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• 
  

• 
  Arezzo
  Arezzo  listen (help·info) is a city and comune in Central Italy, capital of the province of the same name, located in Tuscany. Arezzo is about 80 km southeast of Florence, at an elevation of 296 m above sea level. In 2011 the population was about 100,000.
  Arezzo is set on a steep hill rising from the floodplain of the River Arno. In the upper part of the town are the cathedral, the town hall and the Medici Fortress (Fortezza Medicea), from which the main streets branch off towards the lower part as far as the gates. The upper part of the town maintains its medieval appearance despite the addition of later structures.
  Described by Livy as one of the Capitae Etruriae (Etruscan capitals), Arezzo is believed to have been one of the twelve most important Etruscan cities—the so-called Dodecapolis. Etruscan remains establish that the acropolis of San Cornelio, a small hill next to that of San Donatus, was occupied and fortified in the Etruscan period. There is other significant Etruscan evidence: parts of walls, an Etruscan necropolis on Poggio del Sole (still named "Hill of the Sun"), and most famously, the two bronzes, the "Chimera of Arezzo" (5th century BC) and the "Minerva" (4th century BC) which were discovered in the 16th century and taken to Florence. Increasing trade connections with Greece also brought some elite goods to the Etruscan nobles of Arezzo: the krater painted by Euphronios ca 510 BC with a battle against Amazons (in the Museo Civico, Arezzo 1465) is unsurpassed.
  
  wn.com/Arezzo
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  Bargello
  The Bargello, also known as the Bargello Palace or Palazzo del Popolo (Palace of the People) is a former barracks and prison, now an art museum, in Florence, Italy.
  The word "bargello" appears to come from the late Latin bargillus (from Goth bargi and German burg), meaning "castle" or "fortified tower". During the Italian Middle Ages it was the name given to a military captain in charge of keeping peace and justice (hence "Captain of justice") during riots and uproars. In Florence he was usually hired from a foreign city to prevent any appearance of favoritism on the part of the Captain. The position could be compared with that of a current Chief of police. The name Bargello was extended to the building which was the office of the captain.
  The Bargello palace was built to house first the Capitano del Popolo and later, in 1261, the 'podestà', the highest magistrate of the Florence City Council. This Palazzo del Podestà, as it was originally called, is the oldest public building in Florence. This austere crenellated building served as model for the construction of the Palazzo Vecchio. In 1574, the Medici dispensed with the function of the Podestà and housed the bargello, the police chief of Florence, in this building, hence its name. It was employed as a prison; executions took place in the Bargello's yard until they were abolished by Grand Duke Peter Leopold in 1780, but it remained the headquarters of the Florentine police until 1859. When Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor Peter Leopold was exiled, the makeshift Governor of Tuscany decided that the Bargello should no longer be a jail, and it then became a national museum.
  
  wn.com/Bargello
• Battle of Campaldino
  The Battle of Campaldino was a battle between the Guelphs and Ghibellines on 11 June 1289. Mixed bands of pro-papal Guelf forces of Florence and allies, Pistoia, Lucca, Siena and Prato, all loosely commanded by the paid condottiero Amerigo di Narbona with his own professional following, met a Ghibelline force from Arezzo including the perhaps reluctant bishop, Guglielmino degli Ubertini, in the plain of Campaldino, which leads from Pratovecchio to Poppi, part of the Tuscan countryside along the upper Arno called the Casentino. One of the combatants on the Guelph side was Dante Alighieri, twenty-four years old at the time.
  Later, in the mid-14th century, Giovanni Villani recorded the long-remembered details— as Florentines remembered them— in his chronicle, though the casus belli he offers are merely conventional "outrages" on the part of Arezzo; the elaborately staged raid and fight led by aristocrats on both sides sounds like stylized gang warfare, though carried out, according to Villani, under the battle standard of the absent Charles, the Angevine King of Naples. The immediate cause of the battle were reports that the Guelphs were ravaging the places of Conte Guido Novello, who was podestà of Arezzo, and, worse, threatening the fortified place called Bibbiena Civitella. This led to an Arentine force being quickly assembled and marching out to counter the threat. It was reported by Villani that a plot had been intercepted at Arezzo, by which the bishop agreed to give over to the Florentines Bibbiena Civitella, and all the villages of his see, in return for a life annuity of 5,000 golden florins a year, guaranteed by the bank of the Cerchi. The plot was uncovered by his nephew Guglielmo de' Pazzi, and they hustled the bishop onto his horse and brought him to the battlefield, where they left him dead among the slain of the battle and its aftermath: Guglielmino de' Pazzi in Valdarno and Buonconte, the son of Guido I da Montefeltro.
  
  wn.com/Battle_of_Campaldino
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  Battle of Montaperti
  The Battle of Montaperti was fought on September 4, 1260, between Florence and Siena in Tuscany as part of the conflict between the Guelphs and Ghibellines. It gained notoriety for an act of treachery that turned the tide of the battle, which was immortalised by Dante Alighieri in his epic poem Divine Comedy.
  The Guelphs and Ghibellines were factions at least nominally supporting the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire respectively in Italy during the 12th and 13th centuries; in practice, the division between these factions often had more to do with local rivalries than with the hostility between papacy and empire.
  In the middle of the 13th century, the Guelphs held sway in Florence whilst the Ghibellines controlled Siena. In 1258, the Guelphs succeeded in expelling from Florence the last of the Ghibellines with any real power; they followed this with the murder of Tesauro Beccharia, Abbot of Vallombrosa, who was accused of plotting the return of the Ghibellines.
  The feud came to a head two years later when the Florentines, supported by their allies from around Tuscany (Bologna, Prato, Lucca, Orvieto, San Gimignano, San Miniato, Volterra and Colle Val d'Elsa), moved an army of some 35,000 men towards Siena. The Sienese called for help from King Manfred of Sicily, who provided a contingent of German mercenary heavy cavalry. The Sienese forces were led by Farinata degli Uberti, an exiled Florentine Ghibelline. Even with these reinforcements, though, they could only raise an army of 20,000.
  
  wn.com/Battle_of_Montaperti
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  Bologna
  Bologna (Italian pronunciation: [boˈloɲɲa] ( listen); Emilian: Bulåggna pronounced [buˈləɲɲa]; Latin: Bononia) is the principal city (capital) of the Emilia-Romagna Region in Northern Italy. Bologna is a lively and cosmopolitan Italian college city, with spectacular history, art, cuisine, music, and culture. It is the seventh largest city in terms of population in Italy and it is the heart of a metropolitan area (officially recognized by the Italian government as a metropolitan city) of about 1,000,000 inhabitants. The urban sprawl of Bologna, including nearby Modena, whose metropolises are adjoining, is continuously expanding.
  The city, the first settlements of which date back to at least one millennium before Christ, has always been an important urban center, first under the Etruscans (Velzna/Felsina) and the Celts (Bona), then under the Romans (Bononia), then again in the Middle Ages, as a free municipality (for one century it was the fifth largest European city based on population). Home to the oldest university in the world, University of Bologna, founded in 1088, Bologna hosts thousands of students who enrich the social and cultural life of the city. Famous for its towers and lengthy porticoes, Bologna has a well-preserved historical centre (one of the largest in Italy) thanks to a careful restoration and conservation policy which began at the end of the 1970s, on the heels of serious damage done by the urban demolition at the end of the 19th century as well as that caused by wars.
  
  wn.com/Bologna
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  Dante Park
  Dante Park or Dante Square is a park in front of Lincoln Center in New York City, New York.
  The park was established by Italian-Americans in honor of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. Carlo Barsotti, editor of the paper Il Progresso Italo-Americano, originally wanted to gather funds for a much more substantial statue to be placed in Times Square around 1912. Because of fundraising difficulties, by 1921, the 600th anniversary of Dante's death, a smaller statue was completed by Ettore Ximenes and placed in the location at Broadway at West 64th Street.
  A statue of the same casting is featured at Meridian Hill Park in Washington, DC.
  Coordinates: 40°46′19″N 73°58′57″W / 40.77194°N 73.9825°W / 40.77194; -73.9825
  
  wn.com/Dante_Park
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  Florence
  Florence (Italian: Firenze [fiˈrɛntse] ( listen), alternate obsolete form: Fiorenza; Latin: Florentia) is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area.
  Florence is famous for its history. A centre of medieval European trade and finance and one of the wealthiest cities of the time, Florence is considered the birthplace of the Renaissance, and has been called the Athens of the Middle Ages. A turbulent political history includes periods of rule by the powerful Medici family, and numerous religious and republican revolutions. From 1865 to 1870 the city was also the capital of the recently established Kingdom of Italy.
  The historic centre of Florence attracts millions of tourists each year, and Euromonitor International ranked the city as the world's 72nd most visited in 2009, with 1,685,000 visitors. It was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1982. Due to Florence's artistic and architectural heritage, it has been ranked by Forbes as one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and the city is noted for its history, culture, Renaissance art and architecture and monuments. The city also contains numerous museums and art galleries, such as the Uffizi Gallery and the Pitti Palace, amongst others, and still exerts an influence in the fields of art, culture and politics.
  
  wn.com/Florence
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  Gubbio
  Gubbio is a town and comune in the far northeastern part of the Italian province of Perugia (Umbria). It is located on the lowest slope of Mt. Ingino, a small mountain of the Apennines. See also Mount Ingino Christmas Tree.
  The city's origins are very ancient. The hills above the town were already occupied in the Bronze Age (Malone and Stoddart 1994). As Ikuvium, it was an important town of the ancient Umbrian people in pre-Roman times, made famous for the discovery there of the Eugubine (or Iguvine) Tables, a set of bronze tablets that together constitute the largest surviving text in ancient Umbrian. After the Roman conquest in the 2nd century BC — it kept its name as Iguvium — the city remained important, as attested by its Roman theater, the second-largest surviving in the world.
  Gubbio became very powerful in the beginning of the Middle Ages. The town sent 1000 knights to fight in the First Crusade under the lead of count Girolamo Gabrielli, and according to an undocumented local tradition, they were the first to penetrate into the Holy Sepulchre when the city was seized (1099).
  
  wn.com/Gubbio
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  Italy
  Italy ⁱ/ˈɪtəli/ (Italian: Italia [iˈtaːlja]), officially the Italian Republic or the Republic of Italy (Italian: Repubblica italiana), is a unitary parliamentary republic in south-central Europe. To the north, it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia along the Alps. To the south, it consists of the entirety of the Italian Peninsula, Sicily, Sardinia–the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea–and many other smaller islands. The independent states of San Marino and the Vatican City are enclaves within Italy, while Campione d'Italia is an Italian exclave in Switzerland. The territory of Italy covers some 301,338 km² (116,347 sq mi) and is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate. With 60.6 million inhabitants, it is the fifth most populous country in Europe, and the 23rd most populous in the world.
  Rome, the capital of Italy, was for centuries a political and religious centre of Western civilisation as the capital of the Roman Empire and site of the Holy See. After the decline of the Roman Empire, Italy endured numerous invasions by foreign peoples, from Germanic tribes such as the Lombards and Ostrogoths, to the Byzantines and later, the Normans, among others. Centuries later, Italy became the birthplace of Maritime republics and the Renaissance, an immensely fruitful intellectual movement that would prove to be integral in shaping the subsequent course of European thought.
  
  wn.com/Italy
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  Lucca
  Lucca  listen (help·info) is a city and comune in Tuscany, the north-west of Italy, situated on the river Serchio in a fertile plain near the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Lucca. Among other reasons, it is famous for its intact Renaissance-era city walls.
  Lucca was founded by the Etruscans (there are traces of a pre-existing Ligurian settlement) and became a Roman colony in 180 BC. The rectangular grid of its historical centre preserves the Roman street plan, and the Piazza San Michele occupies the site of the ancient forum. Traces of the amphitheatre can still be seen in the Piazza dell'Anfiteatro. Lucca was the site of a conference in 56 BC which reaffirmed the supremacy of the Roman First Triumvirate.
  Frediano, an Irish monk, was bishop of Lucca in the early 6th century. At one point, Lucca was plundered by Odoacer, the first Germanic King of Italy. Lucca was an important city and fortress even in the 6th century, when Narses besieged it for several months in 553. Under the Lombards, it was the seat of a duke who minted his own coins. The Holy Face of Lucca (or Volto Santo), a major relic supposedly carved by Nicodemus, arrived in 742. It became prosperous through the silk trade that began in the 11th century, and came to rival the silks of Byzantium. During the 10-11th centuries Lucca was the capital of the feudal margraviate of Tuscany, more or less independent but owing nominal allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor.
  
  wn.com/Lucca
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  Luxembourg
  Luxembourg (ⁱ/ˈlʌksəmbɜrɡ/ LUKS-əm-burg), officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg (Luxembourgish: Groussherzogtum Lëtzebuerg, French: Grand-Duché de Luxembourg, German: Großherzogtum Luxemburg, Dutch: Groothertogdom Luxemburg), is a landlocked country in western Europe, bordered by Belgium, France, and Germany. It has two principal regions: the Oesling in the North as part of the Ardennes massif, and the Gutland ("good country") in the south. Luxembourg has a population of over half a million people in an area of approximately 2,586 square kilometres (998 sq mi). A representative democracy with a constitutional monarch, it is ruled by a grand duke. It is now the world's only remaining sovereign grand duchy. The country has a highly developed economy, with the world's highest GDP (nominal) per capita according to the IMF. Its historic and strategic importance dates back to its founding as a Roman era fortress site and Frankish count's castle site in the Early Middle Ages. It was an important bastion along the Spanish Road when Spain was the principal European power influencing the whole western hemisphere and beyond in the 16th–17th centuries.
  
  wn.com/Luxembourg
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  Orvieto Cathedral
  The Cathedral of Orvieto is a large 14th century Roman Catholic cathedral situated in the town of Orvieto in Umbria, central Italy. The building was constructed under the orders of Pope Urban IV to commemorate and provide a suitable home for the Corporal of Bolsena, a miracle which is said to have occurred in 1263 in the nearby town of Bolsena, when a traveling priest who had doubts about the truth of transubstantiation found that his Host was bleeding so much that it stained the altar cloth. The cloth is now stored in the Chapel of the Corporal inside the cathedral.
  Situated in a position dominating the town of Orvieto which sits perched on a volcanic plug, the cathedral’s façade is a classic piece of religious construction, containing elements of design from the 14th to the 20th century, with a large rose window, golden mosaics and three huge bronze doors, while inside resides two frescoed chapels decorated by some of the best Italian painters of the period with images of Judgement Day.
  
  wn.com/Orvieto_Cathedral
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  Oxford
  Oxford ⁱ/ˈɒksfəd/ is a city in central southern England, the home of the University of Oxford. The city is the county town of Oxfordshire, and forms a district within the county. It has a population of just under 165,000, of whom 153,900 live within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles (80 km) north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames (also sometimes known as the Isis locally) run through Oxford and meet south of the city centre.
  Oxford has a diverse economic base. Its industries include motor manufacturing, education, publishing and a large number of information technology and science-based businesses.
  Buildings in Oxford demonstrate an example of every English architectural period since the arrival of the Saxons, including the iconic, mid-18th century Radcliffe Camera. Oxford is known as the "city of dreaming spires", a term coined by poet Matthew Arnold in reference to the harmonious architecture of Oxford's university buildings. The University of Oxford is the oldest university in the English-speaking world.
  
  wn.com/Oxford
• 
  Palazzo Vecchio
  The Palazzo Vecchio (Italian pronunciation: [paˈlattso ˈvɛkkjo] "Old Palace") is the town hall of Florence, Italy. This massive, Romanesque, crenellated fortress-palace is among the most impressive town halls of Tuscany. Overlooking the Piazza della Signoria with its copy of Michelangelo's David statue as well the gallery of statues in the adjacent Loggia dei Lanzi, it is one of the most significant public places in Italy.
  Originally called the Palazzo della Signoria, after the Signoria of Florence, the ruling body of the Republic of Florence, it was also given several other names: Palazzo del Popolo, Palazzo dei Priori, and Palazzo Ducale, in accordance with the varying use of the palace during its long history. The building acquired its current name when the Medici duke's residence was moved across the Arno to the Palazzo Pitti.
  
