I am reading and loving @adapalmer #InventingTheRenaissance and it is - within my mind - in (mostly gentle) discourse with #JoWalton’s #Lent and #GuyGavrielKay’s #ABrightnessLongAgo, both of which I read years ago, and which I now want to re-read. #bookstodon

You know it's a good book when it has a footnote clarifying that someone was not the first pirate cardinal. #InventingTheRenaissance

Just got a nice history book for reading this spring. First chapter already contains the quote:

"Machiavelli: WTF?!?!"

😄 it's going to be good.

#inventingtherenaissance by @adapalmer

So, Ada Palmer's "Inventing the Renaissance". A very readable and funny, if dense, book for general audiences. It kind of sets out to answer two questions: "was the Renaissance a Golden Age™?" and "were the Renaissance Men™ thinking like we moderns do?". The answer is a resounding "it's complicated, but no", backed up by evidence that gives fascinating insights into how historians work.

(1/n)

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We also see genuinely new things happening then, and Renaissance people being conscious of that, and actively trying to legitimize their power by claiming they were working towards a Golden Age. We see that the Renaissance was both similar to and different from the Middle Ages, and from our own times.

We see that and how it started things that led to modernity; to colonialism and nationalism, and to ideas of equality and freedom of religion.

(3/n)

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By reviewing both events that happened during the Renaissance and their later reception, but mostly by following the interconnected lives of (mostly) famous people who lived through it, we get to see how to arrive at this conclusion.

We get to see the Renaissance as a mess of political chaos, war, and diseases; and Renaissance people being religious and spiritual hardliners.

(2/n)

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Maybe there are no Golden Ages, but there are fruitful beginnings, and the book ends on that hopeful note: we can influence the course of history for the better.

(So, *did* a singularity happen then? Sort of yes! There was new information technology, and the world afterwards looks *very* different from the world before. But singularities are unevenly distributed if you live through them, so it may not have felt like it.)

(4/n, n=4)

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Another thought: yes, the author acknowledges that she's writing about Italy because that's where we have the most sources, but - she centers some people we don't have much material on, too.

So why not include Jews and Muslims, their thoughts and perspectives? There must be *some* sources!

#InventingTheRenaissance #Books2025

Still thinking about this "that the hero who shaped us must have been like us", apparently a common wish.

It's a thought only the maximally privileged could entertain, I think. Everyone else knows they wouldn't have been allowed to shape the world of ideas because of their gender, class, race; wouldn't have been able to because of their disability; and so on.

The past is not only a foreign country, but hostile territory for many of us.

#InventingTheRenaissance #Books2025

"The printing press also spread exponentially, so—like anything exponential—growth was slow at first."

Exponential spread, both of tech and knowledge and a new information distribution network, you say?

I told you there a was a Renaissance singularity!!!

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"While Luther developed new methods for reading the Bible very different from anything practiced in the studia humanitatis, his project of retranslating and correcting Scripture used new translation methods, and new tools for understanding Greek, developed when Ficino had translated Plato, Poliziano Homer, Valla Aristotle and so on."

This seems obvious, but I've never thought about it this way. Neat.

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"We keep asking if Machiavelli was an atheist because we want to believe that big historical changes are caused by people who intend to cause those changes, that the hero who shaped us must have been like us."

I really hate this "we". Speak for yourself; *I* don't give a fuck because I know that people in different times were radically different from me and had different outlooks, goals, and beliefs. *I* don't believe in heroes and "great men".

#InventingTheRenaissance #Books2025

"We see this too in the medieval popularity of what is either the best or worst board game ever invented, rithmomachia, “The Philosophers’ Game,” an asymmetric chess-like game except that each side’s pieces have a unique set of numbers on them (so one side has 2, 4, 6, 8, 36, 64, 153, 289, etc. while the other has 3, 5, 7, 9, 18, 49, 120, 361, etc.) ..."

(1/2)

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"...and the goal is to get the combination of your numbers and your opponent’s numbers into an arrangement so the ratios between the numbers and the distances between them harmonize with the proportions of the celestial spheres."

😍😍😍

(2/2)

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@amalia12 I'm reading "Inventing the Renaissance" by Ada Palmer, a nonfiction book about, well, the Renaissance and how it's a complicated hot mess, not simply a rebirth of art and philosophy after a Dark Age.

I mostly like it so far; it's interesting but a bit dense, with lots of people and feuds and schemes.

It also makes me want to visit Florence, and Rome, again.

Great quotes and random thoughts -> #InventingTheRenaissance

#RandomBookClub

TIL: "[The] use of queen for a female monarch, as opposed to a king’s wife, was new at the time, appearing only toward the end of the reign of England’s Prince Elizabeth I; when Machiavelli wrote The Prince the term included women"

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"Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola—nephew of our Pico—witnessed some of Camilla’s prophecies, and wrote later that she had divine foreknowledge of Savonarola’s sermons and their messages"

Given that "I had a vision" was a relatively safe way for a woman to do theology, and preaching was out of the question, we can theorize that maybe she knew his sermons beforehand because she (co-)wrote the things.

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"In 2011, even as your operas continue to be performed, two different television series will depict different Lucrezias, one anachronistically shocked at the prospect of an arranged marriage at age fourteen"

Hah, I snarked about that scene in the Borgia TV show too!

(And no, I have no idea why the author chose to write this section in second person singular)

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"Even when Erasmus’s efforts to reconcile Luther with the papacy made both sides feel obliged to formally condemn him, both sides still loved this frenemy, and the Inquisition still let Catholics teach and read his works, all you had to do was ritually cross out his name on the title page."

I love this 😂😂😂

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"[...Τ]he important History Lab maxim that, when you zoom in on a moment in the past, it’s always (A) messier than you thought, and (B) includes more women."

Well, they *are* almost 50 % of the population.

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