Sir Thomas More was an advisor to Henry VIII and a contemporary of Erasmus. The two shared ideas about Christian humanism and a dedication to the Catholic faith. More’s most famous work is called Utopia, and it provides an outline of an ideal (some might even say utopian) society. 

The second half of the sixteenth century was dominated by the battle between the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. In an attempt to control the rapid spread of Protestantism, the Catholic Church released an Index of Prohibited Books in the 1540s. The release of such an index was an attempt to censor reading material and prevent the people from accessing the writings of religious reformers.

As the Roman Empire was falling apart and being invaded by Germanic tribes, learned monks realized the value of knowledge and the preservation of their Roman ancestry. Since Christianity was the only universally untouchable institution at the time, monks were able to freely transcribe and translate Greek and Roman philosophical texts for posterity.

One of the most widely read books of all time, Don Quixote took Cervantes ten years to complete. It is considered a seminal work of satirical narrative. All of the other options are books by Cervantes, but none are as prominent as Don Quixote, and none took as long to complete. Viaje del Parnaso was published in 1614. Novelas ejemplares was published in 1613. Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda was published in 1617.

The École Militaire was founded in 1750 as a school to train officers in the art of war. The idea of the school was to make men into professional soldiers rather than to continue the tradition of allowing rich nobles who knew nothing of the military to command armies. This meant that French armies could have a tactical advantage in battle.

The Writ was a document carrying all the weight of a king's command. It helped strengthen the place of the king. This was unique for the time as it established the strength of documentation in a society that was just starting to become literate.

Thomas Malthus was an Enlightenment-Era British philosopher and economic writer. In his famous work, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus argued that, if the population continued to grow, it would outstrip the supply of food and lead to widespread famine and starvation. Together with Adam Smith and David Ricardo, he remains one of the most influential economic thinkers from this time period.  

The invention of the internet has dramatically changed the availability of information, education, and free communication for people around the world. Now everyone with access to the internet has the potential to acquire as much knowledge as they could possibly synthesize in a lifetime (or a million lifetimes). This has opened up human society by allowing greater opportunity and understanding. This sudden widespread dissemination of information may be compared with the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. The introduction of the printing press to Europe allowed works of literature to be printed en masse and shared with a much wider audience than would previously have been possible. The telegraph might have been a reasonable answer, but it was invented in the nineteenth century.

During the dying decades of the Russian Tsarist Empire, the government mandated that all education be carried out in Russian, regardless of the ability of the students in various parts of the multinational empire to understand the language. This, predictably, was unpopular throughout the empire and impeded the ability of non-Russian-speaking citizens to achieve in education and improve their lives. When Lenin came to power, he instituted his “nationalities reforms,” which allowed schools to teach students in their native languages.

Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, is most responsible for making the Bible available to the common people. Indeed, all of these men, except perhaps Lorenzo the Magnificent, would have had a vested interest in not making the Bible available to the common people— some, like Leo X, even worked actively to prevent this from happening. The printing press allowed the Bible to be reproduced in large quantities and in a wide range of languages. This greatly advanced the capabilities and potential of the Protestant Reformation.