  wn.com/Palazzo_Vecchio
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  Ravenna
  Ravenna [raˈvenna] ( listen) (Romagnol: Ravêna) is the capital city of the Province of Ravenna in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. It was the capital city of the Western Roman Empire from 402 until that empire collapsed in 476. Afterwards, it served as the capital of the Kingdom of the Ostrogoths. The city formed the centre of the Byzantine Exarchate of Ravenna until the invasion of the Franks in 751, after which it became the seat of the Kingdom of the Lombards.
  Although an inland city, Ravenna is connected to the Adriatic Sea by the Candiano Canal. It is the location of a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
  The origin of the name Ravenna is unclear, although it is believed the name is Etruscan. Some have speculated that "ravenna" is related to "Rasenna" (later "Rasna"), the term that the Etruscans used for themselves, but there is no agreement on this point.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Ravenna
• 
  Rome
  Rome (/ˈroʊm/; Italian: Roma pronounced [ˈroːma] ( listen); Latin: Rōma) is a city and special comune ("Roma Capitale") in Italy. Rome is the capital of Italy and the capital of Lazio (Latin: Latium). With 2.8 million residents in 1,285.3 km² (496.3 sq mi), it is also the country's largest and most populated comune and fourth-most populous city in the European Union by population within city limits. Between 3.2 and 3.7 million people live in the Rome metropolitan area. The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.
  Rome's history spans two and a half thousand years. It was the capital city of the Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, which was the dominant power in Western Europe and the lands bordering the Mediterranean for over seven hundred years from the 1st century BC until the 7th century AD and the city is regarded as one of the birthplaces of western civilization. Since the 1st century AD Rome has been the seat of the Papacy and, after the end of Byzantine domination, in the 8th century it became the capital of the Papal States, which lasted until 1870. In 1871 Rome became the capital of the Kingdom of Italy, and in 1946 that of the Italian Republic.
  
  wn.com/Rome
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  Sarzana
  Sarzana (Italian pronunciation: [sarˈdzaːna]) is a town and comune in the Province of La Spezia, of Liguria, Italy, 15 km east of Spezia, on the railway to Pisa, at the point where the railway to Parma diverges to the north. In 2008 it had a population of 21,356.
  The position of Sarzana at the entrance to the valley of the Magra (ancient Macra), the boundary between Etruria and Liguria in Roman times, gave it military importance in the Middle Ages. The first mention of the city is found in 983 in a diplom of Otto I: in 1202 the episcopal see was transferred from the ancient Luni, 5 km southeast, to Sarzana.
  Sarzana, owing to its position, changed masters more than once, belonging first to Pisa, then to Florence, then to the Banco di S. Giorgio of Genoa and from 1572 to Genoa itself.
  These changes left in Sarzana a conspicuous fortress, which remains a focus of attraction for people interested in military history and specifically in the history of fortifications (see Star fortress).
  In 1814 it was assigned to the Kingdom of Sardinia, the frontier between Liguria and Tuscany being now made to run between it and Carrara.
  
  wn.com/Sarzana
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  Sicily
  Sicily (Italian and Sicilian: Sicilia, [siˈtʃiːlja]; [sɪˈɕilja]) is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea; along with surrounding minor islands, it constitutes an autonomous region of Italy, the Regione Autonoma Siciliana (Sicilian Autonomous Region).
  Sicily is located in the central Mediterranean. It extends from the tip of the Apennine peninsula from which it is separated only by the narrow Strait of Messina, towards the North African coast. Its most prominent landmark is Mount Etna, which is at 3,320 m (10,890 ft) the tallest active volcano in Europe and one of the most active in the world. The island has a typical Mediterranean climate.
  The earliest archeological evidence of human dwelling on the island dates from 8000 BC. At around 750 BC, Sicily became a Greek colony and for the next 600 years it was the site of the Greek-Punic and Roman-Punic wars, which ended with the Roman destruction of Carthage. After the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD, Sicily often changed hands, and during the early Middle Ages it was ruled in turn by the Vandals, Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Arabs and Normans. Later on, the Kingdom of Sicily lasted between 1130 and 1816, subordinated to the crowns of Aragon, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and finally the Bourbons, as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. It was united with the rest of Italy in 1860, but a subsequent economic collapse led to a wave of emigration, separatism, and the emergence of the Mafia, whose criminal activities pose problems to this day. After the birth of the Italian Republic in 1946, Sicily was given special status as an autonomous region.
  
  wn.com/Sicily
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  Uffizi
  The Uffizi Gallery (Italian: Galleria degli Uffizi, Italian pronunciation: [ˌɡalleˈria deʎʎi ufˈfittsi]) , is a museum in Florence, Italy. It is one of the oldest and most famous art museums of the Western world.
  Building of the palace was begun by Giorgio Vasari in 1560 for Cosimo I de' Medici as the offices for the Florentine magistrates — hence the name "uffizi" ("offices"). Construction was continued to Vasari's design by Alfonso Parigi and Bernardo Buontalenti and ended in 1581. The cortile (internal courtyard) is so long and narrow, and open to the Arno River at its far end through a Doric screen that articulates the space without blocking it, that architectural historians treat it as the first regularized streetscape of Europe. Vasari, a painter as well as architect, emphasized the perspective length by the matching facades' continuous roof cornices, and unbroken cornices between storeys and the three continuous steps on which the palace-fronts stand. The niches in the piers that alternate with columns were filled with sculptures of famous artists in the 19th century.
  
  wn.com/Uffizi
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  Venice
  Venice (Italian: Venezia [veˈnɛttsja] ( listen), Venetian: Venexia [veˈnɛsja]; (Latin: Venetia) is a city in northeast Italy sited on a group of 118 small islands separated by canals and linked by bridges. It is located in the marshy Venetian Lagoon which stretches along the shoreline between the mouths of the Po and the Piave Rivers. Venice is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. The city in its entirety is listed as World Heritage Site, along with its lagoon.
  Venice is the capital of the Veneto region. In 2009, there were 270,098 people residing in Venice's comune (the population estimate of 272,000 inhabitants includes the population of the whole Comune of Venezia; around 60,000 in the historic city of Venice (Centro storico); 176,000 in Terraferma (the Mainland), mostly in the large frazioni of Mestre and Marghera; 31,000 live on other islands in the lagoon). Together with Padua and Treviso, the city is included in the Padua-Treviso-Venice Metropolitan Area (PATREVE) (population 1,600,000).
  
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  Verona
  Verona (Italian pronunciation: [veˈroːna] ( listen); Venetian Verona (pron. Veròna); German Bern, Dietrichsbern or Welschbern) is a city in the Veneto, northern Italy, with approx. 265,000 inhabitants and one of the seven chef-lieus of the region. It is the second largest city municipality in the region and the third of northeast Italy. The metropolitan area of Verona covers an area of 1,426 km² (550.58 sq mi) and has a population of 714,274 inhabitants. It is one of the main tourist destinations in northern Italy, owing to its artistic heritage, several annual fairs, shows, and operas, such as the lyrical season in the Arena, the ancient amphitheatre built by the Romans.
  The city has been awarded World Heritage Site status by UNESCO because of its urban structure and architecture.
  The precise details of Verona's early history remain a mystery. The origin of the name Verona is also unknown. One theory is it was a city of the Euganei, who were obliged to give it up to the Cenomani (550 BC). With the conquest of the Vaecame Roman (about 300 BC) Verona became a Roman colonia in 89 BC, and then a municipium in 49 BC; Verona had the franchise in 59.
  
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  Albertus Magnus
  Albertus Magnus, O.P. (1193/1206 – November 15, 1280), also known as Albert the Great and Albert of Cologne, is a Catholic saint. He was a German Dominican friar and a bishop who achieved fame for his comprehensive knowledge of and advocacy for the peaceful coexistence of science and religion. Those such as James A. Weisheipl and Joachim R. Söder have referred to him as the greatest German philosopher and theologian of the Middle Ages, an opinion supported by contemporaries such as Roger Bacon. The Catholic Church honours him as a Doctor of the Church, one of only 34 persons with that honor.
  Albertus was born sometime between 1193 and 1206 to the Count of Bollstädt in Lauingen in Bavaria. Contemporaries such as Roger Bacon applied the term "Magnus" to Albertus during his own lifetime, referring to his immense reputation as a scholar and philosopher.
  Albertus was educated principally at Padua, where he received instruction in Aristotle's writings. A late account by Rudolph de Novamagia refers to Albertus' encounter with the Blessed Virgin Mary, who convinced him to enter Holy Orders. In 1223 (or 1221) he became a member of the Dominican Order, against the wishes of his family, and studied theology at Bologna and elsewhere. Selected to fill the position of lecturer at Cologne, Germany, where the Dominicans had a house, he taught for several years there, at Regensburg, Freiburg, Strasbourg and Hildesheim. In 1245 he went to Paris, received his doctorate and taught for some time as a master of theology with great success. During this time Thomas Aquinas began to study under Albertus.
  
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  Alfonso Muzzarelli
  Alfonso Muzzarelli (b. 22 August 1749, at Ferrara; d. 25 May 1813, at Paris) was an Italian Jesuit theologian and scholar.
  He entered the Jesuit novitiate on 20 October 1768, and taught grammar at Bologna and Imola. After the suppression of the order in 1773 he received a benefice at Ferrara and, somewhat later, was made director of the Collegio dei Nobili at Parma.
  Pope Pius VII summoned him to Rome, and appointed him theologian of the Poenitentiaria. When Pius VII was exiled in 1809, Muzzarelli was also obliged to leave Rome and was transported to Paris, where he spent his remaining life at the convent of the Dames de Saint-Michel.
  He wrote numerous theological, philosophical and ascetical works. His chief production is a collection of philosophico-theological treatises published repeatedly under the title "Il buon uso della Logica in materia di Religione" (6 vols., Foligno, 1787-9), with additions by the author (10 vols., Rome, 1807; 11 vols. Florence, 1821-3). The collection contains sketches on the theological questions on the day such as - abuses in the Church, the temporal power of the pope, religious toleration, ecclesiastical immunity, riches of the Church and its clergy, primacy and infallibility of the pope, auricular confession, religious institutes, indulgences, Gregory VII, moral liberty, etc. This collection of treatises, with the exception of the last five, was translated into Latin by Zeldmayer de Buzitha ("Bonus usus logiae in materia religionis", Kaschau, 1818-7). A French translation, containing 42 treatises, was published at Brussels in 1837.
  
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  Ambrose
  Aurelius Ambrosius, better known in English as Saint Ambrose (c. between 337 and 340 – 4 April 397), was a bishop of Milan who became one of the most influential ecclesiastical figures of the 4th century. He was one of the four original doctors of the Church.
  Ambrose was born into a Roman Christian family between about 337 and 340 and was raised in Trier. His father was Aurelius Ambrosius, the praetorian prefect of Gaul; his mother was a woman of intellect and piety. Ambrose's siblings, Satyrus (who is the subject of Ambrose's De excessu fratris Satyri) and Marcellina, are also venerated as saints. There is a legend that as an infant, a swarm of bees settled on his face while he lay in his cradle, leaving behind a drop of honey. His father considered this a sign of his future eloquence and honeyed tongue. For this reason, bees and beehives often appear in the saint's symbology.
  After the early death of his father, Ambrose followed his father's career. He was educated in Rome, studying literature, law, and rhetoric.Praetor Anicius Probus first gave him a place in the council and then in about 372 made him consular prefect or "Governor" of Liguria and Emilia, with headquarters at Milan, which was then (beside Rome) the second capital in Italy.
  
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  Andrea del Castagno
  Andrea del Castagno (or Andrea di Bartolo di Bargilla) (c. 1421–19 August 1457) was an Italian painter from Florence, influenced chiefly by Tommaso Masaccio and Giotto di Bondone. His works include frescoes in Sant'Apollonia in Florence and the painted equestrian monument of Niccolò da Tolentino (1456) in the Cathedral in Florence. He in turn influenced the Ferrarese school of Cosmè Tura, Francesco del Cossa and Ercole de' Roberti.
  Andrea del Castagno was born at Castagno, a village near Monte Falterona, not far from Florence. During the war between Florence and Milan, he lived in Corella, returning to his home after its end. In 1440 he moved to Florence under the protection of Bernadetto de' Medici. Here he painted the portraits of the citizens hanged after the Battle of Anghiari on the facade of the Palazzo del Podestà, gaining the nickname of Andrea degli Impiccati.
  Little is known about his formation, though it has been hypothised that he apprenticed under Fra Filippo Lippi and Paolo Uccello. In 1440-1441 he executed the fresco of Crucifixion and Saints in the Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova, whose perspective-oriented construction and figures shows the influence of Masaccio.
  
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  Anselm of Canterbury
  Anselm of Canterbury (Aosta c. 1033 – Canterbury 21 April 1109), also called of Aosta for his birthplace, and of Bec for his home monastery, was a Benedictine monk, a philosopher, and a prelate of the Church who held the office of Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. Called the founder of scholasticism, he is famous as the originator of the ontological argument for the existence of God.
  Born into the House of Candia, he entered the Benedictine order at the Abbey of Bec at the age of 27, where he became abbot in 1079. He became Archbishop of Canterbury under William II of England, and was exiled from England from 1097 to 1100, and again from 1105 to 1107 under Henry I of England as a result of the investiture controversy, the most significant conflict between Church and state in Medieval Europe.
  Anselm was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1720 by a Papal Bull of Pope Clement XI.
  Anselm was born under the name "Anselmus Candiae Genavae" (Italian: Anselmo di Candia Ginevra, French: Anselme de Candie Genève) at or nearAosta in the Kingdom of Arles (currently the capital of the Aosta Valley region in Northern Italy) around 1033. His family was noble (they were related by blood to the ascendant House of Savoy) and owned considerable property. His parents were from a noble lineage and holders of fiefdoms within the Burgundian territories. His father, Gundulf de Candia, was by birth a Lombard of the House of Candia; he seems to have been harsh. His mother, Ermenberga of Geneva, was regarded as prudent and virtuous; she was related to Otto, Count of Savoy.
  
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  Anthony Burgess
  John Burgess Wilson (25 February 1917 – 22 November 1993) – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic.
  The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works. It was adapted into a highly controversial 1971 film by Stanley Kubrick, which Burgess said was chiefly responsible for the popularity of the book. Burgess produced numerous other novels, including the Enderby quartet, and Earthly Powers. He was a prominent critic, writing acclaimed studies of classic writers such as William Shakespeare, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway. In 2008, The Times placed Burgess number 17 on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Burgess was an accomplished musician and linguist. He composed over 250 musical works, including a first symphony around age 18, wrote a number of libretti, and translated, among other works, Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King and Carmen.
  
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  Aristotle
  Aristotle (Ancient Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης, Aristotélēs) (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. Aristotle's writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing morality, aesthetics, logic, science, politics, and metaphysics.
  Aristotle's views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although they were ultimately replaced by Newtonian physics. In the zoological sciences, some of his observations were confirmed to be accurate only in the 19th century. His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, which was incorporated in the late 19th century into modern formal logic. In metaphysics, Aristotelianism had a profound influence on philosophical and theological thinking in the Islamic and Jewish traditions in the Middle Ages, and it continues to influence Christian theology, especially the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church. His ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics. All aspects of Aristotle's philosophy continue to be the object of active academic study today. Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues (Cicero described his literary style as "a river of gold"), it is thought that the majority of his writings are now lost and only about one-third of the original works have survived.
  
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  Augustine of Hippo
  Augustine of Hippo ( /ɒˈɡʌstɨn/ or /ˈɔːɡəstɪn/;Latin: Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis; November 13, 354 – August 28, 430), also known as Augustine, St. Augustine, St. Austin,St. Augoustinos, Blessed Augustine, or St. Augustine the Blessed, was Bishop of Hippo Regius (present-day Annaba, Algeria). He was a Latin philosopher and theologian from Roman Africa. His writings were very influential in the development of Western Christianity.
  According to his contemporary, Jerome, Augustine "established anew the ancient Faith." In his early years he was heavily influenced by Manichaeism and afterward by the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus. After his conversion to Christianity and baptism in AD 387, Augustine developed his own approach to philosophy and theology, accommodating a variety of methods and different perspectives. He believed that the grace of Christ was indispensable to human freedom, and he framed the concepts of original sin and just war.
  When the Western Roman Empire was starting to disintegrate, Augustine developed the concept of the Catholic Church as a spiritual City of God (in a book of the same name), distinct from the material Earthly City. His thoughts profoundly influenced the medieval worldview. Augustine's City of God was closely identified with the Church, the community that worshipped God.
  
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  Averroes
  ʾAbū l-Walīd Muḥammad bin ʾAḥmad bin Rušd (Arabic: أبو الوليد محمد بن احمد بن رشد‎), better known just as Ibn Rushd (Arabic: ابن رشد‎), and in European literature as Averroes ( /əˈvɛroʊ.iːz/; April 14, 1126 – December 10, 1198), was an Andalusian Muslim polymath; a master of Aristotelian philosophy, Islamic philosophy, Islamic theology, Maliki law and jurisprudence, logic, psychology, politics, Arabic music theory, and the sciences of medicine, astronomy, geography, mathematics, physics and celestial mechanics. He was born in Córdoba, Al Andalus, modern-day Spain, and died in Marrakesh, Morocco. His school of philosophy is known as Averroism.
  Ibn Rushd was a defender of Aristotelian philosophy against claims from the influential Islamic theologian Ghazali who attacked philosophy so it would not become an affront to the teachings of Islam.
  Averroes' name is also seen as Averroës, Averroès or Averrhoës, indicating that the "o" and the "e" form separate syllables. Averroes is a Latinisation of a Hebrew transcription of the Arab name Ibn Rushd.
  
