Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age

by Ada Palmer

The Renaissance is one of the most studied and celebrated eras of history. Spanning the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of modernity, it has come to symbolise the transformative rebirth of knowledge, art, culture and political thought in Europe. And for the last two hundred years, historians have struggled to describe what makes this famous golden age unique.

In Inventing the Renaissance, acclaimed historian Ada Palmer provides a fresh perspective on what makes this epoch so captivating. Her witty and irreverent journey through the fantasies historians have constructed about the period show how its legend derives more from later centuries' mythmaking than from the often grim reality of the period itself. She examines its defining figures and the enduring legacy of Niccolò Machiavelli, the rediscovery of the classics, the rise of the Medici and fall of the Borgias, the astonishing artistic achievements of Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Cellini, the impact of the Inquisition and the expansion of secular Humanism. Palmer also explores the ties between culture and books, for example, could cost as much as grand houses, so the period's innovative thinkers could only thrive with the help of the super-rich. She offers fifteen provocative and entertaining character portraits of Renaissance men and women, some famous, some obscure, whose intersecting lives show how the real Renaissance was more unexpected, more international and, above all, more desperate than its golden reputation suggests.

Drawing on her popular blogs and writing with her characteristic energy and wit, Palmer presents the Renaissance as we have never seen it before. Colloquial, funny and brilliant, you would never expect a work of deep scholarship to make you alternately laugh and cry.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Renaissance, Art, Audiobook, Italy, European History

769 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 28, 2025

Reviews

[Tim O'Neill · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven't had this much fun reading a history book in many years. It is chatty, witty, often laugh out loud funny, but with vivid and engaging prose that has a real desire on the part of the writer for the readers to understand,/i> the subject, and in an in-depth and multilayered way. Motivated in part by several very simplistic journaist think pieces during the pandemic that went from "the Renaissance was triggered by the Black Death" to "so maybe we are about to see a new Renaissance", Palmer takes the reader through the very modern and recent origins of the concept of "the Renaissance" and shows it is, in many ways, something of a myth. She then spends most of the rest of her substantial book deconstructing what the term attempts to encompass and to examine what was happening in the periods (plural) and cultures (also plural) it generally refers to that made it both similar to and also distinct from what went before.

In the process she debunks a lot of pop history concepts and common understandings, such as the Middle Ages as "a dark age" or the Renassaince (however you delineate and define it) as "a golden age" - explaining why those terms are not accurate and not even very useful. How secular the Renaissance was and how much it led to secularism, whether it saw a rise in individualism, whether it was the birth of capitalism and whether any of the other posited "x factors" that supposedly definte the Renaissance are valid are also explored at length and in enjoyable detail.

And this is fundamentally an enjoyable book; I imagine Dr Palmer's university classes are a lot of fun. The author peppers her analysis with vivid anecdotes, amusing trivia and running jokes, several of which serve as ways to remind the reader later in what is a fairly long book of something explained at the beginning. So the parrot that speaks Latin, the man with three testicles and Battle Popes One and Two are funny, but also useful to that understanding that the author seeks to instill.

This is a great book and an remarkable debut as a popular history writer by a vigorous scholar who is clearly a superb teacher. I look forward to her next book. Highly recommended.

[John Gossman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb history. For those intimidated by its length, let me point out it has 100 pages of notes and references. Yes, that means it is still 650 pages, but it is clear, enjoyable reading: I finished it in 3 days. Part of the reason for the length is that Palmer repeats herself. She also uses a lot of asides and parentheticals. But these have an important function, by repeating information and annotating it she makes it easier to remember. I suspect Palmer is a superb teacher. One example of this is how she gives nicknames, often comic, to the historical figures. For example, rather than just list off a series of popes, she writes, “he was kept in that tedious but important office by Pius II (Scholar-Pope), Paul II (reclusive Venetian), Sixtus IV (Battle Pope!), and Innocent VIII (King Log).”
While this may seem irreverent or distracting (as well as expanding the text), these serve as mnemonics, especially valuable when so many names are repeated (various Medicis, Sforzas, Borgias, and endless Giovannis). I’ve read a lot of Renaissance history and this book has really helped straighten some of these figures out in my head: I will surely never forget Julius II (Battle Pope II) again.

Palmer is a great stylist (in her fiction too) and uses that style in service of teaching, but occasionally goes wrong. Her chapter on Lucretia Borgia was very difficult for me, partly because she chose to write it in second person (using “you” as if the reader were Borgia). Since in other chapters she often addresses the reader directly as “you” and sometimes uses “you” as an indefinite pronoun, this added to my cognitive load unnecessarily. Fortunately, this conceit is restricted to that single chapter. And though I thought overall the sprawl of the text was helpful for context and perspective, the book probably could have been edited down slightly without losing anything. Still, a masterpiece.

Finally, Palmer provides a wealth of references, mostly to recent, accessible books. If you like the Renaissance and read this book, be prepared to buy a bunch more books.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a bit grating at first, especially the lulzy internet speak, but I have to admit I found myself able to fly through it, and it also does a good job of keeping all the repetitious dynastic names comprehensible to the reader. The mini-biographies were ok.

I do have one big issue and a few minor ones on the Lucrezia Borgia chapter. The big issue: the author talks about the well-known debate Isabella d'Este had over who was the better fictional knight, Rinaldo or Orlando, suggesting this was spurred by Ariosto sharing the first chapters (ahem, cantos) of his Orlando Furioso. This is preposterous. Ariosto was seventeen in 1491, still a law student. Isabella might have/probably knew Ariosto, maybe even knew him as a poet (at that point he'd written some latin poetry and a student play that's since been lost), but the OF was still years away. We know this because he had another, earlier chivalric epic that he started working on but abandoned, at around the turn of the century. The first known reference to the OF isn't until 1507, when Ariosto is sent on embassy to congratulate Isabella on the birth of her (third?) son, and in her thank-you letter, Isabella mentions the poem. Isabella's debate was more likely spurred by Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, of which she was a huge fan, writing him to ask for a third book. She also would have known the characters from, among other things, Cieco's Mambriano and possibly Luigi Pulci's Morgante.

