I’ve been reading Ada Palmer’s great “Inventing The Renaissance”, and it sparked a line of thinking about how to properly reveal hidden complexity.

As the name suggests, Palmer’s book explores how the historical period we call the Renaissance has been constructed by historians, nation-states, and the general public. Not in the sense that there is nothing distinctive or interesting in this (hard to pin down) span of history, but because the compressions that have most currency in people’s head are retroactive projections of what was considered good or important or even decadent about the time when the histories were written.

There’s a lot of fascinating historical details in the book, but what I want to single out is how Palmer goes about her deconstruction of histories of the Renaissance.

You see, a really big point in my model of epistemology and methodology is that humans are not that smart. We can’t understand and remember massively complex models of everything because our capacities are limited.

In practice, this means compression is not an option, it’s a necessity. We always compress everything, all the time — the only choice is the relative degrees of compression of different things. The fact that I care more about my wife than my banker manifests itself in my having a much less compressed model of my wife (though still throwing out a lot of details).

So when some extremely brilliant and knowledgeable expert like Ada Palmer comes and decompresses your existing simplified models of, say, the Renaissance, there is a really common failure mode: that you, the reader, end up automatically compressing back, following various easy heuristics:

• Ignore what you just read
  • That is, compress back to exactly what you started, maybe with the additional gear that this particular author is full of shit.
• Swing to the opposite compression
  • You thought that Lorenzo the Magnificent was a hero, and this new book/video/article explains how he’s clearly not? Now you believe he’s a villain.
• Start distrusting the whole field
  • If author A says X and author B says Y, with X contradicting Y, and no clear obvious winner, it must be because they’re all pulling things out of their ass.
• Hedge everything you know
  • You keep all the facts, stories, ideas you know, but assume that there’s a decent chance each of them individually is wrong, and so you feel much less confident about any statement on the topic

Neither of them is fundamentally better than the other, because each of these heuristics is appropriate in different situations. The problem is that without investing quite a lot of effort into resolving the contradiction, we tend to choose based on the vibe we have.

As an example, I know I like the feeling of seeing an old model get deconstructed and corrected, which means that by default, I lean toward agreeing with statements of this shape.

How to mitigate this problem? By offering a new compression, which better addresses the original compression’s issues.

That’s what Ada Palmer does brilliantly. She doesn’t just criticize existing histories, she digs a bit into historiography, the study of historical methods. Instead of letting you with the messy ruins of your previous compression, she offers a model of why histories have traditionally represented and built the Renaissance in various (incoherent and insufficient) ways.

Some are straightforward, as in her point that the Renaissance, after being conceptualized as a Golden Age, could be used to bring legitimacy to any one who affiliated themselves with it.^[1]

One powerful tool of legitimacy is invoking a past golden age. Under my rule, we will be great like [X] was great! This claim can be made by a monarch, a ruling council, a political party, an individual, a movement, even a business. […]

Because the Renaissance was already considered a golden age by the eighteenth century, it’s on the list of eras you can invoke to gain legitimacy. This is why Mussolini, while he mostly invoked imperial Rome, made special arrangements to meet Hitler at the Uffizi gallery in Florence, to show off its Renaissance treasures. This is why governments and elites in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries raced to buy Italian art to display in homes and museums. And this is why the US library of Congress building is painted with imitations of Renaissance classicizing frescoes, even though the figures they include and values they depict are more Enlightenment than Renaissance.

(Ada Palmer, Inventing The Renaissance, p.22-23)

Others are more subtle, as her point that because Renaissance can be claimed (when you squint) as the starting or inflection point of many aspects of modernity, what counts as the Renaissance and how events are framed depends on what you take to be THE thing Renaissance did particularly well.

Each time you propose a different X-factor, a different cause for the Renaissance, you make it possible to claim the Renaissance in a new way. If you can argue the Renaissance was great because it did the thing you do, you can claim to be its true successor even if you don’t resemble it in any other way.

Thus, if we’re in the middle of the Cold War, and an influential historian publishes a book magnifying old discussions from Max Weber and Sombart arguing that the X-Factor that sparked the Renaissance was the rise of banking and the merchant class, triggered by the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, America can grab the book to say: The Renaissance was the birth of modern capitalism! Clearly the Renaissance’s true successor is modern western capitalist regimes! The fact that it was a golden age proves capitalism will make a golden age as well! And communism is the bad Dark Ages!

If, on the other hand, we’re in the nineteenth-century rise-of-nationalism period, and someone argues that the X-Factor that sparked the Renaissance was the idea of Italy as a unified nation first articulated in the late 1300s, and that the Renaissance golden age ended because Italy was conquered by outside powers, then the Renaissance can be claimed as a predecessor, not only by the Italian unification movement, but by the German unification movement, and any nationalist movement, all claiming a golden Renaissance will come when peoples become nations. Thus, each time someone (usually a historian) proposes a new X-Factor for the Renaissance, it sparks a new wave of opportunities to claim the Renaissance as a source of legitimacy.

