Let’s park this book review under “books that I was influenced to read from podcasts” (which should be a tag on this blog now that I’ve got two such books – the other book is Flawless and I’ll post my review next week!). I heard about Inventing the Renaissance from Ada Palmer’s interview on The Medieval Podcast and enjoyed the topic so much that I went to borrow the book!

As you can tell by the subtitle “Myths of a Golden Age”, Inventing the Renaissance is talking about how we came to have certain ideas about this time period we call the “Renaissance” and exposing what it was really like. It’s a big topic and this was certainly a big book, over 1200 pages on my kobo and I don’t enlarge my font that much either (the hardcover is 768 pages, according to Goodreads).

Inventing the Renaissance is divided into 6 parts:

Part 1: Why You Shouldn’t Believe Anyone (Including Me) About the Renaissance

This was an informative look at how history is written and how certain biases can colour how we see time, and how we also use our biased ways of reading history to propose certain ideas. Palmer makes a few great (and very useful) points here: Firstly, when we think of the golden ages, we should remember that “a time that left us golden treasures was not necessarily a golden time to be alive.” And secondly, that:

“The Renaissance is not a set of years, it’s our name for the idea that there was a period of change between medieval and modern, during which some special innovation, some new ingredient, some X-factor, arrived and made the world different.”

I actually found this section to be the most useful because it teaches us to think critically about history. Realising that we think of the Renaissance as a concept rather than a period of time makes it easier to understand why so many people like to lay claim to the Renaissance (either as a renaissance person or something else). As Palmer puts it:

“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.”

Part 2: Desperate Times and Desperate Measures

In this section, Palmer takes us through the background of the Renaissance and how it came to be. This is basically a historical account and I won’t summarise it for you because there’s probably a wikipedia article that does a better job (or you can read this book!).

Part 3: Let’s Meet Some People From This Golden Age

Here, Palmer gives us 15 biographies of people who lived during the Renaissance to show us that the Renaissance was more complex than we expect. We see people that we might recognise as very similar to us (oh look! modern people!) but we also see women who could have moved in ways we want retreating to religious mysticism, we see how Florence was taken over by Girolamo Savonarola, a preacher for a short while, we observe the lives of Princess and Princes, and we also meet scholars.

It is, as you might expect, a lot to read but it does a great job of showing us just how complex the Renaissance, very much like… hey very much like our age too! I particularly liked from the biography of Alessandra Scala, showing us how easy it can be to read people in the light that we want them to be:

“She can be anything. In 1491, she can be Sappho; in 1925 she can be Juliet; in 1985 she can be a proto-feminist proving the brilliance of womanhood.

“That’s why we have to be so careful with her. As Lisa Jardine points out, Alessandra Scala was not a major author; she merits only a brief entry in an encyclopedia of Renaissance humanists, but that isn’t where discussions of her appear.”

Part 4s to 6: What was Renaissance Humanism; The Try Everything Age; Conclusion – Who has Power in History?

Sorry, I have to admit that Parts 4 to 6 kind of melded together into one for me because this book was so long. From what I understood, now that we’ve understood the background to the Renaissance and have gotten to know some of the people who lived in the time period, we can now consider the more abstract questions like:

• What is Renaissance Humanism? (like part 4 says)
• Were there atheists during the Renaissance?
• Was Machiavelli a Humanist?
• What is a Renaissance humanist anyway?
• What is progress? (Also, the history of progress)
• How does this great forces of history concept shape the way we view things, especially in comparison to individual choice history?

These are all not easy questions to answer and we actually do have to go into some philosophy to even try and get at the answers. I was really impressed with Palmer’s recreation of the Papal Election that she makes her students go through and I really, really wish I had the chance to attend that! One quote from these sections that I liked was this one:

“We are all familiar with how histories shaped by such ideas [of progress] denigrated whole regions (Asia, Africa, the pre-Columbian Americas), but they also shaped those histories of Europe which celebrate radical freethinker Machiavelli as a step forward, demonize mystic visionary Camilla Rucellai as backward, distort genius Pico into something comfortable modern, sideline tediously pious Raffaello Maffei Volterrano as a wrong-headed holdout, and don’t know what to do with guru Ficino. Only heroes and villains fit, so Lorenzo de Medici and Savonarola must become one or the other.”

Once again, it underscores the idea that the Renaissance is a lot more complex than we may have imagined and that is a really useful idea to keep in mind.

Remaining thoughts on the book

Now that I’ve briefly gone through this book and highlighted the bits that stuck out to me (some of them, anyway, I probably highlighted a lot more in my kobo), here are some other things that I wanted to mention.

Well, it’s really one thing and that it’s that for all that I love about this book – how it uses the Renaissance to teach us about history more generally, its comprehensiveness, the fact that we also get to know the people of the Renaissance, etc – I also struggled with the tone at times. I understand that Palmer started this book as a blogpost and that she’s writing for a general public, but the book quite often reads as Extremely Online. I don’t really know how to describe it except that it sometimes has a frenetic quality that I associate with people who are trying to convey their energy!!! online!! For example:

“It includes three different obscure participial constructions for no reason, and quotes Varro deceptively out of context, making a quote seem to be about taxonomies of knowledge that’s actually about poultry farming! Poultry farming!!! Just to trick you into thinking Leto knows a source you don’t! I collect Leto’s cruelest sentences to send to Latin teacher friends who use them to punish classroom troublemakers and boy does it work! End rant.”

While I won’t pretend that I don’t write like this on the blog (because, obviously I do, look at this blogpost), I also find it a bit tiring to read for an extended period of time. I mean, this blogpost is just under 1500 words now and I’m finding it tiring to write like this for long. There was even a chapter on Lucrezia Borgia that I was very excited to read but ending up missing a lot because the whole thing was written in second person (it’s also the only one of the fifteen biographies written in second person), starting like this:

“You are Lucrezia Borgia (1480-1519). You had the best of education: the studia humanitatis, Latin, Greek, music; you’re fluent in Italian, Spanish, Catalan/Valencian, and French. You can compose poetry in multiple languages, and by age twelve you knew the histories, leaders, and dynastic tangles of all European and Mediterranean powers inside out.”

And the info went on and one and kind of flowed over my head. I do want to read a good Lucrezia Borgia biography now, but I do wish that the book just had a nice casual, approachable tone without the feeling of being written with the way the internet writes in mind.

This said, I still really enjoyed this book. Inventing the Renaissance goes far beyond the Renaissance and teaches us how to think about history and why we may not want to trust every interpretation that we see. I think that is very valuable, and I think what I took from it is that I should be reading widely on topics that interest me and that the more I read, the more angles that I can see the topic from and the better it is to come to an understanding.