Charles Dickens is probably the most famous writer of the Victorian period of British history. His writings coincided with the Industrial Revolution and often focused on portraying social injustices and the arduous lives of the British working class. Famous works by Charles Dickens include Oliver Twist and Hard Times.

Members of a French exploratory voyage to South America in the sixteenth century encountered cannibalistic people living in the Amazon, and a few of them were even brought back to Europe by the expedition. The group was widely sensationalized, but Montaigne’s first-hand experience led him to believe that these people were far less savage and barbaric than the European people around him. In Of Cannibals, he reverses the Eurocentric view of social progress and compares the lives of the cannibals with the barbaric conditions of European society to suggest that the Europeans were the real savages.

The Rococo artistic movement was widely popular in eighteenth century and is characterized by sentimentality and deviations from realism. The Neoclassical movement, which emerged in the late eighteenth century around the time of the French Revolution, is widely understood as a backlash against this movement. Neoclassicism focused on recreating the styles of classical Greece and Rome and valued realism and the accurate representation of the human form.

The Book of the Courtier was published in 1528 by the Italian Renaissance writer Baldassare Castiglione. The book outlines the ideal qualities of a Renaissance man and was widely influential in European society. It was particularly influential in British society, where it came to define the correct behavior of a wealthy British gentleman.

All of these writers are correctly matched with their most famous piece of literature except for Thomas More, who is famous for writing Utopia. Lives of Illustrious Men was written by Petrarch, sometimes referred to as “the Father of Humanism.”

Raphael’s The School of Athens is one of the most famous and influential artistic works of the Renaissance period. It depicts the classical Greek philosophers Socrates and Plato holding court at the school of Athens and is widely understood to be a celebration and exaltation of the values and accomplishments of the classical period, particularly ancient and classical Greece.

The Baroque movement emerged in popularity in the seventeenth century and was supported by both the Papacy and the European aristocracy. It employs exaggerated motion and dramatic detail to create a style of art meant to seem both impressive and imposing. It was widely employed by the aristocracy to create artistic and architectural works that were meant to express power and control. The Palace of Versailles is one such example.

In Praise of Folly was published the first decade of the sixteenth century by the Dutch humanist Erasmus. Although Erasmus remained an ardent Catholic his whole life and never fully embraced the Protestant Reformation, he was nonetheless dissatisfied with the corruption and abuses that he saw within the church. In Praise of Folly is a scathing attack on these corruptions. It is sometimes credited with helping to lay the foundations for the Protestant Reformation.

The Odyssey and The Iliad are two famous epics written down from the oral tradition of Homer. The epic poems tell the tale of the Trojan War and the return home of Odysseus from this war. The were among the foundations of both archaic and classical panhellenism ("all Greece"). The peninsula of Greece was, at this time, not a nation-state (nation-states did not, strictly speaking, exist at this time in history), but a collection of city-states, united by a common language and by large-scale common cultural practices (The Olympic Games, Homer, the ritual recognition of the gods of Olympus). Greek city-states were yet still quite distinct culturally, socially, and politically when seen up-close.

Montesquieu is usually remembered for writing The Spirit of Laws, which influenced the formation of the United States’ government with its advocation for separation of powers and its emphasis on the necessity of checks and balances in any legislative system. Montesquieu also wrote Persian Letters, a text of possibly equal importance, which marked the first time Europeans were given a substantive view of their society from the perspective of a foreigner (or, more accurately, the first time such a perspective was paid substantial attention). It introduced many Europeans to the notion that their perspective might be limited, that they had what is now called a Eurocentric view on the world.