Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities

Programs & Initiatives

Moments of Change

Four-hundred years ago, in 1607, Shakespeare's Hamlet was performed for the first time outside of England on a British East India Company ship off the coast of Sierra Leone. Meanwhile, in Italy, Monteverdi's L'Orfeo received its premiere in Mantua, heralding the birth of opera. Five years later, in 1612, Artemisia Gentileschi unveiled her painting of Judith Slaying Holofernes to astounded gasps at the realism of her work and the violence of her subject.

This period also teemed with scientific breakthroughs, including Galileo's first use of the telescope, Kepler's new understanding of the cosmos and planetary action, and Bacon's theorizing of empiricism, all of which laid the foundations for our modern scientific and technological world. At the same time, accomplishments in other parts of the world crowned a long process of development. For example, architect Mehmed Agha's design of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul (also known as the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, constructed between 1609 and 1617) marked the culmination of more than 200 years of the classical period of Mosque development. Geographical and political maps would also be changed forever, as the shores of Virginia received its first English settlers (1607), the French colonized Quebec (1608), and Pilgrims and Wampanoags celebrated the "first Thanksgiving" in Plymouth (1621).