ABSTRACT
Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet were born at the tail end of the Renaissance, a term used to describe the rediscovery of European knowledge of the classical world—its engineering and scientific marvels, philosophy, literature, and artistic achievements. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, Europe witnessed the Renaissance—the rebirth of classical learning, the flourishing of science and exploration, and the transformation of Christianity. Unlike Loyola, Columbus, or Behaim, Marquette and Jolliet grew up in a world lacking a unified version of western Christianity. Changes in European intellectual life during the 1490s coincided with long-simmering disputes within Roman Catholicism. One of the most important elements of the Catholic Reformation to shape the world that created Marquette and Jolliet was the rise of a new vision for religious communities, or orders. In the Catholic tradition, religious orders are single-sex communities of men or women who come together around a common set of religious ideals.