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  Avicenna
  Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Sīnā (Persian پورسينا Pur Sina [ˈpuːr ˈsiːnɑː] "son of Sina"; c. 980, Afshana near Bukhara– 1037, Hamadan, Iran), commonly known as Ibn Sīnā or by his Latinized name Avicenna, was a Persianpolymath, who wrote almost 450 treatises on a wide range of subjects, of which around 240 have survived. In particular, 150 of his surviving treatises concentrate on philosophy and 40 of them concentrate on medicine.
  His most famous works are The Book of Healing, a vast philosophical and scientific encyclopaedia, and The Canon of Medicine, which was a standard medical text at many medieval universities. The Canon of Medicine was used as a text-book in the universities of Montpellier and Leuven as late as 1650. Ibn Sīnā's Canon of Medicine provides a complete system of medicine according to the principles of Galen (and Hippocrates).
  His corpus also includes writing on philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, geology, psychology, Islamic theology, logic, mathematics, physics, as well as poetry. He is regarded as the most famous and influential polymath of the Islamic Golden Age.
  
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  Beatrice Portinari
  Beatrice "Bice" di Folco Portinari (1266–1290) (pronounced [be.aˈtriːtʃe]) was a Florentine woman known as the muse of the poet Dante Alighieri. Beatrice was the principal inspiration for Dante's Vita Nuova, and also appears as his guide in the Divine Comedy (La Divina Commedia) in the last book, Paradiso, and in the last four canti of Purgatorio. There she takes over as guide from the Latin poet Virgil because, as a pagan, Virgil cannot enter Paradise and because, being the incarnation of beatific love, as her name implies, it is Beatrice Portinari who leads into the Beatific vision.
  Scholars have long debated the identity of the historical Beatrice. She was apparently the daughter of the banker Folco Portinari, and was married to another banker, Simone dei Bardi. Dante claims to have met her only twice, each time separated by nine years but was so affected by the meetings that he carried his love for her throughout his life.
  Although not unanimous, the tradition that identifies Bice di Folco Portinari with the Beatrice loved by Dante is now generally accepted by scholars. Boccaccio, in his commentary on the Divine Comedy, explicitly refers to the young woman. Clear documents on her life have always been scarce, helping make even her existence doubtful. The only hard evidence is the will of Folco Portinari from 1287 which says " ..item d. Bici filie sue et uxoris d. Simonis del Bardis reliquite ..., lib.50 ad floren" - essentially a bequest to his daughter who was married to Simone dei Bardi. Folco Portinari was a rich banker, born in Portico di Romagna. He moved to Florence and lived in a house near Dante where he had six daughters. Folco also gave generously to found the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. Beatrice was related to the other family of great bankers, the Bardi.
  
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  Bernard Lonergan
  Fr. Bernard J.F. Lonergan, CC, SJ (17 December 1904 – 26 November 1984) was a Canadian Jesuit priest, philosopher, and theologian widely regarded as one of the most important Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century.
  Lonergan's works include Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957) and Method in Theology (1972), as well as two studies of Thomas Aquinas, several theological textbooks, and numerous essays, including two posthumously published essays on macroeconomics. A projected 25-volume Collected Works is underway with the University of Toronto Press. He held appointments at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Regis College, Toronto, as Distinguished Visiting Professor at Boston College, and as Stillman Professor of Divinity at Harvard University.
  Lonergan set out to do for Catholic thought in our time what he judged Thomas Aquinas had done for his own time. Aquinas had successfully applied Aristotelian thought to the service of a Christian understanding of the universe. Lonergan's program was to come to terms with modern scientific, historical, and hermeneutical thinking in a comparable way. He pursued this program in his two most fundamental works, Insight and Method in Theology.
  
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  Bernard of Clairvaux
  Bernard of Clairvaux, O.Cist (1090 – August 20, 1153) was a French abbot and the primary builder of the reforming Cistercian order.
  After the death of his mother, Bernard sought admission into the Cistercian order. Three years later, he was sent to found a new abbey at an isolated clearing in a glen known as the Val d'Absinthe, about 15 km southeast of Bar-sur-Aube. According to tradition, Bernard founded the monastery on 25 June 1115, naming it Claire Vallée, which evolved into Clairvaux. There Bernard would preach an immediate faith, in which the intercessor was the Virgin Mary.^{[citation needed]} In the year 1128, Bernard assisted at the Council of Troyes, at which he traced the outlines of the Rule of the Knights Templar, who soon became the ideal of Christian nobility.
  
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  Blaise Pascal
  Blaise Pascal (French pronunciation: [blɛz paskal]; 19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662), was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalizing the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defense of the scientific method.
  In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines, and after three years of effort and 50 prototypes he invented the mechanical calculator. He built twenty of these machines (called the Pascaline) in the following ten years. Pascal was an important mathematician, helping create two major new areas of research: he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of sixteen, and later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. Following Galileo and Torricelli, in 1646 he refuted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. Pascal's results caused many disputes before being accepted.
  
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  Boethius
  Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius, commonly called Boethius (ca. 480–524 or 525 AD) was a philosopher of the early 6th century. He was born in Rome to an ancient and prominent family which included emperors Petronius Maximus and Olybrius and many consuls. His father, Flavius Manlius Boethius, was consul in 487 after Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman Emperor. Boethius, of the noble Anicia family, entered public life at a young age and was already a senator by the age of 25. Boethius himself was consul in 510 in the kingdom of the Ostrogoths. In 522 he saw his two sons become consuls. Boethius was imprisoned and eventually executed by King Theodoric the Great, who suspected him of conspiring with the Eastern Roman Empire. While jailed, Boethius composed his Consolation of Philosophy, a philosophical treatise on fortune, death, and other issues. The Consolation became one of the most popular and influential works of the Middle Ages. A link between Boethius and a mathematical boardgame Rithmomachia has been made.
  
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  Bonaventure
  Saint Bonaventure, O.F.M., (Italian: San Bonaventura; 1221 – 15 July 1274), born John of Fidanza (Italian: Giovanni di Fidanza), was an Italian medieval scholastic theologian and philosopher. The seventh Minister General of the Order of Friars Minor, he was also a Cardinal Bishop of Albano. He was canonized on 14 April 1482 by Pope Sixtus IV and declared a Doctor of the Church in the year 1588 by Pope Sixtus V. He is known as the "Seraphic Doctor" (Latin: Doctor Seraphicus). Many writings believed in the Middle Ages to be his are now collected under the name Pseudo-Bonaventura.
  He was born at Bagnoregio in Latium, not far from Viterbo. Almost nothing is known of his childhood, other than the names of his parents, Giovanni di Fidanza and Maria Ritella.
  He entered the Franciscan Order in 1243 and studied at the University of Paris, possibly under Alexander of Hales, and certainly under Alexander's successor, John of Rochelle. In 1253 he held the Franciscan chair at Paris and was proceeded as Master of Theology. Unfortunately for Bonaventure, a dispute between seculars and mendicants delayed his reception as Master until 1257, where his degree was taken in company with Thomas Aquinas. Three years earlier his fame had earned him the position of lecturer on the The Four Books of Sentences—a book of theology written by Peter Lombard in the twelfth century—and in 1255 he received the degree of master, the medieval equivalent of doctor.
  
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  Bridget of Sweden
  Bridget of Sweden (1303 – 23 July 1373; also Birgitta of Vadstena, Saint Birgitta (Swedish: den heliga Birgitta or Birgitta Birgersdotter), was a mystic and saint, and founder of the Bridgettines nuns and monks after the death of her husband of twenty years. She was also the mother of Catherine of Vadstena.
  She is one of the six patron saints of Europe, together with Benedict of Nursia, Saints Cyril and Methodius, Catherine of Siena and Edith Stein.
  The most celebrated saint of Sweden was the daughter of the knight, Birger Persson of the family of Finsta, governor and lawspeaker of Uppland, and one of the richest landowners of the country, and his wife, a member of the so-called Lawspeaker branch of the Folkunga family. Through her mother, Ingeborg, Birgitta was related to the Swedish kings of her era.
  In 1316, when she was 14 she married Ulf Gudmarsson of the family of Ulvåsa, Lord of Närke, to whom she bore eight children, four daughters and four sons. All of them survived infancy, which was very rare at that time. One of them was afterwards honored as St. Catherine of Sweden. Birgitta’s saintly and charitable life soon made her known far and wide; she gained, too, great religious influence over her husband, with whom (1341–1343) she went on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.
  
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  Brunetto Latini
  Brunetto Latini (c. 1220–1294) (who signed his name Burnectus Latinus in Latin and Burnecto Latino in Italian) was an Italian philosopher, scholar and statesman.
  Brunetto Latini was born in Florence in 1220 to a Tuscan noble family, the son of Buonaccorso Latini. He belonged to the Guelph party. He was a notary and a man of learning, much respected by his fellow citizens and famed for his skill as an orator. He expounded the writings of Cicero as guidance in public affairs.
  He was of sufficient stature to be sent to Seville on an embassy to Alfonso el Sabio of Castile to seek help for Florence against the Sienese; the mission was unsuccessful. On his return from Spain, travelling along the Pass of Roncesvalles, he describes meeting a student from Bologna astride a bay mule, who told him of the defeat of the Guelphs at the Battle of Montaperti. As a result, Latini was exiled from his native city. He took refuge for some years (1260–1266) in France working as a notary - in Montpellier, Arras, Bar-sur-Aube and Paris.
  
  wn.com/Brunetto_Latini
• Cacciaguida
  Cacciaguida degli Elisei (c. 1091 – c. 1148) was an Italian crusader, the great-great-grandfather of Dante Alighieri.
  Little is known about his life. He was born in Florence, and two documents from 1189 and 1201 mention his existence; all other details of his biography are those from his most famous descendant's works. Cacciaguida probably died in the Holy Land.
  Dante meets Cacciaguida in Paradiso, precisely in the canti XV-XVII. Apart from their literary value, the canti are important for the information they provide about Florence in the 12th century. In the canto XVII, Cacciaguida forecasts Dante's future, namely his exile from Florence and the solitude of his late years.
  
  
  
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  Catherine of Siena
  Saint Catherine of Siena, T.O.S.D, (25 March 1347 in Siena – 29 April 1380 in Rome) was a tertiary of the Dominican Order, and a Scholastic philosopher and theologian. She also worked to bring the papacy of Gregory XI back to Rome from its displacement in France, and to establish peace among the Italian city-states. She was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1970. She is one of the two patron saints of Italy, together with St. Francis of Assisi.
  Caterina Benincasa was born in Siena, Italy, to Giacomo di Benincasa, a cloth dyer who ran his enterprise with the help of his sons, and Lapa Piagenti, possibly the daughter of a local poet. The house where Catherine grew up is still in existence. Born in 1347, she arrived when the black death struck the area; Siena was badly ravaged. Lapa was about forty years old when she prematurely gave birth to twin daughters, Catherine and Giovanna. Lapa had already had 22 children, but half of them had died. Giovanna was handed over to a wet-nurse, and presently died, whereas Catherine was nursed by her mother, and developed into a healthy child. She was two years old when Lapa had her 25th child, another daughter named Giovanna. Catherine had her first vision of Christ when she was age five or six, saying that Jesus smiled at her, blessed her, and left her in ecstasy. At age seven she vowed chastity.
  
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  Charlemagne
  Charlemagne ( /ˈʃɑrlɨmeɪn/ or /ˈʃɑrləmeɪn/; French pronunciation: [ʃaʁ.lə.maɲ]; c. 742 – 28 January 814), also known as Charles the Great (Latin: Carolus Magnus or Karolus Magnus), was King of the Franks from 768 and Emperor of the Romans (Imperator Romanorum) from 800 to his death in 814. He expanded the Frankish kingdom into an empire that incorporated much of Western and Central Europe. During his reign, he conquered Italy and was crowned Imperator Augustus by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800 in Rome.
  His rule is also associated with the Carolingian Renaissance, a revival of art, religion, and culture through the medium of the Catholic Church. Through his foreign conquests and internal reforms, Charlemagne helped define both Western Europe and the European Middle Ages. He is numbered as Charles I in the regnal lists of Germany, the Holy Roman Empire, and France.
  The son of King Pepin the Short and Bertrada of Laon, a Frankish queen, he succeeded his father in 768 and was initially co-ruler with his brother Carloman I. It has often been suggested that the relationship between Charlemagne and Carloman was not good, but it has also been argued that tensions were exaggerated by Carolingian chroniclers.
  
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  Charles I of Naples
  Charles I (21 March 1226 – 7 January 1285), known also as Charles of Anjou, was the King of Sicily by conquest from 1266, though he had received it as a papal grant in 1262 and was expelled from the island in the aftermath of the Sicilian Vespers of 1282. Thereafter, he continued to claim the island, though his power was restricted to the peninsular possessions of the kingdom, with his capital at Naples (and for this he is usually titled King of Naples after 1282, as are his successors).
  Charles was the youngest son of Louis VIII of France and Blanche of Castile, and hence younger brother of Louis IX of France and Alfonso II of Toulouse. He conquered the Kingdom of Sicily from the Hohenstaufen and began to acquire lands in the eastern Mediterranean. However, the War of the Sicilian Vespers forced him to abandon his plans to reassemble the Latin Empire.
  By marriage to Beatrice, heiress of Raymond Berengar IV of Provence, he was Count of Provence and Forcalquier from 1246. In 1247, his brother Louis IX made him Count of Anjou and Maine, as appanages of the French crown. By conquest and self-proclamation, he became King of Albania in 1272 and by purchase King of Jerusalem in 1277. By the testament of William II of Villehardouin, he inherited the Principality of Achaea in 1278.
  
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  Ciampolo
  Ciampolo (also Giampolo, "John Paul") is the accepted name of a character in Dante's Divine Comedy.
  Ciampolo appears in Canto XXII of the Inferno, where he is a grafter in the fifth ditch of the eighth circle. Ciampolo is hooked by the devils (the Malebanche, "Evil Claws") that patrol that ditch, and pulled out of the boiling pitch where the grafters are immersed, which represent their sticky fingers and corrupt deals. Threatened by the devils, Ciampolo tells Dante the identity of some of the other grafters punished there. Ciampolo eventually tricks the devils, and makes his escape back to the boiling pitch.
  Dante does not identify Ciampolo by name, but his name was provided by early commentators. Nothing else is really known about him other that the information provided by Dante: that he was born in Navarre, that his father was a wastrel, and that he served King Theobald II of Navarre.
  
  
  
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  Cicero
  Marcus Tullius Cicero ( /ˈsɪsɨroʊ/; Classical Latin: [ˈkɪkɛroː]; January 3, 106 BC – December 7, 43 BC; sometimes anglicized as Tully), was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, orator, political theorist, Roman consul and constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.
  He introduced the Romans to the chief schools of Greek philosophy and created a Latin philosophical vocabulary (with neologisms such as humanitas, qualitas, quantitas, and essentia) distinguishing himself as a linguist, translator, and philosopher.
  Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited for initiating the 14th-century Renaissance. According to Polish historian Tadeusz Zieliński, "Renaissance was above all things a revival of Cicero, and only after him and through him of the rest of Classical antiquity." The peak of Cicero's authority and prestige came during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and his impact on leading Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume, and Montesquieu was substantial. His works rank among the most influential in European culture, and today still constitute one of the most important bodies of primary material for the writing and revision of Roman history, especially the last days of the Roman Republic.
  
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  Cino da Pistoia
  Cino da Pistoia (1270 – 1336/37) was an Italian jurist and poet.
  He was born in Pistoia, Tuscany. His full name was Guittoncino dei Sinibaldi de Candia Pistoia or, Latinised as Cinus de Sighibuldis, his father was from a noble man from the House of Sinibaldi and his mother a noble lady of the House of Candia Pistoia . He received his doctorate from the University of Bologna, where he studied under Dinus de Rossonis, and taught law at the universities of Siena, Florence, Perugia, and Naples. In 1334, he was elected Gonfaloniere of Pistoia, but did not take up the office.
  Cino's most important legal work was Lectura in codicem (1312–1314), a commentary on the Justinian Code which blended pure Roman law with contemporary statutes and customary and canon law, thereby initiating Italian common law. He wrote some 200 lyric poems notable for purity of language and harmony of rhythms, most of them dedicated to a woman named Selvaggia. Dante, a friend of his, in De vulgari eloquentia, praised his poetry. Cino was also close to his fellow student Giovanni d'Andrea and was a literary friend of Petrarch.
  
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  Corso Donati
  Corso Donati was a leader of the Black Guelph faction in 13th- and early 14th- century Florence.
  In the late thirteenth century, power in Florence and the other Tuscan cities was divided between the Podestà, an outsider who served as chief magistrate, and the guildmasters; Corso served as Podestà of Bologna in 1283 and 1288, and of Pistoia in 1289. In 1289, as captain of the people in Pistoia, he led a group of 60 soldiers in the Battle of Campaldino, in which the Guelphs defeated the Ghibellines and cemented their control over Florence.
  In 1293, the merchants of Florence, led by Giano della Bella, prevented the nobility from taking the office of guildmaster; Corso led the noble faction which aligned with the working class against the merchants. In 1294 Corso was acquitted of killing a man in a fight; an angry mob came to della Bella seeking justice after the acquittal, but he sent them away whereupon they rioted and della Bella was exiled as having caused the riot. At that time, the Cerchi family, leaders of the merchant faction who had long feuded with the Donati, became allied with the White Guelphs while the Donati allied with the Black Guelphs, similar factions which had arisen in Pistoia. The leaders of both Guelph factions, including Corso, were exiled by the merchants in 1300, but the White Guelphs were soon allowed to return. Corso and the Black Guelphs petitioned Pope Boniface VIII for aid, and returned to Florence with Charles of Valois in November 1301, killing or exiling many White Guelphs. One of the exiled was the famous poet Dante Alighieri, who by marrying Gemma Donati had become a distant relative of Corso.
  