Minor quibbles: the author writes, "Ferrante sided with Giulio, demanding that (Alfonso), as duke, punish Ippolito, but Alfonso and Ippolito were close (having grown up together while Ferrante grew up in Naples) so Alfonso refused." Alfonso and Ippolito worked together and became close, but this actually came as a surprise to Ferrara-watchers, as in childhood the two did not always get along, with Ippolito being much closer to Giulio and Sigismondo. Also, the author seems to have forgotten (or not to have known in the first place) that Ippolito spent a big portion of his childhood away from his family, in Hungary, where he was educated.

"You (Palmer is writing in the second person, she means Lucrezia, it's actually a nice touch) bore Alfonso more children in these years: Alessandro, Eleonora, Francesco, then more miscarriages. You were in your thirties now—an age at which many wives in political marriages find their husbands’ attentions moving to younger concubines—but from 1513 on Alfonso started keeping you continually pregnant, even though you already had healthy sons, almost as if… Almost as if he wants you to die in childbirth? Of course there can’t be direct evidence. It was certainly unusual in the period for Alfonso to keep you pregnant so much, despite not liking you very much, but why? Was he trying to kill you? Was he just that lustful? Were you just that lustful? Insatiable? Implausibly fertile? This is exactly the kind of moralistic speculation historians will make about both you and everyone around you for centuries to come, tipping your portrait back and forth between villainous femme fatale and tragic heroine."

I don't really take issue with this one (though possibly the author might be slightly conflating Alfonso d'Este with Alfonso II d'Este, of My Last Duchess Fame). The author is entitled to her opinion, but since the book is about how there are so many different renaissances, I just thought I would offer mine. In short, Alfonso was humiliated in his first marriage, and again to by Lucrezia in their early years. Lucrezia's experience with men was even worse than Alfonso's with women, far worse. So the marriage got off to a rocky start, more performative than loving, with both doing their duty (three times on the wedding night, as per Sarah Bradford) but not investing too much in it emotionally. But the wars against first Venice and then Julius II made them realize they had to rely on each other, and both turned out to be capable leaders with unlikely qualities, and my read is that this brought them together. Sadly, for Lucrezia, this meant a lot of troubling pregnancies. But it's important to note that Alfonso didn't replace her in the way he was expected to. That is, by entering into another dynastic marriage with another elite family after the Borgias were taken off the board. After LB died he took up with the daughter of a hat-maker and lived contentedly with her for the rest of his life, possibly marrying her. Yes, Alfonso loved brothels and prostitutes when he was young, but I suspect that left him as he aged, and that he was looking for a more grounded, emotional love. And now that I think about it, Alfonso would've been justified in finding a new wife anytime after the Borgia family network collapsed, but he didn't, did he? I think there was something there, between them.

Still, my take is but one among many.

[kay · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was long so I'll keep it short. This is how you write history nonfiction. There wasn't a dull moment, or a section I couldn't wait to get through, whether it was about people, events, ideas or concepts. It was fun, broad and yet easy to follow, and wonderfully supplemented the mind numbing renaissance art history class I just took. No notes, I hope Palmer writes a book for every topic I'm interested in.

Thank you to Head of Zeus and NetGalley for this ARC.

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very long, but worth the read. The text is 650 pages and feels every page of it—yes, Palmer’s style can be irreverent and even funny, but not dumbed-down or particularly breezy. This is a combination of a partial history of Renaissance Italy, and a larger look at how history is made and how easily even historians can get it wrong, let alone the larger culture.

The latter is an important point, even for those not interested in history (though I can’t imagine anyone uninterested in history making it through this book), as politicians and others use claims about the past to make their own arguments. But historians, like anyone else, have biases: people see in ambiguous facts what we want to see; historians go into their field for particular reasons, with their own interests and worldviews, which color what they study and how they study it; funding goes to more popular topics; pop culture often maintains outdated or oversimplified narratives even when better historical research is available. People writing about particular figures each have their own interpretations, sometimes wildly different from each other. Writers focused on a particular subject or person can be lazy about their treatment of secondary characters and side issues, thus continuing misconceptions.

Historians and writers also tend to focus on events and people that support their narratives, rather than those which undermine them. While the division between medieval and Renaissance is artificial (first invented by people in the Renaissance itself, who hoped to inaugurate a new age), it’s been taken seriously by later writers who have reinforced that division, for instance by downplaying “medieval” aspects of the Renaissance. Scholars who worked for republics get more attention than those who worked for princes, republics that listened seriously to seers and spirit mediums are ignored, and later writers seem to have invented the entire concept of “Renaissance humanism”, the discussion of which exceeded my interest, but is Palmer’s primary one. Scholarship in the Renaissance did have an increased interest in secular topics rather than just theology, but that didn’t mean the scholars weren’t also writing wild treatises on how to become an angel, or whatever often strange religious ideas took their fancy. Let’s not even get started on medicine, which largely relied on horoscopes.

The history aspect of the book is more piecemeal, as it jumps around a lot, much of it relayed through mini-biographies of a variety of people at different times. Returning to the same people and events repeatedly from different perspectives can have the effect of helping you remember them, or it can just confuse you when everything is out of order—I experienced both and suspect that the closer attention you pay, the more you’ll get out of this. The mini-biographies were interesting though, especially the more in-depth ones like Machiavelli, Lucrezia Borgia and Michelangelo. One certainly gets a strong sense of how corrupt, violent, high-stakes and chaotic Italian politics were, both between city-states and around the papacy. Palmer also drives home some useful perspective that many popular authors don’t: for instance, that at the time a book cost as much as a house (200 books was a princely library), notwithstanding the invention of the printing press which people were still struggling to make money from, and an outfit as much as a car (if you were rich and it was fancy, a luxury car).

