Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age, by Ada Palmer University of Chicago Press, 768 pp, £25, ISBN: ‎978-1035910120

Here’s something new! This looks like an academic history book: thick, weighty and with a subtitle. Plus occasional footnotes, copious endnotes, long index, uncommonly long acknowledgments and a sort of bibliography (‘Sources and Recommended Reading’). The latter consists almost exclusively of works in English and the reason is explained on page 717: the author’s chronic illness put an end to travel to archives and she is selecting for books at once ‘readable, affordable and enjoyable’. The reliable university press that issues the volume is that of the institution where the author is a professor, although there are traces of an earlier edition published by a more popular press. It was, she recounts, begun as a series of posts on her blog that grew so long they seemed to demand being turned into a book.

The style is anything but ‘academic’. Ada Palmer, who also writes well-regarded science fiction, adopts a high-spirited, highly personal style throughout that is not unlike her exciting future history novels. ‘Public-facing history’, she calls it. The term ‘veduta’ comes to mind, from a later period of Italian history: those are Canaletto’s eighteenth century ‘views’ of Venice; this is Palmer’s view of Europe in what is now referred to as the Renaissance and that includes, for her, the history of the term.

Bit by bit we learn of her studies and academic progress, of places she lived in Italy (and what’s good to see and eat there), what is discussed at history conferences, which scholars she most admires and the reason she rejects the invisible/omniscient scholarly-narrator pose and elects to write this way instead. The temperament and personal interests of historians, she points out, substantially determine the topics they examine, the questions they ask, the evidence they accept (or ignore, or bury deep in footnotes) and, accordingly, the conclusions they reach. Palmer is aware that she has a particular position in time and space (2020s United States) and holds particular culturally-contingent views (anticolonial, sexually tolerant), suffers a particular experience (autoimmune disability) and believes that a more defensible version of history can be written if one’s own viewpoint is acknowledged at the outset.

‘Inventing’ and ‘Myth’ (in the title) supply the clarifying key to the enterprise. The Renaissance is an idea, not a thing, and has changed over time and (Palmer predicts) will probably change again. So too will the idea of a bad ‘dark’ Middle Ages, at that not even a true idea. Petrarch, suffering through the Black Plague in 1348, believed he was marooned in an age of darkness and ashes. Looking back at the lost glories of ancient Rome he proposed that if we could only recover the books that had educated the Roman elite we could bring about a new golden age and escape the darkness. Historian Leonardo Bruni, a century later, took the idea one step further inventing the tripartite division of history we still mostly accept (wise ancients, ignorant dark ages, enlightened modernity). So the ‘invention’ started with people who lived back then! To our surprise: the golden age was what they hoped for in the not-too-distant future, not the era they were living through. Not unlike us, they considered their present virtually intolerable.

Later writers eagerly adopted the conceit of a golden age Renaissance to serve as the foundation or legitimation of their own (much improved) era: the eighteenth, nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Different periods celebrated different traits they claimed to find there; a new and improved Renaissance issues from each pen (or plume or word processor) with different and frequently opposed impulses. Apart from the striking, fresh style of the writing, Palmer’s most unusual (and welcome) departure from standard history book procedure shows up in her extensive attention to historiography: the history of history writing.

She offers deep dives into two influential ‘classics’: Jacob Burckhardt (nineteenth century Swiss-German) who treasured the ‘beginning of individualism and self-fashioning’; and Hans Baron (twentieth century German-American) who identified the first stirrings of modern liberal-democratic governance in the city state republics of Renaissance Italy. These republics were, she points out, extreme oligarchies, more plutocratic than democratic. And those Renaissance individualists were not obviously unlike their predecessors. Neither view is ludicrous but each is partial and limited. As are their successors’ histories; as is, no doubt, Palmer’s. All histories are replaceable. Palmer is exceptionally generous in her praise of recent scholars – her mentors, her colleagues near and far (‘friends’), and her ‘brilliant’ students, many of whom are footnoted for having contributed additional viewpoints. History writing is never over, settled, concluded … it moves on as times and tastes and interests do.

Palmer considers biography writing to have been too long devalued as a singularly feminised undertaking. Female scholars, however wise and worldly, formerly had little access to prestige presses and had to produce ‘stuff that sells’ for the popular press. As if in revenge for past wrongs, her book is structured from many short biographies. The central section (Part III) is entitled ‘Let’s Meet Some People of this Golden Age’. Fifteen brief lives: princes, learned ladies, popes, poets, an artist (Leonardo), a mercenary, a musician, scholars, a wood carver, a female mystic and a political prophet (Savonarola). Biographies ballast the book with their sheer abundance. There is a peculiar, fairly sympathetic chapter on Lucrezia Borgia written in the second person recounting what ‘you’ (Lucrezia) saw and felt. There is also an excellent chapter on Lorenzo the Magnificent, his progenitors, heirs and mastery of the ever-changing nature of governance in turbulent Florence.

