As a part of his sweeping reform of French domestic policy, Napoleon made universal state-sponsored education available to the masses for the first time in the early nineteenth century. Napoleon believed the introduction of universal state-sponsored education would both help the people of France and allow him to recruit more and better military officers.

Positivism is a philosophy built on the belief that quantifiable information attained through scientific experimentation and inductive reasoning is the only source of authoritative knowledge. Auguste Comte stated that the only information people can trust and accept as true must be verifiable through experimentation or be supported by mathematical or scientific reasoning.

Relativism, as a philosophy, has been in existence for many centuries, but only became widely understood and referenced by that name in the nineteenth century. According to relativism, truth is not absolute; rather, it is subjective and informed by the perception of the individual and the circumstances in which the information is perceived.

Miguel de Cervantes wrote possibly the most famous piece of Spanish literature, Don Quixote, in the sixteenth century. Cervantes wrote in vernacular Spanish, and is often credited as among the earliest and most influential proponents of vernacular Spanish as both a language of common interaction and high artistic achievement. Don Quixote remains one of the most lastingly culturally influential pieces of literature in any language; that it was written in vernacular Spanish at a key time in the language's development cannot be overlooked or understated.

Benvenuto Cellini wrote the most famous autobiography of the Renaissance period. His autobiography is celebrated as an early example of high-level life writing, and is also revered by historians for the insight it provides into sixteenth-century Italian life.

Early widely used languages in Europe were Greek and Latin. These languages were commonly used in trade, as they were read and spoken by people of many nations, regardless of their first language. By the time of the Renaissance, Greek and Latin were replaced by vernacular Italian. During the Golden Era of French history, the reign of Louis XIV in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, French became the common language of Europe— spoken by courtiers, diplomats, artists, and intellectuals.

Cartesian Dualism was developed by René Descartes, a French philosopher of the early seventeenth century. It states that the spiritual and the material are two distinct worlds and are each subject to their own unique set of laws. According to Descartes, the spiritual word can only be examined through deductive reasoning (developing a theory and then looking for evidence), whereas the material world can be examined through inductive or experimental method.

William Wordsworth was an English poet who lived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wordsworth, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wrote Lyrical Ballads, a book that both laid out the fundamental artistic vision of early literary Romanticism and exemplified those ideals in verse. In addition to writing many of the most famous early Romantic poems, Wordsworth also articulated the ethos of the movement, which was focused on the appreciation of nature and common everyday experiences and language. These artistic goals were rooted in a desire to move away from "high" or courtly poetic values.

Erasmus is the most well-known of the Northern Christian humanists. He lived in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and wrote extensively on the gradual reform of society and the importance of peace and reason. He was a devout Catholic, but also unafraid to be sharp in his criticism of the church. His most famous book In Praise of Folly is a criticism of many of the excesses of the church. His second most famous work Handbook of a Christian Knight was written as an educational manual for humanist Christians, advising them how to live practically and successfully as pious humanists.

Leonardo Bruni was a Florentine politician and historian who lived in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. He is most notable for producing a historical account of the development of Florence, one of the most famous historical works of the Early Modern period. Bruni's history of Florence was notable, and fairly unique for the time, because it was a secular history. He employed narrative structure and presented his historical analysis in a way that would still be familiar to readers today.