Particularly fascinating to me was the discussion of patronage. Patron/client relationships at the time were essentially the building blocks of society and its social safety net (beyond just Italy, as Palmer offers examples from Shakespeare too). Patrons offered employment, sometimes housing, and even education for particularly promising young men, plus the benefit of their connections, including in the justice system—which actually made little pretense of justice, but made a virtue of mercy when asked by the right person, meaning those with powerful patrons had impunity. (One artist did a lot of murders whenever employed by a pope for this reason. Meanwhile, none of these thinkers had to worry about anti-sodomy laws because they all worked for someone powerful.) Clients meanwhile were expected to be loyal to their patrons, working for them and showing up to riot or fight for their causes, even throwing themselves between the patron and an assassin if necessary (and it often was. Your children would be repaid for your sacrifice). Either side breaking their end of the bargain was an excellent way to wind up unprotected and therefore dead. People envisioned a similar relationship between humanity and the divine, which is why defacing the statue of a city’s patron saint was among the most serious crimes—the saint was presumed to be regularly interceding with God for the city, so everyone could be doomed if their protection were withdrawn. The Virgin Mary was of course the most influential saint, and the Hail Mary sounds a bit different when you realize that “grace” was a synonym for “political influence”!

So, a lot of interesting material here and I’m glad to have taken the time (though it took a long time). Worth a read for anyone interested in how history gets made, as well as for Renaissance and Italian history.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've really enjoyed Ada Palmer's complex, ambitious science fiction so was excited to read Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age. To my surprise, I seriously considered giving up on it a mere 17 pages in. This was due to the writing style and tone, not the content. As far as I can tell, Palmer assumes that her audience listen to podcasts but would be put off by history books that edge out of the narrative zone and into academic analysis. So she seems to be trying to sweeten a potentially bitter pill of 650+ pages on the historiography of the Renaissance with chatty interjections like this:

Machiavelli: WTF?!?!
Conclusion: must invent Political Science.

It's only a slight exaggeration. The War of the League of Cambrai is so incomprehensible its Wikipedia page had to develop a new table format to index the betrayals.

Unfortunately I am a fun-hater who prefers a more formal and academic writing style for historical nonfiction. There is no doubting Palmer's erudition, which is evident throughout. However I found the combination of meme references and chatty asides with complex and nuanced discussion of how the Renaissance has been analysed by centuries of historians incongruous. The intermittently light and flippant tone made the book harder for me to follow, rather than easier. Historians are repeatedly described as working in the 'History Lab', which is for me a zany epithet too far.

Obviously to a great extent this is a me problem. After some consideration, I decided it would be aesthetic snobbery to give up on such a long and potentially fascinating book just because the style of the first brief chapter got on my nerves. I definitely do not regret persisting. On the other hand, I think Palmer is attempting a very ambitious balancing act of fun and accessible popular history with critical synthesis of historiographic trends in academic research. This could perhaps have been two books. The first would comprise the fun introduction to the Renaissance and pen portraits of 13 appealing figures. The second would follow on from this, for those whose appetite has been whetted, and comprise the historiography, theology, and philosophy chapters. Ideally this latter would not include comments like, 'One figure in Bruni's history was Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the 'Viper of Milan (1351-1402), a man who lived up in every way to his badass family crest of a crowned serpent swallowing a helpless little dude.'

Stylistic griping aside, I did learn a great deal about the Renaissance from this book and found much of it really interesting. There is no attempt at narrative history, indeed Palmer discusses the uncertainty about when the period actually began and ended. Certain chapters focus on a particularly tumultuous few years or a particular figure, but most are synoptic. I enjoyed the explanation of how the Renaissance was quantitatively different to the Middle Ages rather than qualitatively, in technological, intellectual, and economic terms. The same underlying trends expanded and accelerated, to the point that major social and political impacts emerged. The title of chapter 20 describes this as, 'Medieval but Ever-So-Much-More-So'. Having not read much about the Renaissance before, it was great to learn about the structurally unstable political establishment of Italian city-states (as Italy didn't exist yet). The regular turnover of popes was a major source of chaos. I was also fascinated by Savonarola; what a strange episode in Florence's history that was. Despite disliking some of the casual phrasing, I couldn't resist fun facts like this:

Ficino even wrote, in what is definitely the best job recommendation letter in the history of time, that a young scholar he was recommending for employment to Mattias Corvinus the Raven King was probably the reincarnation of Thomas of Aquinas.

I appreciated the context here: belief in reincarnation was heresy that could bring down the Inquisition upon you, but if like Ficino you had a powerful patron (Cosimo de Medici) you could get away with a lot. Palmer explains early on the extreme importance of the patronage system to Renaissance society and politics, a very helpful frame to keep in mind throughout. However, I felt the discussion of Renaissance atheism was longer than it needed to be, seeming to assume that this would be a particularly compelling topic for the reader. I didn't really think so, although I liked this concluding comment:

The meta-lesson here is that one of the victims of censorship is our ability to interpret the historical record. When we know people are self-censoring, we inevitably try to deduce their secret thoughts, but such efforts are very vulnerable to the subjective bias of we who do it. I have seen the same texts interpreted one scholar as absolute proof the author (Leto, for example) was a secret atheist, and the same text interpreted by another scholar as absolute proof of the opposite. This is why I don't claim to know which of my many readers of Lucretius were or were not atheists.

The advantage of Palmer's first person writing is that it makes easy to keep in mind that this is her specific perspective on a contested and complicated historical period. The reader isn't lulled into a false sense that she presents an agreed consensus among all of those studying the Renaissance. Not that academic writing does that either, given it is a constant process of debate with other scholars. Similarly, Palmer connects the Renaissance with the Middle Ages before and the Enlightenment after, emphasising continuity and connection over tidy division into discrete time periods. The chapter on virtue politics immediately put me in mind of the French Revolution, during which the word virtue had considerable political salience. I hadn't previously considered any Renaissance connection, probably because 'virtue politics' seems to be a relatively new term in scholarship and Palmer describes it only applicable to ruling elites. During the French revolution, wider ideas about promoting the virtuousness of common people developed.

