Best Way to See the Renaissance? Get the Panoramic View
The Try Everything Age: Reviewing Ada Palmer’s ‘Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age’
Historians can ply their trade countless ways, depending on their sources, interests, and audience. You can imagine a geographical Renaissance, a chronological one, or histories built around the period’s literature, art, economics, philosophy, wars, statecraft, or the lives of the popes (likely with sales correlated to salaciousness). All these books exist; many are quite good. But Ada Palmer—a history professor at the University of Chicago and also, curiously, a science-fiction author—is up to something different.
In Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age, Palmer offers not only the history of the Renaissance but also a survey of its historiography, how and why historians have told the story as they have, and how that shapes what we think we know.
If you’re already yawning, resist the impulse! As readers discover within moments of opening the book, Palmer’s approach is both serious and snarky, academic and breezy. I mention this up front because a 700-page history—one that opens with dizzying family trees and charts tracing the kingdoms, republics, and duchies of Italy—is bound to intimidate.
Not once Palmer gets going. As a testament to the publisher and editor who let her get away with it, the book sports more levity and humor than Cosimo de Medici’s library sported prized manuscripts.
Revisionist History
“Why do historians keep rewriting history?” You’ve probably heard someone ask the question; you might have asked it yourself. It smuggles a common assumption in its hip pocket: that history is what happened, so anyone revising it must be up to something shifty, probably contorting the past into line with today’s values or judging it by the same.
But that’s false. History is a story we tell about the past. It’s not the past, as such, nor even a record of it. No one touches the past except by reconstructing it from what survives: artifacts, documents, and whatever other residue we can access. Every reconstruction is necessarily partial and biased, in need of revision as new evidence appears, which happens all the time.
When doing history, as Palmer argues, we tend to find what we came looking for. She calls it an “X-Factor.” Say the Renaissance was about X—politics, trade, art, the humanist revival, whatever—and the Renaissance you reconstruct will look like (surprise! surprise!) the very thing you were looking for.
The mechanism is easy to see in practice. A scholar of humanism reads Machiavelli one way; a scholar of political science reads him another; both are probably right, depending on what you’re studying. It holds for every major figure, the popes, the Medici, the Borgias, heroes or villains, noble or knavish, according to your lens. (Well, maybe we shouldn’t go so easy on the Borgias, except perhaps Lucrezia.)
Humorously, Palmer purposefully subverts herself on this point. Part One of the book flies under the banner, “Why You Shouldn’t Believe Anyone (Including Me) About the Renaissance.” What keeps Inventing the Renaissance from being, by its own lights, one more invention? Nothing. That’s history. There is no canonical version that trumps all others. There’s just who makes the better argument based on partial evidence and provisional interpretation—until the next, better argument comes along.
Those living through the Renaissance were subject to the same dynamic, which explains in part how we ended up with the idea of the Renaissance in the first place. Those we call the humanists plumed themselves on creating a golden age. The very idea of a “Middle Ages” comes from the humanists, Petrarch first, elevating themselves above their medieval forebears.
But, depending what goggles you’re wearing, the Renaissance seems more like a continuation of the Middle Ages than a break; the same sorts of people, events, and questions carry across the centuries, so that seemingly “medieval” things keep happening into the 1500s and 1600s, while figures deep in the Middle Ages can look modern for their time. Playing with this reality, Palmer calls the Renaissance the Middle Ages, only Ever-So-Much-More-So.
We also tend to read our modern understanding into the past and thus misjudge how things looked at the time. Stick with the humanists. Who ranks in their numbers and why? As the Dude would say, and Palmer painstakingly demonstrates, “This is a very complicated case . . . a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous.” It’s almost impossible to pick a definition that covers all the relevant figures. And the humanists’ special claim to fame, the search for antiquity, particularly in the form of classical manuscripts? Medieval monks scooped them by hundreds of years. The humanists were special, but not as special as they wanted—or we want—to believe.
Real distinctions did exist: The humanists, for instance, defined themselves against the scholastics. But there’s more continuity than rupture. We’ve just been trained by reading the humanists not to expect it. Which is self-serving because we want to imagine ourselves as being in the lineage of the humanists as routed through the Enlightenment or the Romantics, depending on which way we swing. But medieval? God, no.
