Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer

Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age

by Ada Palmer

University of Chicago Press 2025

Ada Palmer's big new book, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, comes thickly bethorned with temptations, the first certainly being the prospect of a good solid eye-roll at the book's title. Readers of history are wary of straw men under the best of circumstances, but “Golden Age”? Haven't we seen this particular straw man too many times? In 2014, Alexander Lee trotted it out in his book The Ugly Renaissance: Sex, Greed, Violence and Depravity in an Age of Beauty, for instance, and as in all uses of this particular straw man, the whole gag depends on a simplistic reduction of the Italian Renaissance to “an Age of Beauty” or, in this case, a “Golden Age.”

Also appearing in 2014 was Palmer's previous work of history, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, a thoroughly bookish and enjoyable look at the age's Lucretius craze and its wider implications. There followed one of the strangest publishing interludes since a certain Oxford don stopped writing weighty historical tomes in order to churn out some lawn-scorching erotica, then meekly returned to the stacks of the Bodleian: Palmer wrote her beloved “Terra Ignota” series of science fiction novels and only now returns to writing nonfiction about the Renaissance, lightly couching Inventing the Renaissance in the popular understanding of the period as “a self-conscious golden age, bursting with culture, art, discovery, and vying with the ancients for the title of Europe's most glorious era.”

She's quick to dispel the bulk of this impression, harking instead to the primary sources connected with the figure who's something like the presiding genius loci of the whole book, the now-infamous Niccolo Machiavelli: “If instead we read the private letters which flew back and forth between Machiavelli and his correspondents in those years,” she writes, “we see terror, invasion, plague deaths, a desperate man scrabbling even to keep track of the ever-moving threats encircling his fragile homeland, as his friends and family beg for frequent letters, since every patch of silence makes them fear he might be dead.”

The book promptly introduces readers to the non-golden age Palmer is going to explore in these pages, a world in which, as she's learned from teaching students for years, “The Great Forces are powerful, and real. The strong factions are strong. Money is power. Blood is thicker than promises. Virtue is manipulable. Love rarely beats fear. In the end, a bad man will be pope, and he will do bad things.” (The chapter in which she describes getting her students to simulate, and in best game theory mode, often alter, the Papal conclave of 1492 virtually glows with affection, and the dorky photos are thoroughly endearing).

It's an episodic, drama-driven narrative of the social, literary, and even quasi-scientific elements of the Renaissance, always darkened by machinations between power brokers (“Renaissance politics,” Palmer writes, “isn't turtles all the way down, it's murders and betrayals all the way down”). And cropping up regularly through it all is Machiavelli, whose life in Palmer's telling becomes a kind of living collage of the era itself: By age twenty,” Palmer writes, “Young Nick [that's Machiavelli, to you] had already faced several apocalyptic horsemen: in his boyhood his family faced sudden poverty when the mercenary armies in the post-Pazzi Conspiracy mess trampled their farms, he nearly lost his father to a resurgence of plague, and while we knew he later loved to enter the halls of the ancient and commerce with the classics, his years studying the studia humanitatis had been soured at ages fourteen to eighteen by sexual abuse by his teacher, suffered by both him and his classmate and lifelong friend Francesco Vettori, the same friend with whom he would exchange letters on politics and the writing of The Prince.” Her young Machiavelli spent his days and nights reading and debating about politics, studying in the libraries of people “in Florentine patronage networks like the legacy of Leon Battista Alberti Renaissance Man™, who had close ties to Nick's branch of the Machiavelli family.”

Those eye-catching eccentricities (Young Nick, ™, etc.) have plenty of company in this book, where we get “The Battle Pope” and “The Power Couple,” where a segment on Lucretia Borgia is narrated in the second person (the year 1517: “Orlando Furioso was finally complete and printed, that was a joy,” one passage goes. “And around that time you started hearing of a troublesome friar in Wittenberg called Martin Luther, whose list of the corruptions of the Church also sounded depressingly familiar – you'd seen such calls for reform so many times before, in Petrarch, Bembo's umanista friends, even Savonarola”), and where there's liberal use of italics and exclamation points to flesh out flights of narrative fancy: “Lorenzo arranged for Pico to return to Florence (to fretful Poliziano's loving arms!), and got permission for the count to live with him in a kind of city-wide house arrest, with Lorenzo vouching for his good behavior (He's living practically like a monk, just studying the Psalms, I promise!).”

The book is full of the usual suspects from any Renaissance history, from the aforementioned Savonarola to the Medici family to Francis Bacon, who championed a new kind of rigor in thinking (“Like Galileo, he made observation supreme over logic; if we see it, even if it doesn't make sense, it's real, and it's on us to figure out the cause”), to the iconic Perseus bronze that adorns the book's cover: “Just as the David, a boy who bested giants, had a very particular meaning when placed in the city's heart in 1504 as the republic braced for the rise of Julius II,” Palmer writes, “Cellini's Perseus – whose severe face resembles portraits of Duke Cosimo – had a very particular message when unveiled in 1554 to an audience who had seen the real severed heads of the republican resistance rotting in that same spot not long before.”

All of that is expected in any big one-volume book on the Renaissance – US readers will be getting much the same thing next month with Patrick Baker's translation of Bernd Roeck's The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance, which is even longer than this book. None of it represents any temptation for the reader.

No, the temptations come with those eye-catching eccentricities, the buzzy narration, the nicknames, the italics and exclamations. The temptation is to see those things and decide that this book isn't serious, that it's mostly a jokey Substack post with a dire pituitary imbalance. This isn't true, in fact it's dramatically false, as one look at Palmer's extensive End Notes and Suggested Reading (not to mention her frequent in-text discussions of sources) easily demonstrates. But the temptations are still there, and Palmer is the first to address them. “This book won't read like most histories you could pull off the shelf,” she writes. “Some parts will be dramatic, tragic, grave, but others funny, flippant, casual, or personal, as I lift the veil on how historians learn, and how we change our minds about it all, and bicker.” Readers will see her, the author, as a present character in the story, her jokes, her anecdotes, her favorites (Young Nick, for instance), “and I trust you to judge me as you would any friend telling you a story, an act of fun, nerdy enthusiasm, sharing the fruits of my labor of love.”

For the last 70 years at least, this has been an almost forbidden request to put to history readers, and it's safe to assume many of them won't be up to granting it. This is sad but understandable: a serious work of Renaissance history hasn't been written in this unabashedly personal and passionate register since Walter Pater did it 150 years ago. It stands to reason that many readers will therefore yield to the temptation to dismiss Inventing the Renaissance. But as Savonarola (not to mention Young Nick) would have told them, yielding to temptation is the first and worst of sins.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News