Near the end of the book, Palmer describes the incredible papal election of 1492 LARP she runs with her students every year to give them context before reading Machiavelli's The Prince. She sounds like an amazing lecturer and role-playing the intensely complicated politics of the Renaissance must be a powerful teaching tool. The goal is to demonstrate the simultaneous (but not necessarily equal) importance of historical forces and individual choices:

What I see in the simulation I see in real history.
Both kinds of history are true. There are Great Forces: economics, class, wealth gaps, prosperity, stagnation; these make some historical moments ripe for change, war, crisis, transformaton, or peace. But individuals also have real agency, and our actions determine the consequences of Great Forces as they shape our world. We have to understand both, study both, and act within our world remembering both are real.

Evidently this valuable lesson is applicable beyond the Renaissance, not least in attempts to make sense of the present. Although I found Inventing the Renaissance hard going at times and I believe it could have worked better as two books, there is a lot of really insightful writing in it. Perhaps those who are less accustomed to formally-phrased history, who do not read Fredric Jameson for pleasure, might find the writing style less distracting. I really think a map of Italy should have been included, though. Without a clear idea of where Italian cities are located in relation to one another, I lacked a spatial sense of what was happening during the war sections. Finally, if you're in a Renaissance mood, I must recommend the wonderful epistolary novel Perspectives by Laurent Binet.

[Ben Eustis-Guthrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I had read this book in the 8th grade instead of Michio Kaku and Brian Greene "pop physics" books, there's a good chance I would be doing a history PhD right now instead of a physics PhD.

For context, I took the author's "Italian Renaissance" history class when I was in college (more specifically, the famed Fall 2016 run of the class she references in the final chapters of the book!). She got a spontaneous round of applause after the first day of class. She's that freaking good. She's truly in a league of her own when it comes to lecturing, and that comes through on every page of the book.

This book has three big goals, as best as I can tell, which it achieves masterfully:

1) The narratives we tell about the past say as much about the present as it does about the past. (The Renaissance was about rising nationalism! No, it was about civic participation and city-state republics! No, it was about the decline of faith and the rise of reason!).

2) The past is much more complex than we can ever capture with tidy narratives. The kind of Lorenzo de Medici who helped create the kind of Florence that was full of scholars that many moderns hope were closet atheists (no, they weren't) was not the only story of Florence. It was also the city that, a generation later, took great steps to being what we would recognize as a modern republic, and it also paid great heed to the supposed prophecies of charismatic nuns and elected Jesus Christ as the eternal king of Florence. (That statement is an "and" kind of statement, not a "but" kind of statement). Guess which part of the story usually makes it into the grand narratives we tell?

3) What truly made the Renaissance a distinct age was not art, or scholarships, or merchants, or princes. All those were continuous with the Middle Ages (which were not the Dark Ages!). It was that, for the first time, the artists and scholars and merchants and princes were consciously shaping their efforts to create a new golden age. They failed to create the kind of golden age they hoped for. Instead, they (eventually) created us, and the project is still ongoing. The book ends with a stirring "call to arms" to further the project of creating as-yet-unimagined golden ages with ten times the charisma of any other history book I've ever read. Petrarch's "words that sting and bite" indeed!

This book doesn't just fill you with wonderful facts about the Italian Renaissance (although it does that in bucketfulls - just wait until you get to the part about the Florentine craftsman who got gaslit-pranked so badly he had to leave the country in shame) and spin stories about its figures who are revealed to be wonderful, flawed, and deeply human people. It teaches you grand lessons about how we study history, understand history, activate history. And it makes you want to lay your bricks in the unfinished cathedral of a golden age we still don't have the plans for yet, but by God, let us go forth and make a better, unimaginable world.

[Bas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ada Palmer has created here a very solid and readable introduction to the Renaissance. It introduces the reader to some of the most interesting characters from that period as to most important characteristics. At the same time she very well let's us question the idea of the 'Renaissance' and how it contains very contradictory elements and is always given form by the biases of later generations who want to project their issues on that time period. I think a reader will come out of this book both more knowledgeable about the time period as more skeptical about popular conceptions of time period and aware of one's biases. ( And Ada Palmer very much concedes she herself has also those).

Palmer's writing is very readable and funny ( there are some great humorous passages in this book) and not at all academical. Palmer is also very much present in the book with examples and personal experiences that she shares. This is not a non-fiction were the author is almost invisible. I do have some criticisms of the book. One is very much one of taste. Ada Palmer is very much a historian of Ideas and that shows in this book ( what is humanism, what is atheism, what did obscure writer x thought about y,...) , material aspects of the Renaissance world get much less attention ( again something she herself concedes). There is nothing wrong with that but my interests don't completely align with Palmer.

A bigger issue is the fact that this is still a very dense book at times , with a lot of different names. I'm reasonable familiar with the period and know a lot of those and even I was drowning at times. I can imagine that it would be much for people who have less background. Palmer does really try to make it accessible but sometimes she errs in the other way by repetition of certain information which makes it tedious. But generally I really enjoyed the book and I would recommend it if people want to learn more about the period.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inventing the Renaissance does something magical: it manages to take a tightly-held conviction (that there was a thing in European history called “the Renaissance”), dismantle it with humor and intelligence, then put it back together as something different and more true to the past itself. But maybe more importantly, Palmer’s expertise and storytelling here helps us better understand how golden ages are imagined, and why rejecting those invented constructions of the past provides us with hope as we confront our own contemporary world. As she says herself: “we can do better than the Renaissance.”

[Nel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This rating reflects my personal experience with this book rather than its quality.
I'm sure it's a great book, especially for someone academically inclined, but I cared naught for that particular discussion of humanism (part 4) and whatever was going on in part 5 & 6, either - I'm just here for the anecdotes, really, and Donatello with his cute gay boyfriend (I mean, girl, all I'm saying...you can't just drop this and not show the receipts), but I did enjoy part 1 & 2, especially the chapter on patronage.
Oh and Medici's balls.
The mystery of those balls will haunt me forever.

