Formally established as a distinct entity apart from the neighboring Vatican Library in 1621, the Archives’ “Secret” title is predicated upon the fact it truly was a covert operation, until it was opened to secular academics in 1881. At the time, Pope Leo XIII justified the decision by stating, “The Church needs nothing but the truth.”

Since that time, the Archive’s overseers have granted scholars access to their collection on an application-only basis; on average, only two hundred historians from outside of the Catholic hierarchy are permitted entrance each year. Among the records that those select few have inspected are accounts of the goings-on behind the canonization of saints, architectural schematics for Vatican City’s buildings, chapels and infrastructure, transcripts and evidence from the trials of Galileo and the Knights Templar and papal reports, correspondence and diaries.

The Archive’s earliest known document dates from 471 AD. It is an Act of Donation from Junius Bassus, the Roman consul of Tivoli and a Catholic-converted Goth, who bequeathed the majority of his property to the Church before retiring to the countryside. When the document was copied in the 12th century, it could still be read and handled. The original has since disintegrated, but remains in possession of the Archive.

The wide-ranging subject matter and depth of the Vatican’s closely guarded collection has made it ripe for conquest by would-be conquerors. In 1810, during Napoleon’s occupation of Rome, the Emperor annexed the Archives in his bid to create a world library and had its contents packaged and shipped to Paris by wagon. After his fall in 1814, it was immediately recalled to Rome – but only after many “unimportant” pieces of parchment were sold off to French paper manufactures in bulk. One story tells of the Archive’s former prefect visiting Paris to oversee its restoration, only to discover that a seven hundred-volume registry of papal bulls had been distributed as wrapping paper to butcher shops throughout the city.

Today, the number of documents released from the Archive grows with each passing decade. Most recently, Pope Benedict XVI approved the release of all documents through 1939. Echoing his predecessor’s call for “nothing but the truth,” Benedict XVI cited the “unjust and thoughtless speculation” concerning the Church’s supposed complicity with Nazi Germany in the years prior to World War II – an issue that remains contentious to this day.

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During the Elizabethan era a good complexion was considered to be highly important. So much so that many recipes began circulating describing the best mixtures to remove freckles, pimples and pox-marks. One such recipe by Hugh Platt in his book, Delights of Ladies detailed “Wash the face and body of a sucking child with breast milk or cow milk or mixed with water every night and the child’s skin will wax fair and clear and resist sunburn”.

Other recipes including mixing lead with marble and heating the mixture for several days until only a powder is left. This is then mixed with vinegar to create a thick paste which could be applied to the face, neck and bosom leaving the skin looking white and blemish free. However, the use of lead in the cosmetics could often cause the skin to burn and peel away. At the every least it would become shrunken and gray. Egg white could also be used on the skin to create a ‘glazed’ look and to hide wrinkles. Elizabeth I is known for her skin, which she insisted be covered in white paste to hide her pox-marks. (The Queen suffered smallpox at the age of twenty-nine which left her skin badly blemished.)

Perhaps another reason for the extreme beauty aids used at this time was due to the increasing importance of painted portraits. We certainly see pasty white faces in Elizabethan portraits and portraits dating back to as far as 1521. Even the men are depicted dressed in their finest, displaying their wealth and apparent good looks.

While the Queen herself was the most influential in the Elizabethan fashion market, not everyone approved of the time and effort put into cosmetics and clothes. Thomas Becon, using the Bible as him main source, wrote “I will… that women array themselves in comely appeal, with shamefacedness and discrete behaviour, not with braided hair, gold or pearls or costly array.” While Thomas Tuke’s book, ‘A Discourse against Painting and Tincturing of Women’ first published in 1616, stated “Fucus is paint, and fucus is deceit, and fucus they used, that do mean to cheat”. Even one of Shakespeare’s sonnets scorns and makes fun of the ideals of Elizabethan beauty;

“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun
Coral is far more fair than her lips fair
If snow be white, why then her breast is dun,
If hair be wires, black wires grow on her head…”

Several male writers thought that cosmetics and clothing hid the true nature of a woman and their beauty was used to entice rich men into marrying them. Certainly, Elizabeth’s mother Anne Boylen was beheaded for bewitching the Henry VIII. One reason for this is that the white paste used to cover blemishes hid the humble women’s blush. Blushing was seen as a sign of innocence, a quality much desired in a woman. Nevertheless, writers like Becon and Tuke did nothing to change Elizabeth’s ideals of beauty nor her life long quest for perfection.

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Further reading:
‘Women According to Men, the World of Tudor-Stuart Women’ by Suzanne W. Hull

About the Author
Charlotte Gardner, a guest blog writer, is currently studying archaeology at the Australian National University. In her spare time she likes to read and write about eccentric historical moments. Her love of old buildings and older stories was sparked when she visited Italy. One of Charlotte’s greatest wishes is that in a few thousand years her skeleton will be dug up by an archaeological investigation team and put on display in a national museum. You may contact Charlotte via email at: charlotteg86@gmail.com.

Built in a few short months in 1597 and 1598, the Globe was an open air amphitheater constructed of wood with two flights of stairs on either side of the stage and a single entrance for performers and theater goers. With the capacity to house over 1500 guests, the theater was not small by old or new standards and was the venue for the latest Shakespearean productions. Unheated and with very few lights, the theater had high balcony seats covered with thatch straw roofs. A veritable overcrowded and unsafe tinderbox.

Shakespeare and his band of thespians known as “The Chamberlain’s Men” performed theater in the round which meant that the audience and the actors had the intimate experience of close proximity. There were no female actors at the time as such a practice was illegal and viewed as obscene. So whether the character was Romeo or Juliet, the actor was male and this was not strange. In fact, the tradition of male actors playing female leads continues today in British pantomime (Christmas Plays) performances.

