James Nicoll Reviews

Ada Palmer’s 2025 Inventing the Renaissance is a popular history book.

The title seems clear… until you ask in what sense ​“inventing” is intended. Are we talking the late Medieval Italians? or historians who create the frameworks we use to discuss history? But the game is given away by the subtitle: The Myth of a Golden Age.

Myths are created by outsiders at a later date. This book is as much historiography as history.

But first, a digression.

It would never in a million years have occurred to me to describe the Renaissance¹ as a golden age. It’s not a period I know well; I knew it mainly from reading Machiavelli’s The Prince and The Discourses, typing my ex’s fine art papers, and playing various wargames set in Renaissance-era Italy. Yes, there was some nice art and some of the architecture was not entirely unpleasant, but there were also too many capable, energetic, ambitious people working at cross-purposes. Not to mention far too many wandering mercenary armies. The resulting local oversupply of history² has had consequences that are still with us.

But the subtitle wouldn’t exist if Palmer hadn’t encountered people who did see the Renaissance as a golden age. I learned something new just by reading the subtitle. As I read further, I discovered just who thought the Renaissance had been a golden age, what they meant by golden age, and why it was useful to them to frame the Renaissance as a golden age.

One reason that ​“the Renaissance” might be bit of a myth is that various historians have described Renaissances with different start and end dates, located in different locales. There seem to have been many overlapping Renaissances, whose location and duration are shaped by the historian’s ideological and philosophical framework.

If someone says the Renaissance, they’re usually talking about 14^th or 15^th century Italy. That is unless they’re working in the framework of the long Renaissance, in which case they might specify Italian Renaissance. But there was also lots of stuff going on inside Italy, which at that time enjoyed a wealth of warring states. Two people talking about ​“the Renaissance” might not be talking about the same Renaissance at all.

It’s hard to read history when it’s just a tedious list of names, battles and dates. The 14^th and 15^th centuries featured a great many names, battles, and dates (well, maybe not at many unique names as it should have). This book could have been deadly dull, but it isn’t. It’s never boring. Instead, Palmer regales readers with irreverently phrased snapshots of specific individuals, along with enough commentary to make clear why those people in particular deserve our attention.

Furthermore, Palmer conveys the often-alien mind-sets of the time, the assumptions, philosophical models, and legal structures that provided the frameworks for those particular actors making those particular decisions.

After reading this book, I better understood the era… and was even further from considering it a golden age³. But that wasn’t its only use. I found it inspirational. Visit footnote⁴ and I’ll tell you the first use that came to mind.

On reflection, the coming years may well resemble the relentless chaos, social stratification, missing social safety nets, squabbling oligarchs, plagues, wars and all the other features that made the Renaissance so delightful⁵. Therefore, the coping mechanisms adopted by the successful⁶ Renaissance Italians might be of use to modern readers. Is an oligarch pissing you off? Remember how the Florentines rewarded Jacopo de’ Pazzi⁷.

Inventing the Renaissance is a comparatively hefty tome, clocking in at 768 pages. Rather conveniently for me, who struggles to finish long works [8], the text is divided into six sections, plus ancillary material. Which is to say, a week’s reading for the disciplined reader. I recommend the experience.

Inventing the Renaissance is available here (University of Chicago Press), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: What I remember being taught in school was that the Renaissance was the result of ignorant Europeans rediscovering classical knowledge that their barbarian ancestors had forgotten, misplaced or destroyed, but that had been preserved in the Muslim polities that succeeded the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium for some reason never appeared in our curriculum). That’s not exactly the picture Palmer presents, so I wonder if that’s a version of history specific to a particular teacher in Wilmot County… like the stuff we were taught about United Empire Loyalists being tremendously inbred, prone to genetic disorders, and not to be trusted with elected office (by a teacher who clearly still bore a grudge against the Family Compact).

2: USA delenda est.

3: Especially given the assertion that between 1200 and 1500, lifespans fell from about 35 – 40 to 18 (measured one way) or from 54 to 45 (measured another). In any case, a decline in longevity. Only serious misanthropists would think that golden ages feature declining lifespans.

4: By ​“inspirational,” perhaps I mean that I will nick such details as how Florence managed wealth taxation, file off the serial numbers, and drop the scheme into a current or future roleplaying game.

5: Minus the art, since the oligarchs are going all in on AI shit.

6: Those who died of old age or at least of the plague.

7: Hint: in the Medici TV series, Jacopo de’ Pazzi was played by Sean Bean.

8: I must admit here that I have never succeeded in finishing an Ada Palmer SF novel. This has nothing to do with Palmer’s prose. It’s due to unintentional operant conditioning, as I read Palmer’s first novel at an unpleasant time in my life.

See also C. S. Friedman, a fan of whom made a passionate case for her works while inadvertently bumping the leg whose knee I had just destroyed. As a result, if I see a Friedman novel, my left leg hurts from the hip down.

This involuntary cross-referencing books with unrelated phenomena is in no way helpful, except that it livens up my walk to work as I remember various SFF books I associate with various parking lots and other physical features near UWaterloo.