[Dr Sayuti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots of concepts & phenomena, people, history covered & dissected through both modern & archaic purviews all as an elaborate scheme to build up Machiavelli—Ada's historical crush... fr tho this was a really excellent informative & surprisingly humorous read. Glad it's my first non-fiction read and I look forward to reading more of such. Won't be rating it as I'm still undecided about rating nonfics or not.

[Jenia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book picking apart our myths and popular imaginings about the renaissance. It's long and I read it with breaks, so I definitely didn't follow the arguments as well as I could have. But it was still a really interesting and fun read!

[H.J. Swinford · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

Very entertaining and informative take on why and how we view the Renaissance the way we do. I thoroughly enjoyed this.

[Oliver · Rating 3 out of 5]

I ended up enjoying Inventing the Renaissance far more than I expected. While I occasionally found it frustrating, I genuinely admire Ada Palmer's ambition to make a subject as seemingly dusty as historiography feel lively, engaging, and even entertaining. This is less a book about the Renaissance itself than about the ideas that have shaped our understanding of what "the Renaissance" is. Palmer's enthusiasm is infectious—I'm sure she's adored by her students—but the book also has some notable shortcomings.

My main reservation is that Palmer somewhat overstates the originality of her central argument. She presents herself as dismantling long-standing myths about the Renaissance, particularly the Burckhardtian narrative of a sudden rebirth of civilization. While this may still challenge the popular image found in many general history books (several of which Palmer herself cites), academic historians and art historians have been deconstructing these ideas for decades. The critique of Renaissance exceptionalism has been a central theme in academic scholarship for at least the past fifty years, so the book occasionally gives the impression that it is breaking new ground where it is actually introducing readers to an already well-established debate.

Ironically, while the stated goal is to demythologize the Renaissance, the book also reinforces several familiar myths. Geographically, despite welcome excursions to Milan, Naples, and Ferrara, Florence and the Medici remain overwhelmingly dominant. Important cultural centers such as Siena receive little attention, despite their significance for both the visual arts and republican political culture. Even more striking is the book's persistent Italian focus. Aside from brief discussions of Josquin des Prez, Elizabethan England, and Matthias Corvinus's Hungary, the Renaissance largely remains an Italian story that radiates outward to a less sophisticated northern Europe. Figures such as Albrecht Dürer, Konrad Peutinger, the School of Fontainebleau, or the flourishing cultures of Renaissance Spain are entirely absent. Erasmus appears as the "prince of the humanists," but because he spent relatively little time in Italy, Palmer never quite seems to know how to integrate him into her narrative. Likewise, Josquin is discussed primarily because he worked for Italian patrons.

Chronologically, the Renaissance also ends rather abruptly. The narrative focuses primarily on the period between 1400 and 1530, with the later sixteenth century receiving surprisingly little attention before the story leaps toward the Enlightenment (apart from an intriguing but somewhat disconnected chapter on seventeenth-century Sweden). This likely reflects Palmer's own scholarly expertise, and unsurprisingly the strongest chapters are those on Machiavelli and the Italian Wars. Her explanation of the bewildering web of shifting alliances and conflicts of this confusing period is excellent, revisiting events from multiple perspectives in an almost Rashomon-like fashion until everything finally clicks.

Readers looking for an in-depth exploration of Renaissance art may come away disappointed. Palmer openly acknowledges that art history is not her primary field, and the book focuses much more on intellectual history, political thought, and historiography than on painting, sculpture, or architecture. Keep in mind that this is a criticism coming form an art historian ;-)

Stylistically, the book is clearly aimed at a younger audience (gen-z). References to television, science fiction, board games, and video games appear throughout. Sometimes these comparisons are genuinely clever and illuminating, but at other times they feel a little forced. Replacing the word "money" with "$$$," for example, struck me as trying just a bit too hard to sound contemporary, to the point that her own Gen-Z public might call it 'cringe'. By contrast, giving popes and princes memorable nicknames worked surprisingly well as a mnemonic device and made an otherwise crowded cast of characters easier to follow.

A few narrative choices also felt odd. The chapter on Lucrezia Borgia, written entirely in the first person, stood out in a way that I found distracting. Since none of the other biographical chapters use this approach, its inclusion seemed arbitrary rather than purposeful.

Overall, despite my criticisms, I found this an engaging, and often very entertaining read. Palmer somewhat succeeds at making the history of historical ideas accessible and exciting. I only wish her version of the Renaissance had been geographically broader and less firmly anchored in the familiar Florence-centered narrative that the book itself sets out to question.

[Rachel Ashera Rosen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish Goodreads' ratings went above 5 stars for this one. Infinity stars. My God. This book is a goddamn triumph, not just as an accessible history of the Renaissance but a look at how our understanding of history is constructed. It interweaves learnings from multiple disciplines—political science, history, art, economics, archaeology, and so on, and also LARP and fishtank maintenance—to paint a brilliant and multifaceted portrait of the people, ideologies, and movements that built the Renaissance, and explains why the beginning, end, and significance of the era is so difficult to pin down.

It's also really emotional in a way that deserves celebration. Rarely does any nonfiction work make me openly weep and this did in multiple places. It's the work of an author who loves her subject. I also love her subject but this somehow made me even more excited and invested in the Renaissance than I already was. I am babbling. I got it out from the library in brick form because that what was available but I think I'll buy it in ebook so that I have a searchable version.

[Michael Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the best book I have read in many months – and deserves to be reread many times in the future.

Inventing the Renaissance was engaging, funny, witty, snarky, and (occasionally) irreverent in a good way. Palmer doesn’t just recount Renaissance history; she re-educated me in how to think about it. It’s not only informative and entertaining, but mind-stretching (for me).

One of Palmer’s greatest strengths is interweaving intellectual history with political, literary, artistic, and military history. Ideas never float free from their context (power, war, money, or institutions), and Palmer doesn't let them. Religion, politics, art, architecture, warfare, music, and philosophy are not separate domains but overlapping systems that shape one another. The Renaissance was not a tidy rebirth story, but a messy, contingent process, not aiming to make the modern world, as much as we would like to believe that’s what they were doing.

