsburg Confession: The confession of faith, which was submitted to His Imperial Majesty Charles V at the diet of Augsburg in the year 1530
Philipp Melanchthon
This foundational text functions as a formal legal and theological brief, presenting the core tenets of the emerging Lutheran movement. It seeks to reconcile deep doctrinal disagreements through a structured, scholarly defense of faith, aiming for unity within the Holy Roman Empire at a moment of significant…
The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803
Unknown
This archival collection offers an unfiltered window into the late sixteenth-century Philippines, capturing the friction between colonial administration and the realities of life in the archipelago. It serves as a foundational record for understanding the early mechanisms of Spanish rule.
A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Civilization, rather than elevating humanity, has systematically shackled the human spirit, transforming our natural freedom into a state of competitive bondage and profound social inequality.
Institutes of the Christian Religion (Vol. 1 of 2)
Jean Calvin
God's grandeur shines through the universe, yet human minds—shattered by corrupt self-will—cannot apprehend saving truth without divine illumination, a Redeemer, and the regenerating work of the Spirit.
Micrographia: Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon
Robert Hooke
An extraordinary expedition into the unseen structures of daily life reveals that even the smoothest human creations crumble under scrutiny, while the smallest natural forms display terrifying, exquisite perfection.
The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy
Jacob Burckhardt
Modern individuality was not born by accident; it was forged within the volatile, dangerous Italian city-states where politics became an art form and personal talent superseded traditional inheritance.
The First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous regiment of Women
John Knox
When a realm submits to female authority, it upends the clear hierarchy of nature, divine command, and moral order, inviting sudden judgment upon an obedient populace that surrenders its right governance to a single crown.
The Phantom World
Augustin Calmet
Centuries of spectral visions, demoniacal possessions, and nocturnal marvels meet the sharp edge of Enlightenment inquiry in a Benedictine scholar’s methodical catalog of the strange.
The Story of the Barbary Corsairs
Stanley Lane-Poole
For three centuries, the Mediterranean belonged to the sea-rovers of North Africa, whose swift galleys reduced powerful empires to paying humiliating tribute.
The sidereal messenger of Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei
A lens pointed upward shatters ancient heavens, turning mysterious lights into rugged worlds and unmapped moons.
The Ancient Regime
Hippolyte Taine
An aristocratic social order implodes when its privileged elite retains immense wealth and authority while abdicating all moral duty and public service to the suffering people below.
Disputation of Doctor Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences
Martin Luther
A series of sharply argued propositions challenges the sale of spiritual pardons, demanding that genuine repentance replace commercial shortcuts in Christian life.
History of the Conquest of Mexico
William Hickling Prescott
A towering empire collides with an unyielding expedition across the mountains and causeways of Anahuac, forever altering the course of two hemispheres.
On the magnet, magnetick bodies also, and on the great magnet the earth: a new physiology, demonstrated by many arguments & experiments
Silvanus P. (Silvanus Phillips) Thompson
A vast global body acts as a single primary magnet, its invisible forces drawing iron and guiding compasses across oceans to define the natural boundaries of the earth.
A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 6
François Guizot
The sun never sets on Versailles without someone paying for the light, yet even absolute kings must eventually hand their kingdom over to children, ministers, and mobs.
The Smalcald Articles
Martin Luther
A fiery, non-negotiable manifesto outlines the boundary lines of religious reform, separating core evangelical truths from human traditions. Written during a period of intense ecclesiastical conflict, it details exactly where compromise is possible and where standpoints remain immutable.
A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2: Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumes
J. M. (John Mackinnon) Robertson
Doubt, dissent, and critical inquiry are not modern inventions; they form an unbroken, international thread running continuously alongside the history of religious dogma.
Elements of the Theory and Practice of Chymistry, 5th ed
Pierre Joseph Macquer
A rigorous systematic survey shows how experimental observation replaces blind alchemy to establish the true laws governing chemical combination, transformation, and analysis.
Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey through the Country from Pekin to Canton
Barrow, John, Sir
Few Westerners in the nineteenth century ever gained a glimpse behind the Great Wall, but this record captures the rare, firsthand experience of a British diplomatic mission arriving at the height of the Qing Dynasty.
The Holy Roman Empire
Bryce, James Bryce, Viscount
The Holy Roman Empire survives as a ghost in the architecture of modern Europe, an ancient and contradictory institution that defined the Middle Ages. Its long, slow dissolution reveals how a singular dream of universal order shaped the laws and nations we recognize today.
The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience Discussed and Mr. Cotton's Letter Examined and Answered
Roger Williams
This foundational text argues that the state has no rightful authority over the soul’s private devotion. It serves as a stirring, rigorous defense of individual conscience against the reach of government and institutional religion.
A Treatise on Good Works
Martin Luther
Faith is not a static belief but a living engine, the primary force that animates every virtuous act and defines a life of true service.
The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803
Unknown
This collection of primary accounts offers an unfiltered glimpse into the Spanish colonial project in the Pacific. It serves as a foundational record of the mid-sixteenth-century encounter between European ambition and the diverse cultures of the Philippine archipelago.
The history of the damnable life and deserved death of Doctor John Faustus, 1592, together with The second report of Faustus, containing his appearances and the deeds of Wagner, 1594
Unknown
A scholar trades his soul for twenty-four years of limitless power, only to discover that the devil’s bargain offers a hollow feast of transient tricks and ultimate ruin.
The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea. Vol. II
Gomes Eannes de Zurara
A journey of ambition and conquest across the African coast, documenting the relentless drive of explorers to expand the known world.
History of Modern Philosophy
Alfred William Benn
Before intellect could map the universe, it had to break free from medieval dogma and learn to measure its own limits.
The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803
Unknown
Across papal decrees, diplomatic squabbles, and voyage records, this compilation captures the global struggle to claim, carve up, and govern the Philippine archipelago.