(Ada Palmer, Inventing The Renaissance, p.24-25)

So the way a particular historical figure (Lorenzo The Magnificient) is treated in various histories, will heavily depend on what you most care about.^[2]

The problem here is the X-Factors. Lorenzo is an ally of some X-Factors and an adversary of others. Depending on what you think the spirit of the Renaissance (and modernity) is, what questions you came to the Renaissance to ask, the same facts can seem totally different. If the key to the Renaissance is republican civic participation and proto-democracy, then Lorenzo and the Medici stifle that, distorting and constraining the republic, even banishing our boy Machiavelli, and replacing the art of a vying merchant guilds with the self-aggrandizing art of a single family. If the key to the Renaissance is Reason breaking through the veil of ignorance (our problem term humanism), Lorenzo is the philosopher prince who nurtured and epitomized that light. If the X-Factor is economics, and you’re here for birth of modern finance, Cosimo and his dad are superstars, but you may balk at that point in the Siena board game where it’s time to bankrupt yourself turning money into power — that’s not the engine of wealth creation, that’s failure. The Medici bank failed under Lorenzo, so in Medici Money he’s the spendthrift who foolishly threw away the important part, the cash!, and if not for his foolish disregard for the matchless importance of finance the Medici might still be a bank today, like the Fugger family of Augsburg, instead of throwing the important part away for unimportant things like restoring Plato to the world, revolutionizing art and political thought, and landing their bloodline on every throne in Europe. If you’re here for some other X-Factor, like the awakening of Modern Man, or the first step toward breaking down aristocratic dominance and approaching Enlightenment, Lorenzo merchant-scum-more-princely-than-princes can be your triumphant finale.

(Ada Palmer, Inventing The Renaissance, p.79)

The new model Palmer offers even includes ways to think about how past histories affect what is sampled, maintained, and restored, which is the basis of future histories. Palmer gives the great example of Florence, which appears to the visiting scholar or tourist obviously more Renaissance than any other place in the world, and yet its place as exemplar comes from the bias of previous histories, and their consequences.

Upon the death of the last Medici duke Gian Gastone de Medici (1671-1737), his extremely smart sister Anna Maria Luisa de Medici (1667-1743) bequeathed the family’s art treasures to the city of Florence with strict conditions that the art never, ever leave Florence. thus, as other Italian cities had their best art bought by aristocratic tourists, or carried off to Vienna, Berlin, Paris, DC, or Madrid, Florence’s stayed in Florence. And as Florence realized the value of tourism, it used museum proceeds to buy extra art from neighboring cities too.

Thus, as 1700 flowed on to 1800 and 1900, Florence stayed beautiful and full of art, and above all it stayed Renaissance. Tourism was already the heart of its economy in 1700, and tourists wanted Renaissance Florence, not anything new. As palaces crumbled and needed repairs, foreign money poured in to restore them, while in other Italian cities, Renaissance things (art, architecture) were more likely to be torn down and replaced by baroque things, or nineteenth-century things. As Milan, Rome, Paris, and London continued to add modern layers, Florence remained Renaissance, and every time damage threatened it, money flooded in to keep it looking untouched. […]

This process became even more extreme as histories like Burckhardt’s and Baron’s made everyone so excited about Renaissance republics. Eager young scholars poured into Florence and Venice, not the “tyrannies” of Milan, Naples, or Rome. Scholar sorted the archives, which resulted in more papers being kept, more books being written, and soon every academic library had five shelves for Florence, two shelves for Venice, and on shelf for the whole rest of Italy. […] The vogue for Florentine history filled Florence with more evidence of its own history.

Then came the Second World War. Florence was largely spared.

[Both the German commander of Florence, Gerhard Wolf, and the Allies, did all they could to limit damages to Florence]

Thanks to both sides caring so much about Florence, the city kept its art treasures, archives, frescoes, churches and palaces. And thanks to everyone believing that Florence was the heart of the Renaissance, they didn’t take the same care with other Renaissance centers. […]

Historians study what’s here to be studied, and the fact that we study Florence so much makes us take care of Florence, which in turn makes it easy to study Florence, making Florence seem more important in a self-reinforcing cycle. Florence is the propaganda winner, so it got protected more, studied more, and when you walk through the streets you see the Renaissance all around and fall in love — clearly this is the cradle of the Renaissance! But we would have glories like that in other cities too if intervening generations had taken the same care to protect them.

(Ada Palmer, Inventing The Renaissance, p.56-58)

Palmer’s model of historiography even explains why points where many histories of the Renaissance agree can be wrong too.

Even better, when you claim the Renaissance, you get to use the corresponding myth of the bad Middle Ages to smear your rivals and predecessors. The other political party, university, bank, ideology, whatever, their methods are medieval, ours belong to the Renaissance. The fact that the myth of the supposed Dark Ages is so useful makes it extra hard for scholars to correct.

(Ada Palmer, Inventing The Renaissance, p.25)

All these new histories, and their soon-to-follow cousin genre the heroic family epic in Aeneid-style, adjusted details to make the current ruler(s) look great and legitimate (self-fashioning individualism, you say?), generally at the expense of making the newly invented Middle Ages look bad.

This is why all medievalists deserve an apology from the Renaissance.

From its inception, the word Renaissance was a smear on the age that came before, rebirth coming to fix something wrong.

(Ada Palmer, Inventing The Renaissance, p.102)

Of course, that Palmer offers a compressed alternative doesn’t mean that she’s right on everything. But it helps a lot with holding her takes in mind, and deciding whether it makes sense or not, which part to keep and which part to throw away.

And the very existence of this compression makes it much more feasible for future thinkers and scholars to dig into it, and turn the likely productive mistake into better histories.

1. ^{^}

   Ironically, the vision of the Renaissance as a golden age stems in part from the Italian city-states strategy to get legitimacy from emulating the art, literature, and engineering of an earlier supposed golden age, the Roman Republic/Empire.

2. ^{^}

   Note that Palmer is explicit about what most interests and excites her (intellectual history)