Palmer’s critique of the various “x-factors” that are often offered as THE explanation for the Renaissance was helpful. Rather than reducing the period to printing, humanism, capitalism, or secularization, she shows how simplistic those explanations are. Her extended discussion of humanism, in its many varieties, was especially illuminating. Humanism appears not as a unified movement with a clear agenda, but as a set of tools used by very different people for very different ends.

One of the most fascinating sections explores atheism in the Renaissance. Palmer identifies only two figures she is confident were true atheists and then explains why there were not more. The reason is not fear of censure or of the Inquisition, but worldview. Renaissance thinkers lacked anything like the systematic explanatory framework modern atheists inherited from scientific naturalism. In a world where God was still the best available explanation of reality, disbelief hard to sustain intellectually.

The history of the papacy during this period was informative and entertaining. Palmer’s portraits of “Battle Pope,” “Battle Pope II,” and the memorable “very, very, very, very bad pope” are hilarious without sacrificing historical seriousness. Her humor is not gimmick; it is a pedagogical tool that made the institutional church feel as human as it actually was.

What ultimately makes this book exceptional is Palmer’s ability to draw together the diverse strands into a coherent narrative, not just a grab bag of Renaissance anecdotes. It is a carefully constructed account that challenges our (my) assumptions and myths and forces us to think more carefully about progress and intellectual change.

I was not just better informed but was reoriented. The book changed how I think about the Renaissance. Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys history that insists on intellectual honesty.

[Hrishi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was an incredible ride. It is somehow dense; the number of pages does not represent its true length, or the effort it took me to get through it. Not because it is a hard read - actually the author's irreverent, almost impish tone (fantastically captured by the narrator in the audiobook) is really fun! No, it is the headiness of the subject matter, the sheer scope of the dramatis personae, and the scope of its implications that made it a studious and contemplative rather than a breezy read that nearly took me two months.

It achieves its central goal I think - to show that the Renaissance, particularly centered around the city state of Florence, and the person of Niccolo Machiavelli was not objectively better or closer to modernity than the Mediaeval age before it, or the Reformation to come after. In showing it in all its reality - warts and plagues included - the book paints a raucous, chaotic picture of an age that has too often been over-romanticized, idealized, and pitched as the beginning of modernity.

This is not a book for everyone - it jumps around in time, often repeats itself, goes down rabbit holes that would only interest the most scholarly among us, and despite its banter and wit, sometimes lulled me off into sleep. I actually kept a list of people to research and read up the Wikipedia articles for as I went - Machiavelli, of course, but also Cosimo and Lorenzo de Medici, Savonarola, Isabella d'Este, Rodrigo, Cesare & Lucrezia Borgia, Alessandra Scala, Petrarch, Erasmus, Michelangelo, Pope Julius II, Lucretius, Pope Leo X... if none of these names jump out to you as interesting - maybe don't read the book? (side note: it is curious that the author focuses on Michelangelo but just sort of mentions Leonardo when she absolutely has to. I explained this to myself as she is much more a Mikey in tone than a Leo, if she were a Turtle)

It all came together at the end nicely as the book deeply explained and contextualized people, places, and events that I have seen mythologized too often in other media - on TV (The Borgias), in various movies, in the Assassin's Creed games, and more. Really glad I read it, but hoo boy, it was not a passive read.

[Blue Cephalopod Man from Titan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer

3.5★

Ada Palmer set out to demystify the Renaissance, and on that level this is a very strong work of history. The book is not just about what happened during the Renaissance, but about how the Renaissance became “the Renaissance” in the first place: a packaged period, a usable past, a story later historians and cultures built for their own needs.

Palmer is a terrific teacher. Her passion for the subject is obvious, and the book often feels like sitting in on a long, energetic, deeply informed lecture. She is also generous with other historians, frequently showing how interpretations are built collaboratively rather than pretending history descends from one all-knowing voice. That reflexive quality is one of the book’s strengths. She knows she is constructing a history while explaining how history gets constructed.

The limitation is that it is long. Very long. The thematic structure is smart, and Palmer does a good job reorienting the reader as she moves between humanists, artists, politics, patrons, and later mythmaking, but the names and threads can start to blur. For a reader already deeply invested in Renaissance history, this might be a richer experience. For me, it was easier to admire than to love.

Still, it confirmed what her fiction already suggested: Palmer is brilliant, funny, passionate, and unusually gifted at making big intellectual structures accessible. I came away respecting the book, respecting her as a historian and teacher, and hoping there is much more fiction from her to come.

[Alex Sarll]

Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series is probably my favourite fiction published this century, and one of my standard descriptions is that it's science fiction as written by a historian, someone who understands the second- and third- order consequences of change, and the strange switchback paths the world takes. Well, here's her first public-facing work of history, and it demonstrates that same encyclopaedic knowledge and ability to deploy it to spark new epiphanies in the reader. Ever wondered how melons were responsible for the French Revolution? Almost certainly not, but the answer is here, along with dozens of similarly improbable but persuasive insights. And if you object that the French Revolution was hardly the Renaissance, then that's part of the point; there's vast erudition on display here, but as the title suggests, this is a work of historiography as much as history, the story not just of the Renaissance but of the stories different people and ages have told of the Renaissance, from Petrarch encapsulating the first stirrings to the various (mis)conceptions of it down to the present. Or almost the present, anyway; Palmer's conclusion is a rallying cry for a tattered, bloodied, roundabout yet still forward-facing notion of progress:
"Plague wasn't the Horseman of the Apocalypse Petrarch hoped to defeat, but the man whose Remedies Against Fortune offered consolation, even for those who lose their homeland to war, would weep such happy tears to hear the plague for which he had no consolation is defeatable."