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  Cyprian
  Cyprian (Latin: Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus) (died September 14, 258) was bishop of Carthage and an important Early Christian writer, many of whose Latin works are extant. He was born around the beginning of the 3rd century in North Africa, perhaps at Carthage, where he received a classical education. After converting to Christianity, he became a bishop in 249 and eventually died a martyr at Carthage.
  Cyprian was born sometime in the early third century. He was of a wealthy and distinguished pagan background; in fact, the site of his eventual martyrdom was his own villa. Before becoming a Christian, he was an orator, "pleader in the courts", and a teacher of rhetoric. The date of his conversion is unknown, but after his baptism about 245–248 he gave away a portion of his wealth to the poor of Carthage, as befitted a man of his status.
  His original name was Thascius; he took the additional name Caecilius in memory of the presbyter to whom he owed his conversion. In the early days of his conversion he wrote an Epistola ad Donatum de gratia Dei and the Testimoniorum Libri III that adhere closely to the models of Tertullian, who influenced his style and thinking.
  
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  Dante Alighieri
  Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante (UK  /ˈdænti/, US /ˈdɑːnteɪ/; Italian: [ˈdante]; c1265–1321), was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem Commedia, later named La divina commedia (Divine Comedy), considered the greatest literary work composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature.
  In Italy he is known as il Sommo Poeta ("the Supreme Poet") or just il Poeta. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are also known as "the three fountains" or "the three crowns". Dante is also called the "Father of the Italian language".
  Dante was born in Florence, Italy. The exact date of Dante's birth is unknown, although it is generally believed to be around 1265. This can be deduced from autobiographic allusions in La Divina Commedia, "the Inferno" (Halfway through the journey we are living, implying that Dante was around 35 years old, as the average lifespan according to the Bible (Psalms 89:10, Vulgate) is 70 years; and as the imaginary travel took place in 1300, Dante must have been born around 1265). Some verses of the Paradiso section of the Divine Comedy also provide a possible clue that he was born under the sign of Gemini: "As I revolved with the eternal twins, I saw revealed from hills to river outlets, the threshing-floor that makes us so ferocious" (XXII 151-154). In 1265 the Sun was in Gemini approximately during the period of May 11 to June 11.
  
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  Duns Scotus
  John (Johannes, Ioannes) Duns Scotus, O.F.M. (c. 1256 – November 18, 1308) was one of the more important theologians and philosophers of the High Middle Ages. He was given the medieval accolade Doctor Subtilis (Subtle Doctor) for his penetrating and subtle manner of thought.
  Scotus has had considerable influence on Roman Catholic thought. The doctrines for which he is best known are the "univocity of being," that existence is the most abstract concept we have, applicable to everything that exists; the formal distinction, a way of distinguishing between different aspects of the same thing; and the idea of haecceity, the property supposed to be in each individual thing that makes it an individual. Scotus also developed a complex argument for the existence of God, and argued for the Immaculate conception of Mary.
  Little is known of Scotus' life. He was probably born in 1265, probably at Duns, in Berwickshire, Scotland. In 1291 he was ordained as a priest in Northampton, England. A note in Codex 66 of Merton College, Oxford, records that Scotus "flourished at Cambridge, Oxford and Paris. He began lecturing on Peter Lombard's Sentences at the prestigious University of Paris in the Autumn of 1302. Later in that academic year, however, he was expelled from the University of Paris for siding with then Pope Boniface VIII in his feud with Philip the Fair of France, over the taxation of church property.
  
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  Edward Schillebeeckx
  Edward Cornelis Florentius Alfonsus Schillebeeckx (English pronunciation: /ˈskɪləbeɪks/ SKIL-ə-bayks, Dutch: [ˈsçɪləbeːks]; 12 November 1914 – 23 December 2009) was a Belgian Roman Catholic theologian born in Antwerp. He taught at the Catholic University in Nijmegen. He then continued writing. In his nineties, he still wanted to finish a major book about the Sacraments.
  He was a member of the Dominican Order. His books on theology have been translated into many languages, and his contributions to the Second Vatican Council made him known throughout the world.
  After being educated by the Jesuits at Turnhout, Schillebeeckx entered the Dominican Order in 1934. He studied theology and philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven. In 1941 he was ordained to the priesthood. In 1943 he finalized his studies in Turnhout, and moved to Ghent, where he studied at the Dominican house, and was strongly influenced by Dominicus De Petter's courses in phenomenology. After three years of Philosophy Study at Ghent, Schillebeeckx heeded the call up of the Belgian Armed Forces in 1938, leaving the army again in August 1939. But, one and a half month after that, he was summoned to return, due to the start of World War II and he left the Army only after the defeat of the Belgian Armed Forces by the German occupant. Schillebeeckx then entered the Dominican Study house at Leuven, where he stayed until 1945. From that year to July 1946, he studied at the Dominican study centre Le Saulchoir at Étiolles, near Paris, where representatives of the Nouvelle théologie-movement such as Marie-Dominique Chenu and Yves Congar introduced him to modern Catholic Theology as well as to the thought of Calvinist theologians like Karl Barth.
  
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  Folco Portinari
  Folco Portinari (died 31 December 1289) was an Italian banker.
  Born at Portico di Romagna, near Forlì, he was later prior of Florence in 1282. He was the father of Beatrice Portinari, the woman largely identified as the character loved by Dante and mentioned in several of his works. In 1285 he donated a large part of his assets to the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence to found a female wing.
  His residence in Florence was the future Palazzo Portinari Salviati. He was buried in the nearby church of Santa Maria de' Cerchi.
  
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  Forese Donati
  Forese Donati (died 1296)
  Forese Donati, brother of Corso and Piccarda Donati, was a childhood friend of Dante Alighieri. In their youth, Forese and Dante exchanged a series of playful sonnets called tenzone, which take the form of a series of exchanged insults.
  In the Divine Comedy Dante encounters Forese on the sixth terrace of Purgatory, where the gluttonous are punished by being forced to starve for food and drink while passing past them, similar to the punishment of Tantalous. Dante barely recognizes Forese's emaciated face and his friend's state causes him great grief. He expresses surprise at Forese's salvation - he had died five years before - and at his quick advancement through the terraces of Purgatory. Forese praises his wife Nella, whose prayers have allowed him to pass quickly through Purgatory.
  Forese maligns the provocatively-dressed Florentine women and predicts that more restrictive dress codes will soon be enforced in Florence. Dante tells Forese of his journey through Hell and Purgatory, accompanied by Virgil, and asks about Forese's sister Piccarda. Forese informs Dante that Piccarda is now in Heaven, and goes on to identify other prominent personages on the terrace of the gluttons. Before leaving Dante, Forese predicts the coming death of his brother Corso and his descent into Hell.
  
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  Francis de Sales
  Francis de Sales, T.O.M., A.O.F.M. Cap., (French: François de Sales) (August 21, 1567 – December 28, 1622) was a Bishop of Geneva and is honored as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church. He became noted for his deep faith and his gentle approach to the religious divisions in his land resulting from the Protestant Reformation. He is known also for his writings on the topic of spiritual direction and spiritual formation, particularly the Introduction to the Devout Life and the Treatise on the Love of God.
  Francis de Sales was born on the 21 August 1567 in the Château de Sales into the noble Sales family of the Duchy of Savoy, in what is today Thorens-Glières, Haute-Savoie, France. His father was François de Sales, Lord of Boisy, Sales and Novel, and his mother was Françoise de Sionnz, the only child of a prominent magistrate. Because he was the first of six children, his father wanted him to attend the best schools, and he enjoyed a privileged education in the nearby towns of La Roche-sur-Foron and Annecy and his spiritual formation and academics were entrusted to the Jesuits. In 1583, he went to the Collège de Clermont in Paris.
  
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  Francis of Assisi
  Saint Francis of Assisi (born Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone; 1181/1182 – October 3, 1226) was an Italian Catholic friar and preacher. He founded the men's Franciscan Order, the women’s Order of St. Clare, and the lay Third Order of Saint Francis. St. Francis is one of the most venerated religious figures in history.
  Francis was the son of a wealthy cloth merchant in Assisi, and he lived the high-spirited life typical of a wealthy young man, even fighting as a soldier for Assisi. While going off to war in 1204, Francis had a vision that directed him back to Assisi, where he lost his taste for his worldly life. On a pilgrimage to Rome, he begged with the beggars at St. Peter's. The experience moved him to live in poverty. Francis returned home, began preaching on the streets, and soon amassed a following. His order was endorsed by Pope Innocent III in 1210. He then founded the Order of Poor Clares, which was an enclosed order for women, as well as the Third Order of Brothers and Sisters of Penance. In 1219, he went to Egypt in an attempt to convert the Sultan. By this point, the Franciscan Order had grown to such an extent that its primitive organizational structure was no longer sufficient. He returned to Italy to organize the order. Once his organization was endorsed by the Pope, he withdrew increasingly from external affairs. In 1223, Francis arranged for the first Christmas manger scene. In 1224, he received the stigmata, making him the first recorded person to bear the wounds of Christ's Passion. He died in 1226 while preaching Psalm 141.
  
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  Francis Xavier
  Francis Xavier, born Francisco de Jasso y Azpilicueta (7 April 1506 – 3 December 1552) was a pioneering Roman Catholic missionary born in the Kingdom of Navarre (now part of Spain) and co-founder of the Society of Jesus. He was a student of Ignatius of Loyola and one of the first seven Jesuits, dedicated at Montmartre in 1534. He led an extensive mission into Asia, mainly in the Portuguese Empire of the time. He was influential in the spreading and upkeep of Catholicism most notably in India, but also ventured into Japan, Borneo, the Moluccas, and other areas which had thus far not been visited by Christian missionaries. In these areas, being a pioneer and struggling to learn the local languages in the face of opposition, he had less success than he had enjoyed in India. It was a goal of Xavier to one day reach China. However, the government in China disliked most missionaries and many were killed.
  Francis Xavier was born in the family castle of Xavier (Xabier, toponymic name whose origin comes from "etxaberri" meaning "new house" in the Basque language) in the Kingdom of Navarre on April 7, 1506 according to a family register. He was born to an aristocratic family of the Kingdom of Navarre, the youngest son of Juan de Jaso, privy counsellor to King John III of Navarre (Jean d'Albret), and Doña Maria de Azpilcueta y Aznárez, sole heiress of two noble Navarrese families. He was thus related to the great theologian and philosopher Martín de Azpilcueta. Notwithstanding different interpretations on his first language, no evidence suggests that Xavier's mother tongue was other than Basque, as stated by himself and confirmed by the sociolinguistic environment of the time.
  
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  Francisco Suárez
  Francisco Suárez (5 January 1548 – 25 September 1617) was a Spanish Jesuit priest, philosopher and theologian, one of the leading figures of the School of Salamanca movement, and generally regarded among the greatest scholastics after Thomas Aquinas.
  Francisco Suárez was born in Granada, Andalusia (southern Spain).
  At age sixteen Suárez entered the Society of Jesus in Salamanca, and he studied Philosophy and Theology there for five years from 1565 to 1570. It seems he was not a promising student at first; in fact, he nearly gave up his matters of study after failing the entrance exam twice. After passing the exam at third attempt, though, things changed, and he completed his course of Philosophy with distinction, going on to study Theology, to then teach Philosophy in Ávila and Segovia. He was ordained in 1572, and taught Theology in Ávila, Segovia (1575), Valladolid (1576), Rome (1580–85), Alcalá (1585–92), Salamanca (1592–97), and Coimbra (1597–1616).
  He wrote on a wide variety of subjects, producing a vast amount of work (his complete works in Latin amount to twenty-six volumes). Suárez writings include treatises on law, the relationship between Church and State, metaphysics, and theology. He is considered the godfather of International Law and his Disputationes metaphysicae were widely read in Europe during the seventeenth century and is considered by some scholars to be his most profound work.
  
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  François Fénelon
  François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, more commonly known as François Fénelon (6 August 1651 – 7 January 1715), was a French Roman Catholic archbishop, theologian, poet and writer. He today is remembered mostly as the author of The adventures of Telemachus, a thinly veiled attack on the French monarchy, first published in 1699.
  Fénelon was born on 6 August 1651 at the Château de Fénelon, in Sainte-Mondane, Périgord, Aquitaine, the second of the three children of Pons de Salignac, Comte de La Mothe-Fénelon by his wife Louise de La Cropte. Being born into a noble family, many of Fénelon's ancestors had been active in politics, and for several generations his relatives had served as bishops of Sarlat.
  Fénelon's early education was provided in the Château de Fénelon by a private tutor which provided Fénelon with a thorough grounding in the Greek language and classics. In 1663, at age 12, he was sent to the University of Cahors, where he studied rhetoric and philosophy. When the young man expressed interest in a career in the church, his uncle, the Marquis Antoine de Fénelon (a friend of Jean-Jacques Olier and Vincent de Paul) arranged for him to study at the Collège du Plessis, whose theology students followed the same curriculum as the theology students at the Sorbonne. While there, he became friends with Antoine de Noailles, who later became a cardinal and the Archbishop of Paris. Fénelon demonstrated so much talent at the Collège du Plessis that at age 15, he was asked to give a public sermon.
  
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  Gabriel Roschini
  Gabriel M. Roschini, O.S.M. (1900 - †1977), was a Roman Catholic Italian priest and professor of Mariology, who published over 900 titles on Mariology. During the pontificate of Pope Pius XII, he worked closely with the Vatican on Marian publications.
  In light of the encyclopedic accuracy of his work, Roschini is considered as one of the top two Mariologist in the 20th century. His first major work, a four volume Mariology, Il Capolavoro di Dio, is judged to be the most comprehensive Mariological presentation in the 20th century. Several theologians called him "one of the most profound Mariologists" and "irreplaceable".
  Roschini was born in Castel Sant'Elia (Viterbo, Italy) in 1900. Upon entering the Order of the Servants of Mary he changed his name to Gabriel Maria (or Gabriele-Maria) from his given name of Alessandro Roschini. In 1924, he received his ordination as a priest. Additionally, Roschini was a doctor in philosophy and master in sacred theology.
  He founded the journal Marianum in 1939 and directed it for thirty years. In 1950, during the reign of Pope Pius XII he founded the Marianum Theological Faculty, which is now a pontifical institute, and served as its rector. He was also instrumental in reviving the Marian Library, which was transferred to the International College of Saint Alexis Falconieri in 1946. Other roles included professor at the Lateran Pontifical University and the Marianum Pontifical Theology Faculty, as well as advisor for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and for the Sacred Congregation for the Causes of the Saints.
  
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  Gaetano Sanseverino
  Gaetano Sanseverino (1811 – November 16, 1865) was an Italian philosopher and theologian. He made a comparative study including the scholastics, particularly St. Thomas Aquinas, and of the connection between their doctrine and that of the church fathers.
  Gaetano Sanseverino was born in 1811 in Naples.
  Gaetano made his studies in the seminary in Nola, where his uncle was rector. After his ordination, he continued the study of philosophy, with the special view of comparing the various systems. Gaetano also became a canon of the cathedral of Naples, professor of logic and metaphysics in the seminary, substitute professor of ethics in the university, and eventually scrittore in the National Library.
  Sanseverino had been educated in the Cartesian system, which at that time prevailed in the ecclesiastical schools of Italy, but his comparative study of the various systems supplied him with a deeper knowledge of the scholastics, particularly St. Thomas Aquinas, and of the intimate connection between their doctrine and that of the church fathers. From that time until the end of his life, his only concern was the restoration of Christian philosophy, in which by his writings, lectures and conversation, he was of supreme assistance to Pope Leo XIII. With this object, in 1840, he founded La Scienza e la Fede, a periodical which was continued until 1887 by his disciples and associates, Signoriello and d'Amelio.
  
