'Inventing the Renaissance' Review
Inventing the Renaissance is a 2025 pop history book by historian of ideas Ada Palmer. I'm someone who rarely completes nonfic books, but i finished this one & got a lot of new perspectives out of it. It's a fun read! I tried this book after attending a talk by Palmer in which she not only had good insights but also simply knew a lot of new-to-me context about the history of Europe. Time to reduce my ignorance! ItR is a conversational introduction to the European Renaissance. It mostly talks about 1400 thru 1600, & mostly Italy, because these are the placetimes Palmer has studied the most. But it also talks a lot about how, ever since that time, many cultures have been delighted by the paradigm of a Renaissance, & have categorized that period very differently. Interesting ideas in this book: * Claim: There has never been any golden age nor any dark age on Earth. Ages tend to be paradoxical juxtapositions of the downstream effects of the last age & the early seeds of the next age. * In 1500, Florence feels familiar to us moderns. It's literate & cosmopolitan. We have detailed records. There are even life insurance companies. Yet it's also still full of exotic medieval violence. Torture & public executions are not rare. Slavery is normal. When the police arrest a wealthy man, they quickly withdraw from the streets into the police fort, then the man's employees besiege the police. Aristocrats can order a commoner killed with no consequence. Sometimes the pope hires assassins. It's a very interesting time to read about, because it's well-documented & familiar, but also very unstable, dynamic, personal, & high-stakes. * The world everyone thought they lived in was very supernatural. It reminds me of a D&D setting. A army might attack a city merely because it has the fingerbone of a certain saint in its cathedral, & this bone would magically make the army's projectiles more accurate. No one questioned this - the city defenders were simply desperate to deny this m
The LARP subculture does a lot of fun things like this, altho with less complex rules than Dr Palmer's class.