Agreed, but then what would he do when you told him that the most powerful, scientifically advanced nation on Earth had, since the completion of this book, decided to turn its back on those miraculous remedies? So that sense of disconnect, that even history seen as two steps forward, one step back no longer feels believable, was one reason that I couldn't quite love Inventing The Renaissance as I do Terra Ignota. The other was the style. Because of reasons, the novels are mostly narrated in a gorgeous 21st century attempt at a 25th century pastiche of Enlightenment prose, a project which made perfect sense on its own terms, but at whose genesis I think I see further hints here in the hilarious sections detailing Palmer's bemused glee at Renaissance humanists'* rediscovery of classical Latin, and the terrible contortions they put it through. Now, I'd read articles before I read the novels, so on some level I knew she doesn't always write like that, even aside from the fact that obviously, nobody always writes like that. But even so, I wasn't prepared for the determined accessibility, sometimes shading into mateyness, with which sections of this are presented. Among (many) other things, Inventing The Renaissance doubles as an intellectual autobiography, and along with the Attenborough-style glimpses of never-before-recorded group behaviours of Renaissance studies academics, there's a keen sense of just how brilliant it must be to get Palmer as a lecturer, even before you consider the awesomeness of her famed papal conclave LARP. And spoken, I imagine her love of a good sobriquet is a boon for keeping the various bearers of repeating names in early modern Italy straight**. But on the page, I confess that the increasingly convoluted variations on Julius II: Battle Pope 2 did start to grate. In places it felt less like Terra Ignota, more like Tumblr posts about Terra Ignota. And there are some excellent Tumblr posts about Terra Ignota, don't get me wrong; I just never imagined there was quite so much of Palmer in $niper.

All of which said, I can forgive a lot in any historian who can, for a brief moment, make me feel like I've almost understood the Italian Wars – and who then makes clear that they're not expecting me to remember it all, because they certainly can't (see also Barbara Tuchman). Palmer is especially good on the League of Cambrai debacle, "a war in which every single participant changed sides, some several times." And if there can sometimes be an echo of those galaxy brain memes that return to the initial statement, coming out of 600+ pages only to conclude, like Bart Simpson, that "in summary, the Renaissance was an age of contrasts", well, the statement definitely feels deepened by the journey. Even just the section which returns to Palmer's dissertation topic and asks whether Machiavelli was an atheist – but more than that, why people get so invested in whether Machiavelli was an atheist, and expands from there to the whole misbegotten human urge to see the past as the present in different hats – would be worth the price of admission on its own. Hell, I emerge from this prepared to concede that Savonarola might, just perhaps, not be quite the blister I have always understood him to be, and there are precious few writers who can shake me on something as foundational as that.

*This word gets a lot of poking and prodding, but I'm not going to try teaching my predictive her preferred variant for one use, legitimate though it is.
**"It could be worse; I know scholars who work on a phase in seventeenth century Iceland when 40 percent of all men were named Jón Jónson."

(Edelweiss ARC)

[Ari · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ada Palmer is both a popular science-fiction writer and also a tenured professor of Renaissance history. She is kind of a genius. This resulted in a book that probably no other working historian could have written.

This is not her most tightly structured work; it was initially meant as a revised improved version of various things she had blogged. But, professionalism, and so it has emerged as a substantial and carefully-constructed work, with a substantial set of notes and references.

She is trying to explain what we mean by the renaissance, by renaissance humanism, etc.

[William Collen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review published in WOLRD magazine here: https://wng.org/articles/reexamining-...

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best history books I've ever read. It is, in some ways, unusual. The style is conversational, not academic. Yet the book is clearly the result of a long career in academia and incredibly well-researched.

I'd recommend it to anyone interested in history as a subject too and not just the Renaissance. Because it is an excellent book on how history works. How it is a dynamic discipline and where theories come and go. Where even failures can contribute something to our understanding of a historical period. And how causes of events aren't always black and white. That major historical events are like rivers where little streams contribute to the rising power of the water and the river broadens and deepens.

The book isn't written in chronological order as Palmer zips backwards and forwards to talk about different people and events but she keeps them connected. I like her little touch of Homeresque tags for people who crop up again and again so that you can remember who they are - Battle Pope being one example.

The book is split into 6 sections. The first - Why You Shouldn't Believe Anyone (Including Me) About the Renaissance - is basically the historiography of the Renaissance and how we see it differently depending on which 'X Factor' we feel most contributed to its creation. This also dicusses humanism, what the Middle Ages did, and the parts of the Renaissance world that don't feel modern.

Part II is a more narrative history but still calls upon ideas and perceptions. Part III introduces us to fifteen figures from the Renaissance, from Alessandro Strozzi to Machiavelli. I should note that Machiavelli is a key figure in this book. It is him that it effectively centres on. Part IV goes into detail on 'What Was Renaissance Humanism'. Indeed, this is the section that all the others have been leading us to. Contextualising. There's a discussion about what humanism is, who qualifies, and again this is as much historiography as history. Part V is 'The Try Anything Age', which talks us through how perceptions of sources, authorities, progress, and science change. How the Renaissance starts to edge towards the Enlightenment.

It should be noted that one of Palmer's threads is the arbitrary nature of the division of history into different periods as if the boundary between the Medieval period and the Renaissance is a solid one. Like a wall. That one period changed to the other one a certain day and time. Whereas in reality change is ongoing and doesn't happen at one speed. That some ideas arrive early in one place and late in another. That history is more like a body of water flowing in one direction but broadened and fed by other times. She's also good on how Medieval Europe wasn't the 'Dark Ages' (and how much calling it that annoys Medieval historians.)

Part VI is the conclusion - 'Who Has Power In History?', which is as much about how we behave in the modern world and what the past has contributed to how we see ourselves.

It is a fascinating read. It makes the Renaissance more complex and therefore more interesting than I'd previously thought. It made me realise how ignorant I was on this and the Medieval period. My European historical knowledge isn't bad on Ancient Greece and Rome but dribbles to almost nothing after the Romans leave Britain until the Tudors and the Stuarts. This helped fill some gaps and pointed me in the direction of many other books I can read - should I choose - that would fill them further. If I only had the time.

Perhaps I do. Perhaps it is a question of priorities.

Anyway you should read this. I've always said that I've never read a single book that changed my life, it has always been more of a combination of books. But this might be the nearest I've come.