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  Geoffrey Chaucer
  Geoffrey Chaucer ( /ˈtʃɔːsər/; c. 1343 – 25 October 1400), known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. While he achieved fame during his lifetime as an author, philosopher, alchemist and astronomer, composing a scientific treatise on the astrolabe for his ten year-old son Lewis, Chaucer also maintained an active career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat. Among his many works, which include The Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde, he is best known today for The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer is a crucial figure in developing the legitimacy of the vernacular, Middle English, at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were French and Latin.
  Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London sometime around 1343, though the precise date and location of his birth remain unknown. His father and grandfather were both London vintners; several previous generations had been merchants in Ipswich. (His family name derives from the French chausseur, meaning "shoemaker".) In 1324 John Chaucer, Geoffrey's father, was kidnapped by an aunt in the hope of marrying the twelve-year-old boy to her daughter in an attempt to keep property in Ipswich. The aunt was imprisoned and the £250 fine levied suggests that the family was financially secure—bourgeois, if not elite. John Chaucer married Agnes Copton, who, in 1349, inherited properties including 24 shops in London from her uncle, Hamo de Copton, who is described in a will dated April 3, 1354 and listed in the City Hustings Roll as "moneyer"; he was said to be moneyer at the Tower of London. In the City Hustings Roll 110, 5, Ric II, dated June 1380, Geoffrey Chaucer refers to himself as me Galfridum Chaucer, filium Johannis Chaucer, Vinetarii, Londonie' .
  
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  Giovanni Boccaccio
  Giovanni Boccaccio (Italian pronunciation: [dʒoˈvanni bokˈkattʃo]; 1313 – 21 December 1375) was an Italian author and poet, a friend, student, and correspondent of Petrarch, an important Renaissance humanist and the author of a number of notable works including the Decameron, On Famous Women, and his poetry in the Italian vernacular. Boccaccio is particularly notable for his dialogue, of which it has been said that it surpasses in verisimilitude that of virtually all of his contemporaries, since they were medieval writers and often followed formulaic models for character and plot.
  The exact details of his birth are uncertain. The majority of sources state that he was born either in Florence or in a village near Certaldo where his family was from.Giovanni Villani, a contemporary of Boccaccio and chronicler, states that he was born in Paris as a consequence of an illicit relation but others denounce this as a romanticism by the earliest biographers. He was the son of a Florentine merchant and an unknown woman, and almost certainly born illegitimate.
  
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  Giovanni Villani
  Giovanni Villani (c. 1276 or 1280–1348, Italian pronunciation: [dʒoˈvanni vilˈlaːni]) was an Italian banker, official, diplomat and chronicler from Florence who wrote the Nuova Cronica (New Chronicles) on the history of Florence. He was a leading statesman of Florence but later gained an unsavory reputation and served time in prison as a result of the bankruptcy of a trading and banking company he worked for. His interest in and elaboration of economic details, statistical information, and political and psychological insight mark him as a more modern chronicler of late medieval Europe. His Cronica is viewed as the first introduction of statistics as a positive element in history. However, historian Kenneth R. Bartlett notes that, in contrast to his Renaissance-era successors, "his reliance on such elements as Divine Providence links Villani closely with the medieval vernacular chronicle tradition." In recurring themes made implicit through significant events described in his Cronica, Villani also emphasized three assumptions about the relationship of sin and morality to historical events, these being that excess brings disaster, that forces of right and wrong are in constant struggle, and that events are directly influenced by the will of God.
  
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  Giuseppe Pecci
  Giuseppe Pecci S.J. (13 December 1807 – 8 February 1890) was a Catholic Thomist theologian whose younger brother, Vincenzo, became Pope Leo XIII and appointed him a cardinal. The Neo-Thomist revival, which Leo XIII and his brother Giuseppe, Cardinal Pecci originated in 1879, remained the leading papal philosophy until Vatican II.
  Born in Carpineto Romano, near Rome, Giuseppe was one of the seven sons of Count Dominico Ludovico Pecci and his wife Anna Prosperi Buzi, Countess Pecci. From 1807 to 1818 he lived at home with his family, in which religion counted as the highest grace on earth, as through her, salvation can be earned for all eternity. Together with his younger brother Vincenzo, he studied in the Jesuit College in Viterbo from 1818 until 1824. In 1824, Count Pecci called him and Vincenzo home to Rome, where their mother was dying; the father wanted his children to be with him after the loss of his wife, and so they remained in Rome, attending the Collegium Romanum, a college belonging to the Society of Jesus. In 1828, the question of occupational choice arose for the two brothers; Giuseppe Pecci professed the Jesuit order, while Vincenzo decided in favour of saecular, or diocesan, clergy.
  
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  Gustavo Gutiérrez
  Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino, O.P., (born 8 June 1928 in Lima) is a Peruvian theologian and Dominican priest regarded as the founder of Liberation Theology. He holds the John Cardinal O'Hara Professorship of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.He began studying in the faculty of medicine of the National University of San Marcos in Peru in order to become a psychiatrist, then he realized he wanted to become a priest. He has been professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and a visiting professor at many major universities in North America and Europe.
  Gutiérrez is also a member of the Peruvian Academy of Language, and in 1993 he was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government for his tireless work. In 2002 Gutiérrez was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2003 he received the prestigious Príncipe de Asturias award. He has also published in and been a member of the board of directors of the international journal, Concilium.
  Gutierrez spent much of his life living and working among the poor and oppressed of Lima. He has studied medicine and literature (Peru), psychology and philosophy (Leuven), and obtained a doctorate at the Institut Pastoral d'Etudes Religieuses (IPER), Université Catholique in Lyon.
  
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• Harold Bloom
  Harold Bloom (born July 11, 1930) is an American literary critic and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. Since the publication of his first book in 1959, Bloom has written more than 20 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He has edited hundreds of anthologies.
  Bloom teaches two classes at Yale: one on the plays of William Shakespeare; the other on poetry from Geoffrey Chaucer to Hart Crane. Some of his writing had reflected this teaching, from Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) to The Anatomy of Influence (2011), which he has called the summa of his career.
  Bloom's career began with decades of studying the Romantic poets, in particular Percy Bysshe Shelley, W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens. From this study, combined with the influence of Freud, Emerson and many others, Bloom developed theories of poetic influence, marked by the publication of The Anxiety of Influence (1973). These theories dominated his writing for a decade, after which he began to focus on what he named "religious criticism", in books such as The Book of J (1990) and The American Religion (1992). Another shift in his career began with an impassioned defense of the non-politicised teaching of canonical literature in The Western Canon (1994). He has continued his religious criticism in books such as Jesus and Yahweh (2005) and The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of The King James Bible (2011).
  
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  Henri de Lubac
  Henri-Marie de Lubac, SJ (February 20, 1896 – September 4, 1991) was a French Jesuit priest who became a Cardinal of the Catholic Church, and is considered to be one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century. His writings and doctrinal research played a key role in the shaping of the Second Vatican Council.
  Henri de Lubac was born in Cambrai to an ancient, noble family of the Ardèche. He was one of six children; his father was a banker and his mother a homemaker. A born aristocrat in manner and appearance, de Lubac joined the Society of Jesus in Lyon on October 9, 1913. Owing to the political climate in France at the time, the school relocated to St. Leonard’s on Sea, East Sussex, where de Lubac studied before being drafted to the French army in 1914. Following a head wound received at Verdun during the Great War, de Lubac returned to the Jesuits and continued his philosophical studies, first in Canterbury and then in St. Helier, Jersey in 1920. In 1924, following a year’s teaching at the Jesuit College at Mongré, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, de Lubac returned to England and undertook his theological studies at Ore Place in Hastings, East Sussex. In 1926, the theologate was relocated back to Fourvière in Lyons, where de Lubac completed the remaining two years of his theological studies before, in 1929, giving his first lecture at the Theology Faculty of Lyons. He was ordained to the priesthood on August 22, 1927.
  
  wn.com/Henri_de_Lubac
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  Henry Suso
  Henry Suso (also called Amandus, a name adopted in his writings, and Heinrich Seuse in German) was a German mystic, born at Überlingen on Lake Constance on 21 March c. 1300; he died at Ulm on 25 January 1366; declared Blessed in 1831 by Gregory XVI, who assigned his feast in the Dominican Order to 2 March. The Dominicans now celebrate his feast on 23 January, the feria, or "free" day, nearest the day of his death.
  Suso and his friend Johannes Tauler were students of Meister Eckhart. The three form the nucleus of the Rhineland school of mysticism. As a lyric poet and troubadour of divine wisdom, Suso explored with psychological intensity the spiritual truths of Eckhart’s mystical philosophy. His devotional works were extremely popular in the later Middle Ages.
  He assumed the name of his mother, his father being a Herr von Berg. In Das Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit (The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom), written between 1327 and 1334 in Constance, he discusses the practical aspects of mysticism. The latter work, which Suso also translated into Latin under the title of Horologium sapientiae (Clock of Wisdom), has been called the finest fruit of German mysticism.
  
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  Hildegard of Bingen
  Saint Hildegard of Bingen, O.S.B. (German: Hildegard von Bingen; Latin: Hildegardis Bingensis) (1098 – 17 September 1179), also known as Saint Hildegard, and Sibyl of the Rhine, was a German writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, Benedictine abbess, visionary, and polymath. Elected a magistra by her fellow nuns in 1136, she founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. One of her works as a composer, the Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of liturgical drama and arguably the oldest surviving morality play.
  She wrote theological, botanical and medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, and poems, while supervising brilliant miniature Illuminations.
  On 10 May 2012, Pope Benedict XVI extended the liturgical cult of St. Hildegard to the universal Church, in a process known as "equivalent canonization". On 27 May 2012, the Pope announced that, on 7 October 2012, he will declare St. Hildegard to be the 35th Doctor of the Church.
  Hildegard's date of birth is uncertain. It has been concluded that she may have been born in the year 1098. Hildegard was raised in a family of free nobles. She was her parents' tenth child, sickly from birth. In her Vita, Hildegard explains that from a very young age she had experienced visions.
  
  wn.com/Hildegard_of_Bingen
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  Ignatius of Antioch
  Ignatius of Antioch (Ancient Greek: Ἰγνάτιος, also known as Theophorus from Greek Θεοφόρος "God-bearer") (ca. 35 or 50-between 98 and 117) was among the Apostolic Fathers, was the third Bishop of Antioch, and was a student of John the Apostle. En route to his martyrdom in Rome, Ignatius wrote a series of letters which have been preserved as an example of very early Christian theology. Important topics addressed in these letters include ecclesiology, the sacraments, and the role of bishops.
  Ignatius' feast day is observed on 20 December in the Eastern Orthodox Church. In the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, he is commemorated, according to its Synaxarium, on the 24th of the Coptic Month of Kiahk (which currently falls on January 2, but is equivalent to December 20 in the Gregorian Calendar due to the current 13-day Julian-Gregorian Calendar offset). His celebration is on 1 February in the General Roman Calendar of 1962. Today Western Christianity follows the Syriac churches in keeping his feast on 17 October.
  
  wn.com/Ignatius_of_Antioch
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  Ignatius of Loyola
  Ignatius of Loyola (Basque: Iñigo Loiolakoa, Spanish: Ignacio de Loyola) (1491 – July 31, 1556) was a Spanish knight from a Basque noble family, hermit, priest since 1537, and theologian, who founded the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) and was its first Superior General. Ignatius emerged as a religious leader during the Counter-Reformation. Loyola's devotion to the Catholic Church was characterized by unquestioning obedience to the Catholic Church's authority and hierarchy.
  After being seriously wounded at the Battle of Pamplona in 1521, he underwent a spiritual conversion while in recovery. De Vita Christi by Ludolph of Saxony inspired Loyola to abandon his previous military life and devote himself to labour for God, following the example of spiritual leaders such as Francis of Assisi. He experienced a vision of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus while at the shrine of Our Lady of Montserrat in March 1522. Thereafter he went to Manresa, where he began praying for seven hours a day, often in a nearby cave, while formulating the fundamentals of the Spiritual Exercises. In September 1523, Loyola reached the Holy Land to settle there, but was sent back to Europe by the Franciscans.
  
  wn.com/Ignatius_of_Loyola
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  Irenaeus
  St. Irenaeus ( /aɪrəˈniːəs/; Ancient Greek: Εἰρηναῖος), (2nd century AD – c. 202) was Bishop of Lugdunum in Gaul, then a part of the Roman Empire (now Lyon, France). He was an early church father and apologist, and his writings were formative in the early development of Christian theology. He was a hearer of Polycarp, who in turn was a disciple of John the Evangelist.
  Irenaeus' best-known book, Adversus Haereses or Against Heresies (c. 180) is a detailed attack on Gnosticism, which was then a serious threat to the Church, and especially on the system of the Gnostic Valentinus. As one of the first great Christian theologians, he emphasized the traditional elements in the Church, especially the episcopate, Scripture, and tradition. "Caesar and Christ"(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972)</ref> Against the Gnostics, who said that they possessed a secret oral tradition from Jesus himself, Irenaeus maintained that the bishops in different cities are known as far back as the Apostles — and none of them was a Gnostic — and that the bishops provided the only safe guide to the interpretation of Scripture. His writings, with those of Clement and Ignatius, are taken to hint at papal primacy. Irenaeus is the earliest witness to recognition of the canonical character of all four gospels.
  
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  Italians
  Italians (Italian: italiani) are an ethnic group native of Southern Europe that share a common Italian culture, ancestry and speak the Italian language as a mother tongue. Within Italy, Italians are defined by citizenship, regardless of ancestry or country of residence (though the principle of jus sanguinis is used extensively and arguably more favorably in the Italian nationality law), and are distinguished from people of Italian descent and, historically, from ethnic Italians living in the unredeemed territories adjacent to the Italian Peninsula.
  In 2012, in addition to the 60 million Italians in Italy and 3,000 in San Marino, Italian-speaking, autonomous groups are found in neighboring countries: about 500,000 in Switzerland, a large, but undefined population in France (Nice, Corsica), and smaller groups in Slovenia and Croatia, primarily in Istria. If regarded as an ethnic group, they constitute one of the world's largest.
  Because of wide-ranging and long-lasting diaspora, about 4 and half million Italian citizens and over 70 million people of full or part Italian ancestry live outside of Italy, most notably in South America, North America, Australia and parts of Europe.
  
  wn.com/Italians
• Jacopo Alighieri
  Jacopo Alighieri (1289–1348) was an Italian poet, the son of Dante Alighieri, whom he followed in his exile. Jacopo's most famous work is his sixty-chapter Dottrinale.
  Born in 1289 in Florence, Jacopo was the son of Dante Alighieri and his wife, Gemma di Manetto Donati.
  He was exiled from Florence with his father and brothers Giovanni and Pietro in 1315. He subsequently traveled to Ravenna, where may have lived with his father. Dante died in 1321, and Jacopo sent a copy of the Divine Comedy to Guido da Polenta, the lord of the city. In 1325, he returned to Florence, where he took minor orders, making it possible for him to become a canon in Verona. At home, he took charge of his family's financial affairs; in 1343, he was able to retake possession of his father's confiscated property.
  He died in 1348.
  
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  Jacques Maritain
  Jacques Maritain (18 November 1882 – 28 April 1973) was a French Catholic philosopher. Raised as a Protestant, he converted to Catholicism in 1906. An author of more than 60 books, he helped to revive St. Thomas Aquinas for modern times and is a prominent drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Pope Paul VI presented his "Message to Men of Thought and of Science" at the close of Vatican II to Maritain, his long-time friend and mentor. Maritain's interest and works spanned many aspects of philosophy, including aesthetics, political theory, the philosophy of science, metaphysics, education, liturgy and ecclesiology.
  Maritain was born in Paris, the son of Paul Maritain, who was a lawyer, and his wife Geneviève Favre, the daughter of Jules Favre, and was reared in a liberal Protestant milieu. He was sent to the Lycée Henri-IV. Later, he attended the Sorbonne, studying the natural sciences; chemistry, biology and physics.
  At the Sorbonne, he met Raïssa Oumançoff, a Russian Jewish émigré. They married in 1904. A noted poet and mystic, she participated as his intellectual partner in his search for truth. Raissa's sister, Vera Oumançoff, lived with Jacques and Raissa for almost all their married life.
  
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  Jean Daniélou
  Jean Daniélou S.J. (14 May 1905–20 May 1974) was a theologian, historian, cardinal and a member of the Académie Française.
  Jean-Guenolé-Marie Daniélou was born at Neuilly-sur-Seine, son of Charles and Madeleine (née Clamorgan). His father was an anticlerical politician, several times minister, and his mother an educator and founder of institutions for women's education. His brother Alain (1907–1994) was a noted Indologist.
  Daniélou studied at the Sorbonne, and passed his agrégation in Grammar in 1927. He joined the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1929, becoming an educator, initially at a boys' school in Poitiers. He subsequently studied theology at Fourvière in Lyon under Henri de Lubac, who introduced him to patristics, the study of the Fathers of the Church. He was ordained priest 20 August 1938.
  During World War II, he served with the Armée de l'Air (Air Force) in 1939–1940. He was demobilised and returned to civilian life. He received his doctorate in theology in 1942 and was appointed chaplain to the ENSJF, the female section of the École Normale Supérieure, at Sèvres. It was at this time that he began his own writings on patristics. He was one of the founders of the Sources Chrétiennes collection. In 1944 he was made Professor of Early Christian History at the Institut Catholique de Paris, and later became dean. Beginning in the 1950s, he produced several historical studies, including The Bible and the Liturgy, The Lord of History, and From Shadows to Reality, that provided a major impetus to the development of Covenantal Theology.
  
