Ada Palmer

England splits off from the Catholic Church, which is like unprecedented in two millennia.

Right.

And is it fair to trace that back to the printing press or its offshoots, or is it just independent?

Right.

I guess the difference is that

Technologically, we know that they weren't moving as fast.

That's interesting.

Yeah.

So obviously progress has been happening in individual fields over time.

But this macroscopic view, there's a reason that people, this is a big part of your book, but living in the 14th century would say, look, the best time to be alive was when the Romans were around.

And since then, it's just been the dark ages.

And if they stood in relation to the Roman Empire as we stand to them,

we obviously noticed that, Hey, the world is like so much, there's like been so much progress since then.

So, um,

So I think you might have answered a question I was about to ask, which is the book you recommend on your website, The Renaissance in Italy.

I keep forgetting the name of the author.

Yes, Guido Ruggiero.

In some part, he has this question, which is, look, in Italy, as you mentioned, in Venice, they've really scaled the printing press.

As a result, you have the metalworking for fine typesetting separately for milling technology for water mills, windmills is advanced.

Yeah.