As theater developed into its modern form, the plays, performances and skills of the various actors and writers were a constant source of conversation. Those who performed best, created the most drama and put on the most captivating stories were rewarded with packed houses and good reviews in the morning papers. For this reason, special effects played a large role in productions and Shakespeare and his company were no exception to this as during his life, he was just another writer trying to improve his credentials.

And so it was that in the arsenal of Globe Theater special effects (that included fireworks, trap doors and pulley operated flying systems) was a small cannon that was fired to mark the onstage arrival of prominent characters. The cannon was loaded with gun powder and fired during the performance of the play, igniting the roof of the theater.

There appears no record as to the number of casualties or whether anyone died that night. But with 1500 people trying to flee a burning building by one exit with little light and a burning roof, there must have been quite a panic. The stampede effect of such circumstances is well known. No one was available to put out the fire and the first Globe Theater, the jewel of London’s theater circuit, burned into oblivion.

Without modern safety equipment such as fire extinguishers and smoke alarms and without the close proximity of a municipal fire brigade, devastating structural fires were common during the period. In fact it would be only a few decades later that the Great Fire of London (1666) would take place, raising a vast portion of the capital to the ground.

In 1614, a second Globe Theater was built on the same spot but would only last for 30 more years. In 1644, the Puritan movement swept through England and public theatrical performances were banned. Considered heretical and distracting, theater was not the choice of the conservative simple life outlook of the Puritans and the Globe was demolished never to be rebuilt.

After the English Civil War, theater came back into fashion but too late for the famous bard to enjoy. William Shakespeare died in 1616. The Swan Theater in Stratford Upon Avon Shakespeare’s birthplace still stands today and is home to the Royal Shakespeare Company.

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Florence, in particular, was emerging as a powerful city-state through its commercial strength as a textile producer and banking center. Its burgeoning economy and growing mercantile class made it a focal point for the cultural transformations that would be associated with the Renaissance. The fall of the Byzantine Empire also fueled change in Western Europe as exiled Greek scholars established themselves in the west, bringing with them copies of classical philosophical texts, literature, and salvaged art works and opening to the Europeans a door to the riches of the classical Greek and Roman periods that had been lost through the centuries of internal tribal warfare and barbaric invasions.

Money from the new middle classes went towards commissioning artists and architects to create masterpieces in quantity and scale unmatched till then. Artists such as Giotto, Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masaccio, Lippi, Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, Lotto, da Vinci, Michelangelo, to name a few, elevated art to a new level and form of cultural expression. The Renaissance began to flourish in the kingdoms to the north of Florence as well, with new ideas and momentum of change spreading along trade routes. Venetian Italy and the regions of the Netherlands also were transformed by new ideas, aesthetics, and commerce.

New intellectual movements stirred Western Europe as well. Authors such as Sir Thomas More and Erasmus of Rotterdam made notable contributions to a growing canon of western intellectual thought on humanism and the capacities of the individual to reason and contend for themselves with the depths of the human spirit. A growing intellectual need arose to balance a world image dominated and guided by religion with a concept of a mankind’s experience on earth as a breathing, thinking being exercising a measure of self determinism.

The Renaissance looked to the past, to the classical period, in order to push itself forward. A fascination with art and literature and thought from a previous era contributed to an era of new literary, artistic, and intellectual development for the Europeans.

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June 22, 1633 in Rome, Italy Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), famed scientist of the future and notorious mad heretic of his own age, was forced to recant his beliefs about the solar system. His crazy notion that the planets rotated around the sun rather than the sun around the earth was sheer heresy. Galileo challenged God and was forced to recount, becoming one of the many examples of how progress and religion have clashed in history.

This severe case of heliocentricity had plagued Galileo for some time, since 1610 in fact when he first began thinking that Copernicus had got it right. Copernicus was the first to challenge the belief that the earth was not the center of the universe. Faith was out of step with logic and scientific observation. Yet Galileo agreed with the concept so much he wrote a book about it.

The book was based on his own observations. After discovering the moons of Jupiter by using a telescope and charting the activity of the planet Venus, Galileo became convinced of the rightness of Copernicus’ concept. He created charts, took calculations and earned his title as the father of physics.

The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, in which Galileo took Copernicus’ theory and the geocentric ideas of Aristotle, put them side by side and appealed to reason, became his undoing. This public challenge to God’s authority had the Inquisition calling. First notified of Galileo’s beliefs by a slighted monk in 1615, the Inquisition declared Galileo a heretic. An earlier work regarding the atomic structure of the universe had already made the scientist a problem for the Church. The 1630s publication just finished things off. But Galileo was determined to defend himself and traveled to Rome willingly to face his tribunal.

Why the determined physicist wrote and signed the confession is a matter of the adverse effects of torture. Whether it was only the threat of torture or the physical act itself, the reputation of the diabolical Inquisition was ubiquitous. Galileo made his confession and was then put under house arrest. He went home to Sienna, Italy to live out his days.

But although his eyes failed him and the confinements of unending confinement must have plagued his mind, Galileo continued to work. His final publication, Two New Sciences would become his greatest work solidifying his post in scientific history. After a few years, his sentence was lighted only so much that Galileo could move to his favorite home in Florence to live out his days. The rebel died peacefully in 1642.

The story that states Galileo said “and yet it moves” after testifying that the earth, as the bible stated, did not move is just that, a story. There is no proof the words were ever spoken. Rather, they have become a symbol of the man’s rebellious and defiant nature. A nature that helped steer the world towards modern thought. It wouldn’t be until 1992 that the Roman Catholic Church would repeal the heresy claim against Galileo.

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