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  Johann Eck
  Dr. Johann Maier von Eck (13 November 1486 – 13 February 1543) was a German Scholastic theologian and defender of Catholicism during the Protestant Reformation. It was Eck who argued that the beliefs of Martin Luther and Jan Hus were similar.
  
  
  Johann Eck was born Johann Maier at Eck (later Egg, near Memmingen, c. 70 km miles south of Augsburg) in Swabia, and derived his additional surname from his birthplace, which he himself, after 1505, always modified into Eckius or Eccius, i.e. "of Eck." His father, Michael Maier, was a peasant and bailiff, or Amtmann, of the village. The boy's education was undertaken by his uncle, Martin Maier, parish priest at Rottenburg on the river Neckar.
  At the age of twelve he entered the University of Heidelberg, which he left in the following year for Tübingen. After taking his master's degree in 1501, he began the study of theology under Johann Jakob Lempp, and studied the elements of Hebrew and political economy with Konrad Summenhart. He left Tübingen in 1501 on account of the plague and after a year at Cologne finally settled at Freiburg University, at first as a student of theology and law and later as a successful teacher where he was mentor to the prominent Anabaptist leader of Waldshut and Nikolsburg, Balthasar Hubmaier, and later retaining this relationship during their move to the University of Ingolstadt. In 1508 he entered the priesthood in Strasbourg and two years later obtained his doctorate in theology.
  
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  Johannes Tauler
  Johannes Tauler (c. 1300 – 15 June 1361) was a German mystic theologian.
  He was born about the year 1300 in Strasbourg, and was educated at the Dominican convent in that city, where Meister Eckhart, who greatly influenced him, was professor of theology (1312–1320) in the monastery school. From Strasbourg he went to the Dominican college of Cologne, and perhaps to St James's College, Paris, ultimately returning to Strasbourg. In 1324 Strasbourg, along with other cities, was placed under a papal interdict, and so all Dominican friars left the city. Tauler went to Basel. The legend that he stayed in Strasbourg and continued to perform religious services for the people is probably due to the desire of the 16th century reformers to enroll the famous preachers of the Middle Ages among their forerunners.
  From 1338 to 1339 Tauler was in Basel, then the headquarters of the "Friends of God" (Gottesfreunde), and was brought into intimate relations with the members of that pious mystical fellowship. Tauler worked with the Friends of God, and it was with them that he taught his belief that the state of the soul was affected more by a personal relationship with God than by external practices. (Cairns 243) In this way, he was more of a proselytizer than his counterpart, Eckhart. Yet Strasbourg still remained his headquarters. The Black Death came there in 1348, and it is said that when the city was deserted by all who could leave it, Tauler remained at his post, encouraging his terror-stricken fellow-citizens with sermons and personal visits. His correspondence with distinguished members of the Friends of God, especially with Margaretha Ebner, and the fame of his preaching and other work in Strasbourg, made him known throughout a wide circle. He died in 1361.
  
  wn.com/Johannes_Tauler
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  John Fisher
  Saint John Fisher (1459 /c. 19 October 1469 – 22 June 1535) was an English Roman Catholic scholastic, cardinal, and martyr. He shares his feast day with Saint Thomas More on 22 June in the Roman Catholic calendar of saints and on 6 July in the Anglican. Fisher was executed by order of King Henry VIII during the English Reformation for refusing to accept the king as Supreme Head of the Church of England and for upholding the Roman Catholic Church's doctrine of papal primacy.
  John Fisher was born in Beverley, Yorkshire, England in 1469, the eldest son of Robert Fisher, a modestly prosperous merchant of Beverley, and Agnes, his wife. He was one of four children. His father died when John was 8. His mother remarried and had five more children by her second husband, William White. Fisher seems to have had close contacts with his extended family all his life. Fisher's early education was probably received in the school attached to the collegiate church in his home town. He attended Beverley Grammar School, an old foundation claiming to date from the year 700. In the present day, one of the houses at the school is named in Fisher's honour.
  
  wn.com/John_Fisher
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  John Henry Newman
  John Henry Newman, D.D., C.O. (21 February 1801 – 11 August 1890), also referred to as Cardinal Newman and Blessed John Henry Newman, was an important figure in the religious history of England in the 19th century. He was known nationally by the mid-1830s.
  Originally an evangelical Oxford academic and priest in the Church of England, Newman was a leader in the Oxford Movement. This influential grouping of Anglicans wished to return the Church of England to many Catholic beliefs and forms of worship traditional in the medieval times to restore ritual expression. In 1845 Newman left the Church of England and was received into the Roman Catholic Church where he was eventually granted the rank of cardinal by Pope Leo XIII. He was instrumental in the founding of the Catholic University of Ireland, which evolved into University College, Dublin, today, the largest university in Ireland.
  Newman's beatification was officially proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI on 19 September 2010 during his visit to the United Kingdom. His canonisation is dependent on the documentation of additional miracles.
  
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  John Milton
  John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth (republic) of England under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote at a time of religious flux and political upheaval, and is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost.
  Milton's poetry and prose reflect deep personal convictions, a passion for freedom and self determination, and the urgent issues and political turbulence of his day. Writing in English, Latin, and Italian, he achieved international renown within his lifetime, and his celebrated Areopagitica, (written in condemnation of pre-publication censorship) is among history's most influential and impassioned defenses of free speech and freedom of the press.
  William Hayley's 1796 biography called him the "greatest English author", and he remains generally regarded "as one of the preeminent writers in the English language"; though critical reception has oscillated in the centuries since his death (often on account of his republicanism). Samuel Johnson praised Paradise Lost as "a poem which...with respect to design may claim the first place, and with respect to performance, the second, among the productions of the human mind". Though Johnson (a Tory and recipient of royal patronage) described his politics as those of an "acrimonious and surly republican".
  
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  John of the Cross
  John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz) (24 June 1542 – 14 December 1591), born Juan de Yepes Álvarez, was a major figure of the Counter-Reformation, a Spanish mystic, Catholic saint, Carmelite friar and priest, born at Fontiveros, Old Castile.
  Saint John of the Cross was a reformer of the Carmelite Order and is considered, along with Saint Teresa of Ávila, as a founder of the Discalced Carmelites. He is also known for his writings. Both his poetry and his studies on the growth of the soul are considered the summit of mystical Spanish literature and one of the peaks of all Spanish literature. He was canonized as a saint in 1726 by Pope Benedict XIII. He is one of the thirty-three Doctors of the Church. When his feast day was inserted into the General Roman Calendar in 1738, it was assigned at first to 24 November, since his date of death was impeded by the then existing octave of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. This obstacle was removed in 1955 and in 1969 his feast day was moved to his date of death, 14 December.
  
  wn.com/John_of_the_Cross
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  Jorge Luis Borges
  Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986), known as Jorge Luis Borges (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈxorxe ˈlwis ˈβorxes]), was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. His work embraces the "character of unreality in all literature". His most famous books, Ficciones (1944) and The Aleph (1949), are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes such as dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, animals, fictional writers, religion and God. His works have contributed to the genre of science fiction as well as the genre of magic realism, a genre that reacted against the realism/naturalism of the nineteenth century. In fact, critic Angel Flores, the first to use the term, set the beginning of this movement with Borges's Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy) (1935). Scholars have also suggested that Borges's progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil.
  
  wn.com/Jorge_Luis_Borges
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  Joseph Görres
  Johann Joseph von Görres (25 January 1776 – 29 January 1848) was a German writer and journalist.
  Görres was born at Koblenz. His father was moderately well off, and sent his son to a Latin college under the direction of the Roman Catholic clergy. The young Görres' sympathies were initially with the French Revolution, and the French exiles in the Rhineland confirmed his beliefs, which would then evolve over time. He harangued the revolutionary clubs, and insisted on the unity of interests which would ally all civilized states to one another.^{[citation needed]} He began a republican journal called Das rote Blatt, and afterwards Rubezahl, in which he strongly condemned the administration of the Rhenish provinces by France.
  After the Treaty of Campo Formio (1797) there was hope that the Rhenish provinces would be constituted into an independent republic. In 1799 the provinces sent an embassy, of which Görres was a member, to Paris to put their case before the directory. The embassy reached Paris on 20 November 1799; two days before this Napoleon had assumed power. After much delay he received the embassy; but the only answer they obtained was "that they might rely on perfect justice, and that the French government would never lose sight of their wants". Görres on his return published a tract called Resultate meiner Sendung nach Paris, in which he reviewed the history of the French Revolution.
  
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  Joseph Hergenröther
  Joseph Hergenröther (15 September 1824 – 3 October 1890) was a German Church historian and canonist, and the first Cardinal-Prefect of the Vatican Archives.
  Born in Würzburg, he was the second son of Johann Jacob Hergenröther, professor of medicine in the University of Würzburg. In 1842 Hergenröther completed with notable success his gymnasium course in his native town, and entered the University of Würzburg to take up a two-year course of philosophical studies, to which he added certain branches of theology. His historical tendencies exhibited themselves at this early age in a dramatic poem entitled Papst Gregor VII (Würzburg, 1841).
  Bishop von Stahl took an interest in him, and in 1844 sent him to the Collegium Germanicum at Rome, whither he had already sent Heinrich Joseph Dominicus Denzinger and Franz Hettinger. Among his scholarly teachers were Giovanni Perrone and Carlo Passaglia in doctrinal theology, Tomei in moral theology, Antonio Ballerini in church history, Francis Xavier Patrizi in Scriptural exegesis, and Marzio in canon law.
  
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  Justin Martyr
  Justin Martyr, also known as just Saint Justin (AD 100–165), was an early Christian apologist, and is regarded as the foremost interpreter of the theory of the Logos in the 2nd century. Most of his works are lost, but two apologies and a dialogue did survive. He is considered a saint by the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church.
  Most of what is known about the life of Justin Martyr comes from his own writings. He was born at Flavia Neapolis (today Nablus) in Palestine into a pagan family, and defined himself as a Gentile. His grandfather, Bacchius, had a Greek name, while his father, Priscus bore a Latin name, which has led to speculations that his ancestors may have settled in Neapolis soon after its establishment or that they may have descended from a Roman 'diplomatic' community that had been sent there. He received a Greek education. He tells us (Dialogue 2-8) that he tried first the school of a Stoic philosopher, who was unable to explain God's being to him. He then attended a Peripatetic philosopher but was put off because the philosopher was too eager for his fee. Then he went to hear a Pythagorean philosopher, who demanded that he first learn music, astronomy and geometry, which he did not wish to do. Subsequently, he adopted Platonism after encountering a Platonist thinker who had recently settled in his city. Some time afterwards, he chanced upon an old man, possibly a Palestinian or Syrian Christian, in the vicinity of the seashore, who engaged him in a dialogue about God, and spoke of the testimony of the prophets as more reliable than the reasoning of philosophers. It was this argument which, Justin avers, kindled in him a love of Christ, and led him to embrace the Christian faith. He was influenced in this by the fearless conduct of the Christians facing execution (Apol. 2:12). His conversion is commonly assumed to have taken place at Ephesus, though it may have occurred anywhere on the road from Palestine to Rome.
  
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  Karl Rahner
  Karl Rahner, SJ (March 5, 1904 — March 30, 1984) was a German Jesuit and theologian who, alongside Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Yves Congar, is considered one of the most influential Roman Catholic theologians of the 20th century. He was the brother of Hugo Rahner.
  He was born in Freiburg, Germany, and died in Innsbruck, Austria.
  Before the Second Vatican Council, Rahner had worked alongside Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac and Marie-Dominique Chenu, theologians associated with an emerging school of thought called the Nouvelle Théologie, elements of which had been condemned in the encyclical Humani Generis of Pope Pius XII.
  His theology influenced the Second Vatican Council and was ground-breaking for the development of what is generally seen as the modern understanding of Catholicism.
  Written near the end of his life, Rahner's Foundations of Christian Faith (Grundkurs des Glaubens) is the most developed and systematic of his works, most of which were published in the form of essays.
  
  wn.com/Karl_Rahner
• Lapo Gianni
  Lapo Gianni (died after 1328) was an Italian poet who lived in Florence in the 13th-14th centuries. He was a member of the Florentine circle of the Italian movement called Dolce Stil Novo, and was probably a notary.
  His composition are distinguished for lightness and originality. Of him eleven ballads and six songs remain. Lapo Gianni is also cited by Dante Alighieri (to whom he was a friend, together with Guido Cavalcanti) in the famous 9th sonnet of the Rhymes.
  
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  Louis de Montfort
  St. Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort (31 January 1673 – 28 April 1716) was canonized in 1947. He was a French priest and known in his time as a preacher and author, whose books, still widely read, have influenced a number of popes.
  He is considered as one of the early proponents of the field of Mariology as it is known today, and a candidate to become a Doctor of the Church. His "founders statue" by Giacomo Parisini is now placed at the Upper Niche of the South Nave within Saint Peter's Basilica at the Vatican.
  He was born in Montfort-sur-Meu, the eldest surviving child of the large family of Jean-Baptiste Grignion, a notary, and his wife Jeanne Robert who was known for being deeply Catholic. He passed most of his infancy and early childhood in Iffendic, a few kilometers from Montfort, where his father had bought a farm. At the age of 12, he entered the Jesuit College of St Thomas Becket in Rennes.
  At some time during his college days, he became aware of a call to the priesthood, and at the end of his ordinary schooling, began his studies of philosophy and theology, still at St Thomas in Rennes. Listening to the stories of a local priest, the Abbé Julien Bellier, about his life as an itinerant missionary, he was inspired to preach missions among the very poor. And, under the guidance of some other priests he began to develop his strong devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.
  
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  Louis Thomassin
  Louis Thomassin (28 August 1619 at Aix-en-Provence–24 December 1695 in Paris) was a French theologian and Oratorian.
  At the age of thirteen he entered the Oratory and for some years was professor of literature in various colleges of the congregation, of theology at Saumur, and finally in the seminary of Saint Magloire, in Paris, where he remained until his death.
  Thomassin was one of the most learned men of his time, "Vir stupendae plane eruditionis", as Hugo von Hurter says, in his Nomenclator literarius recentioris II (Innsbruck, 1893), 410.
  His chief works are:
  The last-named two posthumous works were published by P. Bordes, who wrote a life of Thomassin at the beginning of the "Glossarium".
  
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  Luca Signorelli
  Luca Signorelli (c. 1445 – 16 October 1523) was an Italian Renaissance painter who was noted in particular for his ability as a draughtsman and his use of foreshortening. His massive frescoes of the Last Judgment (1499–1503) in Orvieto Cathedral are considered his masterpiece.
  He was born Luca d'Egidio di Ventura in Cortona, Tuscany (some sources call him Luca da Cortona). The precise date of his birth is uncertain; birth dates of 1441–1445 are proposed. He died in 1523 in Cortona, where he is buried. He was perhaps eighty-two years old. He is considered to be part of the Tuscan school, although he also worked extensively in Umbria and Rome.
  His first impressions of art seem to be due to Perugia — the style of Benedetto Bonfigli, Fiorenzo di Lorenzo and Pinturicchio. Lazzaro Vasari, the great-grandfather of art historian Giorgio Vasari, was brother to Luca's mother; according to Giorgio Vasari he got Luca apprenticed to Piero della Francesca. In 1472 the young man was painting at Arezzo, and in 1474 at Città di Castello. He presented to Lorenzo de' Medici a picture which is probably the one named the School of Pan. Janet Ross and her husband Henry discovered the painting in Florence circa 1870 and subsequently sold it to the Kaiser Frederick Museum in Berlin. The painting was destroyed by allied bombs in WWII. See Benjamin, Sarah (2006) A Castle In Tuscany at 63-67 (image of the painting at 64-65) Murdoch Books Australia. The painting's subject is almost the same which he painted also on the wall of the Petrucci palace in Siena—the principal figures being Pan himself, Olympus, Echo, a man reclining on the ground and two listening shepherds.
  
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  Malaria
  Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease of humans and other animals caused by eukaryotic protists (a type of microorganism) of the genus Plasmodium. The protists act as parasites within red blood cells, causing symptoms that typically include fever and headache, in severe cases progressing to coma or death. The disease is widespread in tropical and subtropical regions in a broad band around the equator, including much of Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
  Five species of Plasmodium can infect and be transmitted by humans. Severe disease is largely caused by P. falciparum while the disease caused by P. vivax, P. ovale, and P. malariae is generally a milder form that is rarely fatal. The zoonotic species P. knowlesi, prevalent in Southeast Asia, causes malaria in macaques but can also cause severe infections in humans. Malaria is prevalent in tropical regions because of the significant amounts of rainfall, consistently high temperatures and high humidity, along with stagnant waters in which mosquito larvae readily mature, provide them with the environment they need for continuous breeding. Disease transmission can be reduced by preventing mosquito bites by distribution of mosquito nets and insect repellents, or with mosquito-control measures such as spraying insecticides and draining standing water.
  
