Divine visions, terrifying monsters, bizarre beasts. The intricate woodcut prints of the 16th and 17th centuries capture the fear and wonder of a world transfixed by invention and transformed by knowledge. Known as the early modern period or, more lavishly, the Age of Discovery, these years represent a temporal space that was a liminal world: transitional, ambiguous, straining against thresholds.
According to the philosopher A C Grayling writing in The Age of Genius (2016), this time was witness to ‘the greatest change in the mind of humanity than had occurred in all history beforehand’. Bloody battles – both intellectual and physical – were fought between the acolytes of science and magic, religion and mysticism, orthodoxy and heresy, democracy and monarchy. The path was violent and wending, but by the mid-17th century in Europe, humans had radically revised their place in the Universe, and were groping towards modernity.