Ada Palmer

Today, I'm chatting with Ada Palmer, who is a Renaissance historian, a novelist, a composer based at the University of Chicago.

And today we're discussing your book, Inventing the Renaissance.

Ada, thanks for coming on the podcast.

First question.

You've got in this period in the late 15th century, early 16th century in Italy, all these different republics, Venice, Florence, Genoa.

And that seems unusual both for the time period and for the place.

What gives?

I feel like the big take of your book is they were trying to resuscitate Roman virtues.

What were the virtues that the Roman emperors had which allowed this safety and good government, et cetera, to work?

And I don't understand the connection between reading Cicero and contemplating the virtues of a great emperor to dot, dot, dot science and technology.

maybe there isn't one, but do you think there is one?

And what exactly is that connection?

Okay, just to make sure I understood.

So the chain of causation here is

we got to resuscitate the virtues of the Romans, therefore read what they read.

Um, you, to do that, you need to build libraries.

Uh, you built the libraries, you resuscitated all those arts basically.

And then you just need to have people be literate, have people think about, uh, think about information in a new way to analyze it.

And that analysis also lends itself, not just to history of leaders, but also to the nature of the world.

Um,