Adrienne Monnier was a French bookseller, writer, and publisher, and an influential figure in the modernist writing scene in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s.
Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse". Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities, and valorized what she coined the "lesbian continuum", which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity that impacts and fills women's lives.
Adrien-Nicolas Piédefer, marquis de La Salle, comte d'Offrémont was a French writer and cavalry officer who saw service in the Seven Years' War, a writer of comedies and libretti, and a Masonic brother of Benjamin Franklin.
Ali Ahmad Said Esber, also known by the pen name Adonis or Adunis, is a Syrian poet, essayist and translator. He led a modernist revolution in the second half of the 20th century, "exerting a seismic influence" on Arabic poetry comparable to T.S. Eliot's in the anglophone world.
Aedesia was a philosopher of the Neoplatonic school who lived in Alexandria in the fifth century AD. She was a relation of Syrianus and the wife of Hermias, and was equally celebrated for her beauty and her virtues. After the death of her husband, she devoted herself to relieving the wants of the distressed and the education of her children, Ammonius and Heliodorus. She accompanied the latter to Athens, where they went to study philosophy, and was received with great distinction by all the philosophers there, and especially by Proclus, to whom she had been betrothed by Syrianus, when she was quite young. She lived to a considerable age, and her funeral oration was pronounced by Damascius, who was then a young man, in hexameter verses.
Aedesius was a Neoplatonist philosopher and mystic. He was born into a wealthy Cappadocian family, but he moved to Syria, where he was apprenticed to Iamblichos. None of his writings have survived, but there is an extant biography by Eunapius, a Greek sophist and historian of the 4th century who wrote a collection of biographies titled Lives of the Sophists. Aedesius's philosophical doctrine was a mixture between Platonism and eclecticism and, according to Eunapius, he differed from Iamblichus on certain points connected with theurgy and magic.
Aegidius Gelenius was a German clergyman and historian who worked as historiographer to the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne, Ferdinand of Bavaria. He had at his disposal some earlier sources that are not in existence today, including a life of Herman of Scheda.
Aegidius Tschudi was a Swiss statesman and historian, an eminent member of the Tschudi family of Glarus, Switzerland. His best known work is the Chronicon Helveticum, a history of the early Swiss Confederation.
