Description:
A New Yorker Best Book of 2025
An irreverent new take on the Renaissance, which reveals it as anything but Europe's golden age.
From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we're told) heralds the dawning of a new world--a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we've told ourselves about Europe's not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity. Palmer's Renaissance is altogether desperate. Troubled by centuries of conflict, she argues, Europe looked to a long-lost Roman Empire (even its education practices) to save it from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similarly nostalgic vision, only now they looked to the Renaissance and told a partial story. To right this wrong, Palmer offers fifteen provocative portraits of Renaissance men and women (some famous, some obscure) whose lives reveal a far more diverse, fragile, and wild Renaissance than its glowing reputation suggests.Brief description: Ada Palmer is associate professor of early modern European history and the college at the University of Chicago. She is the author of many books, including Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance and the award-winning Terra Ignota series of novels.
Review Quotes: "[Palmer] goes deep into the minutiae of the lives of Renaissance luminaries to show that, far from being idealists reaching for the rebirth of a better world, they were the usual human mixture of self-promotion, self-delusion, and fakery. . . . For Palmer, then, the Renaissance is not so much a golden age as a glittering illusion--assembled, reassembled, and ultimately undone by the longings of those who came after."-- "The New Yorker"