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  Meister Eckhart
  Eckhart von Hochheim O.P. (c. 1260 – c. 1327), commonly known as Meister Eckhart, was a German theologian, philosopher and mystic, born near Gotha, in the Landgraviate of Thuringia in the Holy Roman Empire. Meister is German for "Master", referring to the academic title Magister in theologia he obtained in Paris. Coming into prominence during the Avignon Papacy and a time of increased tensions between the Franciscans and Eckhart's Dominican Order of Friars Preachers, he was brought up on charges later in life before the local Franciscan-led Inquisition.
  Tried as a heretic by Pope John XXII, his "Defence" is famous for his reasoned arguments to all challenged articles of his writing and his refutation of heretical intent. He purportedly died before his verdict was received, although no record of his death or burial site has ever been discovered. He was well known for his work with pious lay groups such as the Friends of God and succeeded by his more circumspect disciples of John Tauler and Henry Suso.^{[citation needed]} In his study of medieval humanism, Richard Southern includes him along with Saint Bede the Venerable and Saint Anselm as emblematic of the intellectual spirit of the Middle Ages.
  
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  Origen
  Origen ( /ˈɒrɪdʒən/; Greek: Ὠριγένης Ōrigénēs), or Origen Adamantius (184/185 – 253/254), was an early Christian Alexandrian scholar and theologian, and one of the most distinguished writers of the early Church. As early as the fourth century, his orthodoxy was suspect, largely because he believed in the pre-existence and apokatastasis, or universal reconciliation, ideas acknowledged to be beyond the pale of Christianity. Today he is generally regarded as one of the Church Fathers.
  Origen excelled in multiple branches of theological scholarship, including textual criticism, biblical interpretation, philosophical theology, preaching, and spirituality. Some of his teachings, however, quickly became controversial. Notably, he frequently referred to his hypothesis of the pre-existence of souls. As in the beginning all intelligent beings were united to God, Origen also held out the possibility, though he did not assert so definitively, that in the end all beings, perhaps even the arch-fiend Satan, would be reconciled to God in what is called the apokatastasis ("restitution"). Origen's views on the Trinity, in which he saw the Son of God as subordinate to God the Father, became controversial during the Arian controversy of the fourth century, though a subordinationist view was common among the ante-Nicene Fathers. A group who came to be known as Origenists, and who firmly believed in the preexistence of souls and the apokatastasis, were declared anathema in the 6th century. This condemnation is attributed to the Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople, though it does not appear in the council's official minutes. Few scholars today believe that Origen should be blamed, as he commonly was in the past, for tentatively putting forward hypotheses, later judged heretical, on certain philosophical problems during a time when Christian doctrine was somewhat unclear on said problems.
  
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  Ovid
  Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BC – AD 17/18), known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria, and of the Metamorphoses, a mythological hexameter poem. He is also well known for the Fasti, about the Roman calendar; and the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, two collections of poems written in exile on the Black Sea. Ovid was also the author of several smaller pieces, the Remedia Amoris, the Medicamina Faciei Femineae, and the long curse-poem Ibis. He also authored a lost tragedy, Medea. He is considered a master of the elegiac couplet, and is traditionally ranked alongside Virgil and Horace as one of the three canonic poets of Latin literature. The scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the canonical Latin love elegists. His poetry, much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, decisively influenced European art and literature and remains as one of the most important sources of classical mythology.
  
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  Peter Abelard
  é
  Peter Abelard (English pronunciation: /ˈæb.ə.lɑːrd/, French pronunciation: [a.beˈlaːʁ], Latin: Petrus Abaelardus or Abailard; French: Pierre Abélard) (1079–21 April 1142) was a medieval French scholastic philosopher, theologian and preeminent logician. The story of his affair with and love for Héloïse has become legendary. The Chambers Biographical Dictionary describes him as "the keenest thinker and boldest theologian of the 12th Century".
  Abelard, originally called "Pierre le Pallet", was born in Le Pallet, about 10 miles (16 km) east of Nantes, in Brittany, the eldest son of a minor noble Breton family. As a boy, he learned quickly. His father, a wealthy lord called Berengar, encouraged Pierre to study the liberal arts, wherein he excelled at the art of dialectic (a branch of philosophy), which, at that time, consisted chiefly of the logic of Aristotle transmitted through Latin channels. Instead of entering a military career, as his father had done, Abelard became an academic. During his early academic pursuits, Abelard wandered throughout France, debating and learning, so as (in his own words) "he became such an one as the Peripatetics." The nominalist Roscellinus of Compiègne was his teacher during this period.
  
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  Peter Lombard
  Peter Lombard (rather Peter the Lombard) or Petrus Lombardus (c. 1096, Novara, Lombardy - August 21/22, 1164, Paris, France) was a scholastic theologian and bishop and author of Four Books of Sentences, which became the standard textbook of theology, for which he earned the accolade Magister Sententiarum.
  Peter Lombard was born in Lumellogno (then a rural commune, now a quartiere of Novara, Piedmont), in northwestern Italy, to a poor family. His date of birth was likely between 1095 and 1100.
  His education most likely began in Italy at the cathedral schools of Novara and Lucca. The patronage of Odo, bishop of Lucca, who recommended him to Bernard of Clairvaux, allowed him to leave Italy and further his studies at Reims and Paris. Petrus Lombardus studied first in the cathedral school at Reims, where Magister Alberich and Lutolph of Novara were teaching, and arrived in Paris about 1134, where Bernard recommended him to the canons of the church of St-Victor. In Paris, where he spent the next decade teaching at the cathedral school of Notre Dame, he came into contact with Peter Abelard and Hugh of St. Victor, who were among the leading theologians of the time. There are no proven facts relating to his whereabouts in Paris until 1142 when he became recognized as writer and teacher. Around 1145, Peter became a "magister", or professor, at the cathedral school of Notre Dame in Paris. Peter's means of earning a living before he began to derive income as a teacher and from his canon's prebend is shrouded in uncertainty.
  
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  Petrarch
  Francesco Petrarca (July 20, 1304 – July 19, 1374), known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism". In the 16th century, Pietro Bembo created the model for the modern Italian language based on Petrarch's works, as well as those of Giovanni Boccaccio and, especially, Dante Alighieri. This would be later endorsed by the Accademia della Crusca. Petrarch's sonnets were admired and imitated throughout Europe during the Renaissance and became a model for lyrical poetry. He is also known for being the first to develop the concept of the "Dark Ages".
  Petrarch was born July 20, 1304 at Vicolo dell'Orto 28 according to tradition in the city of Arezzo, just at dawn on a Monday. He was the son of Ser Petracco. His given name was Francesco Petracco. The name was Latinized to Petrarca and later was Anglicized to Petrarch. Petrarch's younger brother was born in Incisa in Val d'Arno in 1307. Dante was a friend of his father.
  
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  Philip IV of France
  Philip IV (French: Philippe le Bel, April–June 1268 – 29 November 1314), called the Fair, was King of France from 1285 until his death. He was the husband of Joan I of Navarre, by virtue of which he was, as Philip I, King of Navarre and Count of Champagne from 1284 to 1305.
  A member of the House of Capet, Philip was born at the Palace of Fontainebleau at Seine-et-Marne, the son of King Philip III and Isabella of Aragon. Philip was nicknamed the Fair (le Bel) because of his handsome appearance, but his inflexible personality gained him other epithets, from friend and foe alike. His fierce opponent Bernard Saisset, bishop of Pamiers, said of him, "He is neither man nor beast. He is a statue."
  His education was guided by Guillaume d'Ercuis, the almoner of his father.^{[citation needed]}
  As prince, just before his father's death, he negotiated the safe passage of the royal family out of Aragon after the unsuccessful Aragonese Crusade.^{[citation needed]}
  Philip ascended to the throne and became King at age 17, although according to the publication titled "The Life And Times Of Jacques de Molay", Philip was 16. As a king, Philip was determined to strengthen the monarchy at any cost. He relied, more than any of his predecessors, on a professional bureaucracy of legalists. Because to the public he kept aloof and left specific policies, especially unpopular ones, to his ministers, he was called a "useless owl" by his contemporaries, among them Bishop Bernard Saisset. His reign marks the French transition from a charismatic monarchy – which could all but collapse in an incompetent reign – to a bureaucratic kingdom, a move, under a certain historical reading, towards modernity.
  
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  Piccarda
  Piccarda Donati was a 13th century Italian noblewoman. She appears as a character in Dante's classic Divine Comedy.
  Piccarda, sister of Corso Donati and of Dante's friend Forese Donati, is the first character Dante encounters in Paradise. She is on the Sphere of the Moon, the lowest sphere of Heaven. Piccarda explains to Dante that her placement is due to "vows neglected and, in part, no longer valid." When she was alive, Piccarda, a nun, was forcibly removed from her convent by her brother Corso, in order to marry her to a Florentine man and further her family's political interests. She died soon after her wedding. In her acquiescence to her brother's wishes, though forced, she neglected her vows to God.
  Through Dante's encounter with Piccarda, we first begin to learn about the nature of Heaven. For example, we learn that souls in Heaven become much more beautiful than they were on Earth; in fact, it takes Dante a while to actually recognize Piccarda as the woman he knew. In higher spheres, souls become so beautiful they cease to resemble their earthly selves. Piccarda is the only person Dante will recognize, unaided, in Heaven.
  
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  Pope Benedict XVI
  Benedict XVI (Latin: Benedictus PP. XVI; Italian: Benedetto XVI; German: Benedikt XVI.; born Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger on 16 April 1927) is the 265th Pope, a position in which he serves dual roles as Sovereign of the Vatican City State and leader of the Catholic Church. As pope he is regarded as the successor of Saint Peter. Benedict XVI was elected on 19 April 2005 in a papal conclave, celebrated his Papal Inauguration Mass on 24 April 2005, and took possession of his cathedral, the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran, on 7 May 2005. A native of Bavaria, Pope Benedict XVI has both German and Vatican citizenship.
  After a long career as an academic, serving as a professor of theology at various German universities—the last being the University of Regensburg—he was appointed Archbishop of Munich and Freising and cardinal by Pope Paul VI in 1977. In 1981, he settled in Rome when he became Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, one of the most important dicasteries of the Roman Curia. From 2002 until his election as Pope, he was also Dean of the College of Cardinals, and as such the primus inter pares among the cardinals. Prior to becoming Pope, he was "a major figure on the Vatican stage for a quarter of a century" as "one of the most respected, influential and controversial members of the College of Cardinals"; he had an influence "second to none when it came to setting church priorities and directions" as one of Pope John Paul II's closest confidants.
  
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  Pope Boniface VIII
  Pope Boniface VIII (c. 1235 – 11 October 1303), born Benedetto Gaetani, was Pope of the Catholic Church from 1294 to 1303. Today, he is probably best remembered for his feuds with Dante, who placed him in the Eighth Circle of Hell in his Divina Commedia, among the simonists.
  Benedetto was born in 1235 in Anagni, c. 50 kilometres southeast of Rome. He was the younger son of a minor noble family, the Gaetani. He took his first steps in the religious life when he was sent to the monastery of the Friars Minor in Velletri, where he was put under the care of his uncle Fra Leonardo Patrasso. He became a canon of the cathedral in Anagni in his teens. In 1252, when his uncle Pietro Gaetani became Bishop of Todi, in Umbria, Benedetto went with him and began his legal studies there. Benedetto never forgot his roots in Todi, later describing the city as "the dwelling place of his early youth," the city which "nourished him while still of tender years," and as a place where he "held lasting memories". In 1260, Benedetto acquired a canonry in Todi, as well as the small nearby castle of Sismano. Later in life he repeatedly expressed his gratitude to Anagni, Todi, and his family.
  
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  Pope Gregory I
  Pope Gregory I (Latin: Gregorius I) (c. 540 – 12 March 604), better known in English as Gregory the Great, was pope from 3 September 590 until his death. Gregory is well known for his writings, which were more prolific than those of any of his predecessors as pope.
  Throughout the Middle Ages he was known as “the Father of Christian Worship” because of his exceptional efforts in revising the Roman worship of his day.
  He is also known as St. Gregory the Dialogist in Eastern Orthodoxy because of his Dialogues. For this reason, English translations of Orthodox texts will sometimes list him as "Gregory Dialogus". He was the first of the popes to come from a monastic background. Gregory is a Doctor of the Church and one of the Latin Fathers. He is considered a saint in the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, Anglican Communion, and some Lutheran churches. Immediately after his death, Gregory was canonized by popular acclaim. The Protestant reformer, John Calvin, admired Gregory and declared in his Institutes that Gregory was the last good pope. He is the patron saint of musicians, singers, students, and teachers.
  
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  Pope Leo I
  Pope Leo I, also known as Leo the Great (c. 391 or 400 – 10 November 461) was the Bishop of Rome—the Pope—of the Catholic Church from 29 September 440 to his death on 10 November 461.
  He was an Italian aristocrat, and was the first pope of the Catholic Church to have been called "the Great". He is perhaps best known for having met Attila the Hun in 452 and persuading him to turn back from his invasion of Italy. He is also a Doctor of the Church, most remembered theologically for issuing the Tome of Leo, a document which was foundational to the debates of the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon. The Council of Chalcedon, the fourth ecumenical council, dealt primarily with Christology, and elucidated the orthodox definition of Christ's being as the hypostatic union of two natures—divine and human—united in one person, "with neither confusion nor division". The Council of Chalcedon gave rise to the first major schism in Christian history, the Monophysite schism.
  According to the Liber Pontificalis, he was a native of Tuscany. By 431, as a deacon, he occupied a sufficiently important position for Cyril of Alexandria to apply to him in order that Rome's influence should be thrown against the claims of Juvenal of Jerusalem to patriarchal jurisdiction over Palestine—unless this letter is addressed rather to Pope Celestine I. About the same time John Cassian dedicated to him the treatise against Nestorius written at his request. But nothing shows more plainly the confidence felt in him than his being chosen by the emperor to settle the dispute between Aëtius and Caecina Decius Aginatius Albinus, the two highest officials in Gaul.
  
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  Raimondo Spiazzi
  Raimondo Spiazzi OP (18 January 1918 - 14 October 2004) was an Italian Catholic theologian, advisor to Pius XII, and Mariologist with over 2,500 publications.
  Spiazzi was born in Moneglia, province of Genoa.
  He met Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli in 1937, who left a major impression on him and facilitated his entry in the seminary. March 25, 1944, he was ordained to the priesthood. During the war years he taught religion in a secondary school in Turin. After the war, he studied at the Pontifical International Athenaeum Angelicum in Rome and graduated in 1947 with the title “The Christian Perfection of Man.” He taught in Rome at the Angelicum until 1972. Spiazzi, a tireless scholar authored 2.500 publications of which are 150 publications in book format. l'Edizione Marietti dell'Opera Omnia di San Tommaso d'Aquino, l'Enciclopedia Moderna del Cristinesimo, l'Enciclopedia Mariana "Theotòcos". Many of his later publications are in the area of Mariology.
  In 1959, Spiazzi published an article, which costs him banning from Rome and the wrath of Pope John XXIII. Aware of discussions on the continued mandatory priestly celibacy, most prominently by the Cardinal Archbishop Emmanuel Célestin Suhard of Paris, Spiazzi argued in Monitor Ecclesiasticus, that historical evidence for mandatory priestly celibacy was extremely shaky. He pointed out, that even at he Ecumenical Council of Trent, the fathers did not consider clerical celibacy a matter of divine positive law, “nor could they since there were validly ordained married priests in communion with Rome.
  
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  Robert Bellarmine
  Robert Bellarmine (full name in Italian: Roberto Francesco Romolo Bellarmino) (4 October 1542 – 17 September 1621) was an Italian Jesuit and a Cardinal of the Catholic Church. He was one of the most important figures in the Counter-Reformation. He was canonized in 1930 and is a Doctor of the Church.
  Bellarmine was born at Montepulciano to a noble if impoverished family, the son of Vincenzo Bellarmino and his wife Cinzia Cervini, who was sister of Pope Marcellus II. He never grew taller than five feet three inches. As a boy he knew Virgil by heart and composed a number of poems in Italian and Latin. One of his hymns, on Mary Magdalene, is included in the Breviary. He entered the Roman novitiate in 1560, remaining in Rome three years. He then went to a Jesuit house at Mondovì, in Piedmont, where he learned Greek. While at Mondovì, he came to the attention of Francesco Adorno, the local Jesuit Provincial Superior, who sent him to the University of Padua.
  Bellarmine's systematic study of theology began at Padua in 1567 and 1568, where his teachers were Thomists. In 1569 he was sent to finish it at the University of Leuven in Flanders. There he was ordained, and obtained a reputation both as a professor and a preacher, drawing to his pulpit both Catholics and Protestants. He was the first Jesuit to teach at the university, where the subject of his course was the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Bellarmine
• Roscellinus
  Roscellinus, also called Roscelin of Compiègne or in Latin Roscellinus Compendiensis and Rucelinus (c. 1050–c. 1125), was a French philosopher and theologian, often regarded as the founder of nominalism (cfr. Scholasticism).
  Roscellinus was born in Compiègne, France. Little is known of his life, and knowledge of his doctrines is mainly derived from Anselm and Abelard.
  He studied at Soissons and Reims, was afterwards attached to the cathedral of Chartres and became canon of Compiègne. As a monk of Compiègne, he was teaching as early as 1087. He had contact with Lanfranc, Anselm and St. Ivo of Chartres.
  It seems most probable that Roscellinus was not strictly the first to promulgate nominalistic doctrines; but in his exposition they received more definite expression, and being applied to the dogma of the Trinity, attracted universal attention.
  Roscellinus maintained that it is merely a habit of speech which prevents our speaking of the three persons as three substances or three Gods. If it were otherwise, and the three persons were really one substance or thing (una res), we should be forced to admit that the Father and the Holy Spirit became incarnate along with the Son. Roscellinus seems to have put forward this doctrine in perfect good faith, and to have claimed for it at first the authority of Lanfranc and Anselm.
  