[Kirsti]

My favorite tidbit so far: During the Renaissance, as much as 60 percent of charitable donations went not to nuns or orphans or hospitals, but to paying off Mediterranean pirates so that people could be rescued from galley slavery.

[Griffin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Both a very informative, accessible history of this conceptually unwieldy period and a valuable meditation on history-making in general.

[Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a delightful history that's written for RETENTION and god bless it for that. I had a wonderful time, laughed a lot, and feel like I actually learned things instead of looking at a billion Lorenzos I will immediately not be able to tell apart. Plus now I need to go read the biography of Benvenuto Cellini because "goldsmith-sculptor-necromancer-assassin" is one hell of a multi-hyphenate to be.

[Silver · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tagantjärele tuli tahtmine täpsustada.

See on kõige parem ajalooraamat mis kunagi kirjutatud.

Kui paljudes akadeemilistes tekstides saab lugeda asju nagu "wtf" ja "srsly" ja lehekülgede kaupa koomilist väljamõeldud dialoogi?

Ada Palmer on parim.

[Maynard Handley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I gave up on this about quarter of the way through; the cognitive dissonance was just too much.
The entire point of the book is historiography, ie how history is written to achieve certain goals in the present when it is written. OK, that's an interesting subject, and suggests a certain level of self-awareness in the author.
EXCEPT (of course...) this self-awareness never extends to our age! Sure, those 19th historians biased everything to support their nationalism, and the early 20th C historians to support bourgeois democracy, but not us today! When WE write about gender issues or provide opinions about class, tyranny, appropriate ways of governing, of course we're getting it absolutely correct! There's no arc or progress, that's whiggish history, and, BTW we are also at the absolute apex of understanding morality and ethics, unlike those the 19th C savages.

This goes from being slightly jarring in the first few chapters to being so pervasive that you simply can't take it any longer. How can I trust that the author has any sort of worthwhile understanding of other writers when she so clearly has no understanding of herself?

I remember once listening to university lectures podcast for some history (actually mainly historiography) course. At the end of the course the students were asked, having seen this survey of different ways of writing and understanding history, what sorts of historians they would be.
ONE Korean student said he planned to be a nationalist historian, making it very clear in his histories the Korean side of things. Everyone else claimed they'd be a "neutral" historian, interested only in the truth. I think a lot about that lecture series and it's almost total lack of effect on the students...

[J. L. R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't claim to be unbiased with my thoughts on this book - Ada Palmer's sci-fi series Terra Ignota is one of my favorite pieces of fiction ever made - but it's easily one of the most fun and thought-provoking history books I've ever read. Inventing the Renaissance takes aim at the general-history conception of the Renaissance as a glorious birth of art and thinking after the "Dark Ages" of the Medieval Era, showing that such a view was the result of an ideological project undertaken by both the very people of the time period and other historians and politicians later on. The book jumps around a lot in time, but follows a conversational thread from historiography to biography to intellectual history. I was always riveted throughout its 650 pages; Palmer managed to teach me a whole lot about European history, political theory, ethics, and the very field of history studies itself, finishing up with a stirring ode to the idea of progress that actually brought a tear to my eye and helped me make sense of our terrifying and dispiriting present.

Palmer takes a conversational tone that echoes the best college professors, though some people might be put off if they're looking for a more stripped-back and serious voice. It definitely worked for me, especially her Homeric habit of adding epithets and repeated little titles to the many characters with similar names spread across Renaissance Europe.

If you're interested in the Renaissance in general, it's a must-read, but I'd also recommend it first and foremost to anyone interested in the broad sweep of history, in tracing ideas and values across time, in understanding who and what shapes the histories in our education system, pop culture, and politics.

[Marks54 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book about the Renaissance by an accomplished historian of the period. But it is much more than just another book of Renaissance history. It is instead a book on the historiography of the Renaissance - an integrative study of how historians have looked at the period and learned from each other in the process of doing so. In this sense, it is a meta-history of the Renaissance. This sort of study has costs and benefits for a reader. You do not get a clear single story with a clear resolution. Events have multiple meanings and multiple often conflicting interpretations. It is never clear just what, precisely, the Renaissance was, when it started, who was involved, or where it occurred. But if you have read a bit about the period and can tolerate a bit of ambiguity, the result is a much more satisfying and engaging account of the period. Professor Palmer is also skillful and linking the Renaissance (whatever it is) with the different (similar ambiguous) periods that gave birth to the Renaissance and came afterwards. This is a distinctive and to me attractive way to think about intellectual and cultural history and I found myself engaged by this book to an extent that has not occurred for most of the books I have read about the period.

While this is a long and demanding book, I recommend it to those interested in the Renaissance.

[Johannes · Rating 2 out of 5]

2,5

As the story goes, I got to Palmer's book by pure chance. Sometimes YouTube recommends good interviews and I got to Dwarkesh Patel's one where she sounded interesting, witty and full of good remarks on the period. Of course she took the chance to advertise her book, it had good reviews hence I bought it.

Months later, yes, months, I was actually surprised by how much it annoyed me to no end. First, and foremost, writers should stop use "inventing" for a while in their titles since it means nothing. Second, ... I don't know what she was trying to achieve here, not really. For a while I thought I was the only one but other readers struggled with the same issues, at times she is simply tryng too hard to be funny, the constant references to the Vikings in Greenland, which stopped being funny after the first time she brought them along, a bit of sociological study there and there, much rumbling about nothing of consequence and... some proper history from time to time, and a lot of gossip to stop the reader from leaving the book before its final page.

And while she claims on and on her bias was not going to percolate into the writing it was all over the place.

All this said, she knows what she is writing about, she is clearly well versed, and she can definitely write very well when she applies herself to it. The chapters where she goes about personal individuals and those very few times where she literally dives into the Medici and the politics from the Republics and Duchies from the region are the ones that allow the book to take fly, until I read her book I could safely say I hadn't seen a neutral account from Lucrezia Borgia where she was taken into context, in that sense I applaud her.

As for the rest I would rather hold my tongue, and no, this is not one I would advise anyone to pick up. Such a wasted opportunity really.