Inventing the Renaissance - by Ada Palmer (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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 help 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.'"--Matthew Gabriele, coauthor of 'The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe'

"[Inventing the Renaissance is] an incredibly impressive work, both of scholarship and popular history, and one absolutely worthy of the time its 700+ pages require."-- "Stuart Ellis Gorman"

"[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"

"A lively introduction to Italy at the end of the Middle Ages, written in a humorous and highly readable style." -- "Medievalists.net"

"A wry look at the mythmaking of an era. . . Palmer argues that many things we associate with the Renaissance--innovations in art, science, philosophy and politics--actually began gradually during the Middle Ages. Also, this myth of a golden age was carefully crafted by historians and has been used repeatedly throughout history to legitimize authority and political agendas."-- "UChicago News"

"Generous, brilliant, and inviting, Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance is a triumph. This is a work of deep erudition worn lightly but excitingly that offers a history of the Renaissance with a unique and personal imprint. If you are a scholar of the period, you will find new insights and interpretations, and if you are coming to the Renaissance for the first time, you will find an engaging and eloquent companion in Palmer."--Christopher S. Celenza, author of 'Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer'

"In her book Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer unpacks how historians through the ages created the idea of a Renaissance 'golden age' for their own reasons--and then disagreed with each over the following centuries about the era's definition, time period, geography and substance."-- "History.com"

"In this engaging, bewitching, and eminently readable doorstop of a book, Palmer invites us to reconsider the Renaissance, what it promised, what it delivered, and what it actually bequeathed to later generations."-- "Chicago Review of Books"

"It's fair to say that the breezier tone of that genre has been turbo-boosted here: every page is a model of mateyness, filled with the millennial patter of social-media-ready irony."--David Butterfield "The Critic"

"Nonfiction that is humorous yet erudite. . . . Palmer essentially deconstructs the Renaissance and talks about why it had to be invented and how, rather than being a set timeframe, bits and pieces of it occurred over hundreds of years. . . This is fun reading on an absorbing topic."-- "Midwest Book Review"

"Palmer is a writer who ranges easily across millennia and media, at home in scholarly, imaginative, and breezily conversational modes."-- "Chronicles of Higher Education"

"What is the message to take home from the long intervention of the American historian? The Renaissance was not a 'rebirth' in the modern sense and it was not the comforting fable of linear progress. It was rather a troubled era, certainly fascinating but instrumentalized by moderns as a distorted mirror to project their own illusions."-- "Union of Catholic Christian Rationalists"

About the Author

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.