It’s taken decades of work by those awful revisionist historians with their shifty motives to undo the work of earlier revisionist historians and shine enough light on the Middle Ages to deny us our superiority and eliminate the label Dark from what Palmer calls “the history lab.”
A Panoramic View
The five parts of Inventing the Renaissance follow an argument rather than a timeline. But that’s overstating. The argument itself emerges from a restless, relentless Eye-of-Sauron approach that tries to survey the Renaissance landscape in one sustained glance. The only way to do it is for that eye to dart around in searching saccades, stitching together the total picture as it roams the period, jumping ahead, scanning back, in sometimes jittery motions.
Part One violates our assumptions about the period; Part Two supplies the wars and politics and dissolves the supposed gulf between medieval and Renaissance; Part Three puts faces to the era—people like Michelangelo, Savonarola, and Machiavelli (“Young Nick,” as Palmer affectionately calls him), along with relatively obscure figures such as Alessandra Scala, Camilla Bartolini Rucellai, and Angelo Poliziano.
Time and again these profiles surface the economic and social reality of patronage, an arrangement that has no easy analog in the modern world. Renaissance people related through complex webs of patronage, and patronage is anti-democratic and hierarchical to the bone; laws themselves bend to it. A patron could get one of his people off the hook for a crime. Everyone lived on a rung of the ladder, which extended all the way to heaven, where the Theotokos herself intercedes with her son on behalf of us all below.
Taking this panoramic view allows Palmer to deflate, as we’ve already seen, gobs of familiar claims about the period. Take atheism and secular humanism. Pluck one or two examples and you can transform the Renaissance into the cradle of the Radical Enlightenment; take in all the available evidence, however, and the argument sours in your mouth. “Even an easy case like Machiavelli?” you ask. Especially an easy case like Machiavelli, Palmer answers.
Most of the book orbits Florence, and because Palmer refuses strict chronology she darts across the timeline, doubling back to explain as she goes. That might carry a cost for the reader; without a schedule, you can miss the train. I sometimes did. But the wild ride is worth the occasional moment of disorientation: a sustained panoramic view instead of a sprint from year to year, and you get to see someone like Machiavelli from several sides at once.
The Try Everything Age
The panorama pays off in the later parts. Part Four asks what Renaissance humanism actually was—our present-day sense of the word doesn’t track—and Part Five, “The Try Everything Age,” serves up some of the best chapters in the book. Here the humanists face the birth of print and what Palmer calls an “exponential information revolution,” the sheer volume of new books outrunning anyone’s ability to keep up. (I discuss this in The Idea Machine.)
Can we relate?
Ever-So-Much-More-So accelerates in information revolutions—we feel that today, living in the digital revolution, when every few years a new disrupter changes how information moves: cassette tapes shaping the Iranian revolution, cellphones the Arab Spring, social media the 2016 authoritarian surge, etc. As 1500 became 1560, and ever smaller towns made it onto the printed news network, the Renaissance’s Ever-So-Much-More-So gained momentum, new ideas reaching millions instead of thousands.
It was dizzying. The old scholastic method could not survive that flood. “We can’t,” says Palmer, “just Abelard harder anymore.” And exploration made it worse. In 1492 Columbus, so the nursery rhyme informs us, sailed the ocean blue. Throw in trade from Asia and Africa, and a whole new world was invading Europe. Suddenly, new lands and new peoples and new plants undercut all the settled opinions of ancient authorities filling monastic and humanists’ libraries, creating a crisis that demanded a response.
Theophrastus knew nothing of cantaloupes or tomatoes! Something as insignificant as garden produce could crack the tidily constructed European picture of the world. And into that crack what would emerge as modern science and medicine began to push, fueled by the printing press. If I wanted to tout my own X-Factor, it would probably be that: The Renaissance, the Age of Discovery and All the Indigestion It Caused.
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Scholasticism was never refuted, it drowned. That distinction seems like the live one for our own flood. Print multiplied claims that could at least be checked against each other. Our version multiplies text that already sounds checked. So Palmer's parallel raises the question of which of our methods is quietly drowning right now, and we probably won't know its name until people have already stopped using it. Nobody attended scholasticism's funeral either.
Great review, Joel. Many thanks for your insights.