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  Saint Dominic
  Saint Dominic (Spanish: Santo Domingo), also known as Dominic of Osma and Dominic of Caleruega (occasionally Calaruega), often called Dominic de Guzmán and Domingo Félix de Guzmán (1170 – August 6, 1221) was the founder of the Friars Preachers, popularly called the Dominicans or Order of Preachers (OP), a Roman Catholic religious order. Dominic is the patron saint of astronomers.
  Dominic was born in Caleruega, halfway between Osma and Aranda de Duero in Old Castile, Spain. He was named after Saint Dominic of Silos, who is said to be the patron saint of hopeful mothers, astronomers. The Benedictine abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos lies a few miles north of Caleruega.
  In the earliest narrative source, by Jordan of Saxony, Dominic's parents are not named. The story is told that before his birth his mother dreamed that a dog leapt from her womb carrying a torch in its mouth, and "seemed to set the earth on fire". This story is likely to have emerged when his order became known, after his name, as the Dominican order, in Latin is Dominicanus and by a play of words was interpreted as Domini canis: "Dog of the Lord." Jordan adds that Dominic was brought up by his parents and a maternal uncle who was an archbishop. The failure to name them is not surprising, since Jordan's work is a history of the early years of the Order rather than a biography of Dominic. A later source, still of the 13th century, gives the names of Dominic's mother and father as Juana and Felix. Nearly a century after Dominic's birth, a local author asserts that Dominic's father was "vir venerabilis et dives in populo suo" ("an honoured and wealthy man in his village"). The earliest statement that Dominic's father belonged to the family de Guzmán, and that his mother belonged to the Aça or Aza family, occurs in the travel narrative of Pero Tafur, written in 1439 or soon after.
  
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  Samuel Beckett
  Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in France for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.
  Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century. Strongly influenced by James Joyce, he is considered one of the last modernists. As an inspiration to many later writers, he is also sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd". His work became increasingly minimalist in his later career.
  Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.
  The Becketts were members of the Anglican Church of Ireland. The family home, Cooldrinagh in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, was a large house and garden complete with tennis court built in 1903 by Samuel's father, William. The house and garden, together with the surrounding countryside where he often went walking with his father, the nearby Leopardstown Racecourse, the Foxrock railway station and Harcourt Street station at the city terminus of the line, all feature in his prose and plays. Beckett's father was a quantity surveyor and his mother a nurse.
  
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  Sandro Botticelli
  Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli (Italian pronunciation: [ˈsandro bottiˈtʃɛlli]; c. 1445 – May 17, 1510) was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. He belonged to the Florentine school under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici, a movement that Giorgio Vasari would characterize less than a hundred years later as a "golden age", a thought, suitably enough, he expressed at the head of his Vita of Botticelli. Botticelli's posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century; since then his work has been seen to represent the linear grace of Early Renaissance painting. Among his best known works are The Birth of Venus and Primavera.
  
  
  There are very few details of Botticelli's life, but it is known that he became an apprentice when he was about fourteen years old, which would indicate that he received a fuller education than other Renaissance artists. He was born in the city of Florence in a house in the Via Nuova, Borg'Ognissanti. Vasari reported that he was initially trained as a goldsmith by his brother Antonio. Probably by 1462 he was apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi; many of his early works have been attributed to the elder master, and attributions continue to be uncertain. Influenced also by the monumentality of Masaccio's painting, it was from Lippi that Botticelli learned a more intimate and detailed manner. As recently discovered, during this time, Botticelli could have traveled to Hungary, participating in the creation of a fresco in Esztergom, ordered in the workshop of Filippo Lippi by János Vitéz, then archbishop of Hungary.^{[citation needed]}
  
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  Teresa of Ávila
  Saint Teresa of Ávila, also called Saint Teresa of Jesus, baptized as Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada, (March 28, 1515 – October 4, 1582) was a prominent Spanish mystic, Roman Catholic saint, Carmelite nun, and writer of the Counter Reformation, and theologian of contemplative life through mental prayer. She was a reformer of the Carmelite Order and is considered to be, along with John of the Cross, a founder of the Discalced Carmelites.
  In 1622, forty years after her death, she was canonized by Pope Gregory XV, and in 1970 named a Doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI. Her books, which include her autobiography, The Life of Teresa of Jesus, and her seminal work, El Castillo Interior (The Interior Castle), are an integral part of the Spanish Renaissance literature as well as Christian mysticism and Christian meditation practices as she entails in her other important work Camino de Perfección (The Way of Perfection).
  Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada was born in 1515 in Gotarrendura, in the province of Ávila, Spain. Her paternal grandfather, Juan de Toledo, was a marrano (Jewish convert to Christianity) and was condemned by the Spanish Inquisition for allegedly returning to the Jewish faith. Her father, Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, bought a knighthood and successfully assimilated into Christian society. Teresa's mother, Beatriz, was especially keen to raise her daughter as a pious Christian. Teresa was fascinated by accounts of the lives of the saints, and ran away from home at age seven with her brother Rodrigo to find martyrdom among the Moors. Her uncle stopped them as he was returning to the city, having spotted the two outside the city walls.
  
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  Tertullian
  Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, anglicised as Tertullian (c. 160 – c. 225 AD), was a prolific early Berber Christian author from Carthage in the Roman province of Africa. He is the first Christian author to produce an extensive corpus of Latin Christian literature. He also was a notable early Christian apologist and a polemicist against heresy. Tertullian has been called "the father of Latin Christianity" and "the founder of Western theology." Though conservative, he did originate and advance new theology to the early Church. He is perhaps most famous for being the oldest extant Latin writer to use the term Trinity (Latin trinitas), and giving the oldest extant formal exposition of a Trinitarian theology. Other Latin formulations that first appear in his work are "three Persons, one Substance" as the Latin "tres Personae, una Substantia" (itself from the Koine Greek "treis Hypostases, Homoousios"). He wrote his trinitarian formula after becoming a Montanist; his ideas were at first rejected as heresy by the church at large, but later accepted as Christian orthodoxy.
  
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  Thomas Aquinas
  Thomas Aquinas, O.P. ( /əˈkwaɪnəs/ ə-KWY-nəs; 1225 – 7 March 1274), also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Roman Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus ([the] Angelic Doctor), Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis. "Aquinas" is not a surname, but is a Latin demonym for a resident of Aquino, his place of birth. He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology, and the father of Thomism. His influence on Western thought is considerable, and much of modern philosophy was conceived as a reaction against, or as an agreement with, his ideas, particularly in the areas of ethics, natural law, metaphysics, and political theory.
  Thomas is held in the Catholic Church to be the model teacher for those studying for the priesthood. The works for which he is best-known are the Summa Theologica and the Summa Contra Gentiles. As one of the 33 Doctors of the Church, he is considered the Church's greatest theologian and philosopher. Pope Benedict XV declared: "This (Dominican) Order ... acquired new luster when the Church declared the teaching of Thomas to be her own and that Doctor, honored with the special praises of the Pontiffs, the master and patron of Catholic schools."
  
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  Thomas Cajetan
  Thomas Cajetan (pronounced Ca-'je-tan), also known as Gaetanus, commonly Tommaso de Vio (20 February 1469 - 9 August 1534), was an Italian cardinal. He is perhaps best known among Protestants for his opposition to the teachings of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation while he was the Pope's Legate in Wittenberg,^{[citation needed]} and perhaps best known among Catholics for his extensive commentary on the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas.
  He is not to be confused with his contemporary, Saint Cajetan, the founder of the Theatines.
  De Vio was born in Gaeta, then part of the Kingdom of Naples, as Jacopo Vio. The name Tommaso was taken as a monastic name, while the surname Cajetan derives from his native city. At the age of fifteen he entered the Dominican order, and, devoting himself to studies in philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (he is the founder of Neothomism), became, before the age of thirty, a doctor of theology at Padua, where he was subsequently professor of metaphysics.
  A public disputation at Ferrara (1494) with Pico della Mirandola gave him a great reputation as a theologian. He was made general procurator in 1507 and general of his order a year later in 1508. For his zeal in defending the papal rights against the 1511 Council of Pisa, in a series of works which were condemned by the Sorbonne and publicly burnt by order of King Louis XII, he obtained the bishopric of Gaeta, and in 1517 Pope Leo X made him a cardinal and archbishop of Palermo.
  
  wn.com/Thomas_Cajetan
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  Thomas More
  Sir Thomas More ( /ˈmɔr/; 7 February 1478 – 6 July 1535), known by Catholics as Saint Thomas More since 1935, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman, and noted Renaissance humanist. He was an important councillor to Henry VIII of England and was Lord Chancellor from October 1529 to 16 May 1532. He is commemorated by the Church of England as a "Reformation martyr". He was an opponent of the Protestant Reformation and in particular of Martin Luther and William Tyndale.
  More coined the word "utopia" – a name he gave to the ideal and imaginary island nation, the political system of which he described in Utopia published in 1516. He opposed the King's separation from the Catholic Church and refused to accept the King as Supreme Head of the Church of England, a title which had been given by parliament through the Act of Supremacy of 1534. He was imprisoned in 1534 for his refusal to take the oath required by the First Succession Act, because the act disparaged papal power and Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. In 1535, he was tried for treason, convicted on perjured testimony and beheaded.
  
  wn.com/Thomas_More
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  Thomas à Kempis
  Thomas à Kempis (Thomas van Kempen or Thomas Hemerken or Haemerken, litt. "small hammer"); (c. 1380 – † Zwolle, 25 July 1471) was a late Medieval Catholic monk and the probable author of The Imitation of Christ, which is one of the best known Christian books on devotion. His name means, "Thomas of Kempen", his home town and in German he is known as Thomas von Kempen. He also is known by various spellings of his family name: Thomas Haemerkken; Thomas Hammerlein; Thomas Hemerken, and Thomas Hämerken.
  He was born at the Lower Rhine region in Kempen, Germany, County of Cleves ca.1380. His paternal name was Hemerken, Kleverlandish for little hammer. His father John was a blacksmith and his mother, Gertrude was a school-mistress.
  In 1392 he followed his brother, Jan, to Deventer, Netherlands in order to attend the city school. While attending school in Deventer, Thomas encountered the Brethren of the Common Life, followers of Gerard Groote's Modern Devotion. He attended school in Deventer from 1392 to 1399.
  
  wn.com/Thomas_à_Kempis
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  Thérèse of Lisieux
  Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (2 January 1873 – 30 September 1897), or Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin, was a French Carmelite nun. She is also known as "The Little Flower of Jesus".
  She felt an early call to religious life, and overcoming various obstacles, in 1888 at the early age of 15, became a nun and joined two of her older sisters in the cloistered Carmelite community of Lisieux, Normandy. After nine years as a Carmelite religious, having fulfilled various offices such as sacristan and assistant to the novice mistress, and having spent the last eighteen months in Carmel in a night of faith, she died of tuberculosis at the age of 24. The impact of The Story of a Soul, a collection of her autobiographical manuscripts, printed and distributed a year after her death to an initially very limited audience, was great, and she rapidly became one of the most popular saints of the twentieth century. Pope Pius XI made her the "star of his pontificate". She was beatified in 1923, and canonized in 1925. Thérèse was declared co-patron of the missions with Francis Xavier in 1927, and named co-patron of France with Joan of Arc in 1944. On 19 October 1997 Pope John Paul II declared her the thirty-third Doctor of the Church, the youngest person, and only the third woman, to be so honored. Devotion to Thérèse has developed around the world.
  
  wn.com/Thérèse_of_Lisieux
• 
  Virgil
  Publius Vergilius Maro (October 15, 70 BC – September 21, 19 BC), usually called Virgil or Vergil /ˈvɜrdʒəl/ in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues (or Bucolics), the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid. A number of minor poems, collected in the Appendix Vergiliana, are sometimes attributed to him.
  Virgil is traditionally ranked as one of Rome's greatest poets. His Aeneid has been considered the national epic of ancient Rome from the time of its composition to the present day. Modeled after Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the Aeneid follows the Trojan refugee Aeneas as he struggles to fulfill his destiny and arrive on the shores of Italy—in Roman mythology the founding act of Rome. Virgil's work has had wide and deep influence on Western literature, most notably the Divine Comedy of Dante, in which Virgil appears as Dante's guide through hell and purgatory.
  Virgil's biographical tradition is thought to depend on a lost biography by Varius, Virgil's editor, which was incorporated into the biography by Suetonius and the commentaries of Servius and Donatus, the two great commentators on Virgil's poetry. Although the commentaries no doubt record much factual information about Virgil, some of their evidence can be shown to rely on inferences made from his poetry and allegorizing; thus, Virgil's biographical tradition remains problematic.
  
  wn.com/Virgil
• Wikipedia Persondata
  wn.com/Wikipedia_Persondata
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  William Blake
  William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". His visual artistry has led one contemporary art critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced". Although he lived in London his entire life except for three years spent in Felpham he produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God", or "Human existence itself".
  Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of both the Romantic movement and "Pre-Romantic", for its large appearance in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the Church of England – indeed, to all forms of organised religion – Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions, as well as by such thinkers as Jakob Böhme and Emanuel Swedenborg. Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. The 19th-century scholar William Rossetti characterised Blake as a "glorious luminary," and as "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors".
  
  wn.com/William_Blake
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  William of Ockham
  William of Ockham ( /ˈɒkəm/; also Occam, Hockham, or several other spellings; c. 1288 – c. 1348) was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small village in Surrey. He is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the centre of the major intellectual and political controversies of the fourteenth century. Although he is commonly known for Ockham's razor, the methodological principle that bears his name, William of Ockham also produced significant works on logic, physics, and theology. In the Church of England, his day of commemoration is 10 April.
  William of Ockham joined the Franciscan order at an early age. It is believed that he studied theology at the University of Oxford from 1309 to 1321, but never completed his master's degree (the usual undergraduate degree in those times). Because of this, he acquired the byname Venerabilis Inceptor, or "Worthy Beginner" (an inceptor was a student formally admitted to the ranks of teachers by the university authorities). He was also known as the Doctor Invincibilis or "Unconquerable Teacher."
  
  wn.com/William_of_Ockham
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  Yves Congar
  Yves Marie Joseph Congar (8 April 1904, Sedan, Ardennes - 22 June 1995, Paris) was a French Dominican cardinal and Catholic theologian.
  Born in Sedan, in northeast France, in 1904, Congar's home was occupied by the Germans for much of World War I. During this time he kept extensive, illustrated diaries recording the occupation, which provide a unique historical insight into the war from a child's point of view.
  In his early twenties, Congar spent three years in a Carmelite monastery where he encountered Thomistic philosophy through the works of the renowned lay philosopher Jacques Maritain and the Dominican theologian Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange.
  In 1925 he joined the Dominican Order at Amiens. Following his theological studies at the Saulchoir, the Dominican studium, which at the time was located in Kain-la-Tombe, Belgium, and offered strong training in historical theology, Congar was ordained a priest in 1930. During World War II he was drafted into the French army as a chaplain, and was held from 1940 to 1945 as a prisoner of war by the Germans in Colditz.
  
  wn.com/Yves_Congar

Dante 01 (2008)

Actors

• Lambert Wilson
• Dominique Pinon
• Linh Dan Pham (ii)
• Francois Levantal (ii)
• Bruno Lochet
• Francois Hadji-lazaro (ii)
• Lotfi Yahyajedidi
• Yann Collette (ii)
• Simona Maicanescu
• Gerald Laroche
• Dominique Bettenfeld

Director

• Marc Caro

• El guatemalo
• Dime cómo
• Retrato de un día en nuestras vidas
• Dónde vas
• Escaped
• Mamita beautiful
• Elevado
• Titila
• Lust, Cash & Tears
• Narcoiris
• Humo digital
• Maybe It's Today
• Ultra Mo'fo
• Magia
• The Day I Lost U (spiritual bolero)
• Para María
• XX
• El guatemalo (english)

• Who Got My Back
• Lawdy Lawdy
• Who Dat
• Shoulda Coulda Woulda
• Interlude
• Call Me
• Tell Me Why
• She Bops (feat. Nelly)
• Favorite Girl
• Sugar Daddy
• Interlude
• Walk Away