The interplay of the detailed biographies with the movement of forces (papal, French, Spanish, mercenary, intellectual) across the Italian landscape clarifies our view of the horrible decade at the end of the 1490s when Machiavelli was an active young public servant striving to prevent his small, weak, wealthy city state of Florence from being overrun. Machiavelli’s career, political philosophy and later reputation and influence form the through-line of Palmer’s historical reflections, the ground bass of her polyphonic composition out of many lives and forces. However, this is an intellectual history not a work of political philosophy; there is no explicit discussion of the twentieth century reappraisals of Machiavelli by Berlin, Pocock, Skinner, et alia.

Palmer loves Florence. She is a Florence specialist. She lived there, ate gelatos, gave stray American tourists better-than-tour-guide tips and looked out from her flat at the sad window of the office where Machiavelli worked when he was in town. The book (especially the capsule biographies) revolves around the city, although as she admits: ‘Florence was weird.’ In 1293, fearing a coup and a tyrant – the usual fate of the other Italian republics – Florence executed or exiled all their nobles. Thereafter the city was governed by ‘the Nine Dudes in the Tower’: wealthy non-noble guild members selected by lot and replaced every two months by another nine in a procedure that did not lead to stable policy until the Cosimo and the later Medicis discovered a way to gerrymander the system. Chiefs of police were hired annually from foreign nobles (after all, nobody would obey a commoner!), paid handsomely then escorted to the gate at the end of their term and banished for life from Florence to prevent coups.

She does not neglect Rome and the Renaissance popes; nor the ever-extending tentacles of Renaissance humanism, statecraft and finance into England, Hungary and even the ever-threatening Ottoman Empire. We don’t hear much of Germany (except for bits about Martin Luther, as the Renaissance bleeds into the Reformation), or Austria (except in so far as Holy Roman emperor Charles V ruled there as well as in Spain and the Netherlands). She also loves Shakespeare and can always come up with a telling quotation (above all, about ‘the murd’rous Machiavel’). The Montague-Capulet feud from Romeo and Juliet does heroic duty throughout in accounts of city state internal politics (and that of Rome).

There is a greater depth of perception and more fact-based history than might at first be credited to this book with all its flippant irreverence:

Divine patronage was deadly serious in this period, and heresy and sinful conduct were feared largely because of the anxiety that offending the saints would forfeit protection for the whole area. In Venice for a time, the legal penalty for any crime was doubled if you committed it where an icon of a saint could see you. When, in 1501, Antonio Rinaldeschi, drunk and cranky after a day of gambling, really did throw horse manure at an icon of the Virgin Mary, he attempted suicide for fear of being ripped apart by the mob, and the case was celebrated as an instance of exceptional mercy when he was instead given some hours in prison to repent and prepare his soul before facing the hangman.

Horseshit plus heaven plus the penal code – this, one must admit, illuminates the thought process of the period.

One of Palmer’s favorite themes is that, despite the verbal similarity, Renaissance Umanisti were not modern secular humanists. They were specialists in Latin (and to some extent, Greek) language, rhetoric in particular (as opposed to medieval scholars, who preferred what the ancients had to say about logic), and almost never atheists. It is incorrect to project our post-Darwinian, post-Newtonian mentality back into an era that possessed no such explanations for the origin of species or of the mechanics of the solar system. Their best ‘science’, another term whose meaning has changed, presupposed God (and Aristotle) to account for the strangely perfect fit of animals into their environments or the motion of the heavenly bodies. Palmer’s earlier book, based on her Harvard PhD research and titled Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, was an earnest search for those supposed atheists, presumably to be found in their annotations in surviving copies of the famous pre-Christian, Epicurean materialist’s poem. They turned out not to exist. The search for proto-atheists, like that for proto-democrats (Baron) or proto-individualists (Burckhardt), she considers a perhaps inevitable vice of historians on the hunt for the one unique “X-factor” that made us what we are today. It is not that these hunts are fruitless but most commonly they turn up facts that are useful for something other than vindicating their favorite theory.

Palmer explains everything, sometimes at irritating length: virtue ethics (vs deontology and utilitarianism); the subjects that constituted the educational trivium; that in the period dynastic marriages differ from modern love matches; and even the location of geographical features:

Now that Louis was king, he needed a wife who could produce heirs, and specifically he needed to marry Charles’s widow Anne of Brittany, since if Anne left she would take Brittany with her (the bit of France that sticks out at the top left, toward England).

Any given tidbit is bound to annoy some reader at some point (‘I knew that, dammit!’) but on the whole this habit is probably more benign than damnable. Some readers, no doubt, need to be reminded where to look for Brittany and not even accredited Learned Persons know everything and must occasionally whisper ‘that was helpful’. Perhaps this tic is simply the experienced American professor, aware of what scant preparation her ‘brilliant’ students arrive with, doing her job. This book is well worth the attention of that endangered species the ‘intelligent general reader’ – if any such survive.