List of notable Baroque figures
From the Quicksilver Metaweb.
This list includes only figures from European history and European literature. Those in italics are fictional, or so we are told by that history. They might be real in Quicksilver's universe, or be secret identities of authors or others. History being what it is, we just can't know. Even the historical figures that are well documented may have had biography fabricated. Facts about many of them are hotly disputed.
- Don Quixote
- Robinson Crusoe - a castaway whose original family name meant 'crucified fool'
- Friday - "African" who later shared Crusoe's Island and his religion
- Lemuel Gulliver
- Cyrano de Bergerac
- George Psalamanazar - a real person with a fictional name and identity
- Queen Elizabeth I - a real person about whom many fictions have been written
- William Shakespeare - a real person whose existence has been doubted, and whose attributed works have been also attributed to others
- King James I - the first Stuart on the English throne
- King Charles I - wee, arrogant and misled by Archbishop Laud, he was tried and beheaded by the Puritans
- Oliver Cromwell - Lord Protector of England
- Richard Cromwell - "Tumbledown Dick" son of Oliver Cromwell
- Hugh Peters - One of the three Regicides executed in October 1660.
- Christopher Marlowe - another real playwright and spy
- Samuel Johnson
- Pierre de Fermat - mathematician, studied freefall and optics
- George Berkeley - first anti-Enlightenment figure?
- Daniel Defoe - author
- Jonathan Swift - an Irish wit who in spoofing Daniel Defoe, created the virtuous Houyhnhnms, inspired by a comment of King George of Great Britain claiming that he communicated with his horses in 'High German' with the implication his stable was more intelligent than his court.
- John Napier - Scottish Mathematician who originated the concept of logarithms as a calculation aid
- Henry Briggs - made common logarithms popular throughout Europe
- Johann Sebastian Bach
- William Harvey - demonstrated the heart acts as a pump in the circulatory system
- Cardinal Richelieu - statesman who ran France, designed a cryptosystem using a slotted card called le grille - possibly epileptic
- Dartagan - not Dumas' hero but Pierre de Montesquiou, Comte D'Artagnan (1645-1725)
- Cornelis (Jacobszoon) Drebbel - Dutch inventor who built the first navigable submarine under the patronage of king James I
- Santorio Santorio - physican who pioneered the use of precision medical instruments
- Rene Descartes - possibly the first Enlightenment figure, but possibly not
- Marin Mersenne - authored the Cogitata Physica-Mathematica; When 2n-1 is prime it is said to be a Mersenne prime
- John Flamsteed - first British Astronomer Royal, sighted Uranus but catalogued it as a star
- Johannes Kepler - discovered the 3 laws of planetary motion that bear his name. Polymath.
- Galileo Galilei - Italian natural philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who suffered under the Inquisition for his insistance the solar system was heliocentric. Aided navigation with a method using Jovian moons to solve longitude
- Sir Francis Bacon - wrote The Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum, promoted the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge
- Sir Robert Morray - polymath - see James Gregory
- Gaspard Bauhin -Swiss physician, anatomist, and botanist who introduced a scientific binomial system of classification to both anatomy and botany.
- Reinier de Graaf - anatomist
- Jan Baptista van Helmont - bridged alchemy and chemistry, recognized the existence of discrete gases which helped him identifiy carbon dioxide
- Tycho Brahe -Danish astronomer whose claim of losing part of his nose in a duel might have been a cover for using mercury as a pox cure
- Johann Bayer - a German astronomer
- James Gregory - authored Optica Promota, and Vera Circuli et Hyperbolae Quadratura
- Blaise Pascal - mathematician whose work on the binomial coefficients was to lead Newton to his discovery of the general binomial theorem; Fermat's correspondence with Pascal laid the foundation for the theory of probability; gambler
- Christiaan Huygens - polymath; well connected son of diplomat and natural philosopher
- Sir Isaac Newton - polymath with a temper, charged with oversight of the Royal Mint.
- Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
- Voltaire
- Sir Christopher Wren
- Baruch de Spinoza
- Robert Hooke - obscure as one focus of Isaac's temper, the single greatest experimental scientist of his generation - see Hooke's Law
- John Wilkins
- Judge Jeffreys
- Monmouth
- William of Orange
- Emperor Joseph I of Austria-Hungary - a candidate for first Enlightenment power figure
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart his employee
See also list of people in Quicksilver, boldfaced in the above to distinguish them quickly. It is mostly by relation to these that the Baroque figures become "notable" here.