Abstract
The Age of Exploration, also referred to as the Age of Discovery, was a period during which European societies began to look outwards. The rebirth of knowledge, and humankind’s interest in its own place in the world, marked by the Renaissance, set the stage for the application much of what had been learned since about 1300. The Age of Exploration, covering the time from the end of fifteenth century to the close of the seventeenth century, saw many great geographical discoveries.
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Notes
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Silesia is a geographic region in central Europe. Nowadays located mainly in Poland, the nationality of the region has changed many times, for example, moving out of a long period of German control as a result of the Potsdam Agreement that settled territorial issues at the end of World War 2.
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Image Credit: Maria Cunitz. Printer: Johann Seyfert. First published 1650. Public Domain.
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Solar eclipses occur when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun, wholly or partially blocking our view of the Sun. Lunar eclipses occur when the Earth passes between the Sun and the Moon, causing the Earth’s shadow to obscure the Moon.
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Xerxes I, or Xerxes the Great, of Persia was the antagonist in the Battle of Thermopylae, opposed by Macedon’s King Leonidas of Sparta. This battle was the focus of the 2006 film 300.
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Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor, discovered that the incidence of puerperal fever—resulting from uterine infection following childbirth, and responsible for a fatality rate of typically 20–25% of mothers—could be drastically reduced simply by getting doctors to wash their hands! Even when he discovered this link, he had the problem that this was considered insulting to the doctors, and his findings were ignored until some years after his death.
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In Australia, in 2010, figures published by the Federal Government’s Department of Health stated that 3.9% of presentations were breech, 0.2% were face or brow, while 0.7% were shoulder/transverse or compound.
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The term midwife is thought to derive from the Middle English (i.e. English from the period 1066–1500) word “mid” meaning “with”, and “wife” meaning “woman”. A midwife, therefore, was someone who was “with the woman/mother”.
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Gedoppelter Handgriff der Justine Siegemundin, erstmals publiziert 1690. Kupferstich aus der 2. Auflage ihres Lehrbuches von 1723 (The two-handed internal rotation of Justine Siegemund, first published in 1690. Copper engraving from the second edition of her textbook from 1723). Image Credit: Wikimedia, H.-P. Haack, Creative Commons 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode.
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For the sake of clarity, the First Industrial Revolution, associated with the introduction and exploitation of steam and water power, ran from about 1760–1830. The Second Industrial Revolution, associated with mass production, assembly lines and electricity occurred between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The third, associated with automation and computers, began in the 1950s, and the fourth, associated with digitalisation, AI and the like, is happening now!
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I discuss the invention of the crankshaft in the twelfth century in Homo Problematis Solvendis.
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Copy of the corn mill patent issued to Sybilla Masters in 1715. Image Credit: Public Domain. Source: https://wams.nyhistory.org/early-encounters/english-colonies/patent-for-cleaning-and-curing-corn/.
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Cropley, D.H. (2020). The Age of Exploration (1490–1700): New Worlds and New Problems. In: Femina Problematis Solvendis—Problem solving Woman. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3967-1_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3967-1_7
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