Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
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.
Been looking forward.
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.
Yeah.
What gives?
One of the big reasons that the Italian city republics are clustered in Italy is that when the Roman Empire dissolved in the West— Individual cities then needed to self-govern, and this is true all across Europe, right? And those individual cities could no longer get the centralized Roman government to oversee supply routes, keep the roads free of bandits.
You could no longer import and export goods at scale. You could no longer rely on central infrastructure. You had to support things yourself. Larger, wealthier towns were able to make this transition because they could support themselves from the local resources and the farms attached to them.
So the larger, wealthier towns surrounded by good agricultural land were more successful at converting over to, okay, let's have a Senate like the old Roman Senate. Let's have our top families form a council. They will rule. We'll set up a republic. A weaker town...
that can't support itself as well, is much more prone to one wealthy family realizes that they can get goons and take over and declare themselves the monarch of the area. Or worse, this town cannot self-sustain. It doesn't have enough. People there can't get food. They are scared. They're afraid of being robbed by people who are desperate.
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Chapter 2: How did the Italian city republics emerge after the fall of Rome?
As a result, and a village was a monarchical structure in this sense that was the migration of people out of a town into the protection zone of a local lordling, right? And then those villages grew to different scales, some of them cities, some not. So Italy had great agriculture and great agricultural land. So more of Italy's cities were able to sustain themselves as towns and be republics.
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.
Yeah.
maybe there isn't one, but do you think there is one? And what exactly is that connection?
Well, as with many processes, the answer is there are multiple steps and it's complicated. And some of the steps are realizing that the earlier steps didn't work. So Petrarch, who lives through the Black Death and lives in a moment when Italy is racked by civil war and foreign mercenary troops are raiding and pillaging. Italy is racked by bandits.
When Petrarch survives the Black Death after losing so many friends, he gets a letter. Two of his friends are alive. He had given up that anyone he knew would survive. But two of his younger scholar friends are alive. They're going to come visit him on the way they were attacked by bandits. And one of them was killed and the other was lost in the mountains and wounded.
And he didn't know that his friend was alive for another year and a half. So the bandits are very real in this period. And Petrarch looks around him and says, this is an age of ash and shadow. What we need is to imitate the arts of the ancients. Let's try to figure out how the Romans did it. And specifically, the problem is our leaders. Our leaders are selfish.
Our leaders care more about their wealth and their family honor and their power than they do about the people. This is where Romeo and Juliet is really helpful for us to understand, right? Lord Montague and Lord Capulet, as their goons are knifing each other in the street, they care about defeating each other. Do they care about the good of Italy?
Do they care about the good of the city of Verona? No. Their feud is harming the city of Verona and they don't care. They demand that Romeo get away with murder because he is their son, right? That is not service to the state. And Petrarch reads about the ancient Roman Brutus, not the one who killed Caesar, but the ancestor to whom that one was trying to live up.
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Chapter 3: What were the Roman virtues that influenced Renaissance leaders?
There are also lots. Oh, we have lots of Plato here. Look, here's my grandson, Lorenzo. He's just written a poem in ancient Greek about the three parts of the soul. Would you like to hear him recite it? And now there's a 10-year-old boy reciting a poem that you in ancient Greek about the three parts of the soul. And you're like, where am I? None of this is possible.
None of this has existed for a thousand years. That's the moment that Cosa and de' Medici turns to and said, would you like to make an alliance with Florence? And you can say no. You can say no.
My king is going to come over the Alps with his enormous army and we're going to descend upon this city and we're going to sack it and everyone's going to let us because it has no friends because it doesn't have any nobility so it can't marry anybody so it has no meaningful allies.
And also it's in the middle of this Guelph-Gibley feud so all of its neighbors hate it so they're just going to let it burn. And we're going to take the enormous piles of gold that are in your basements and go home rich, and all of this will be gone like a dream. Or you could say, yes, let's make an alliance.
Give me a bronze smith and an architect and a Greek teacher and a Platonist, and we're going to take all of these things and we're going to do the French court like this. And then when the ambassador from Portugal comes... He's going to feel like an uncultured fool, just like I feel right now. The power dynamic just flipped upside down. right?
And suddenly the condescending nobleman is in awe of the merchant scum. That's what the art and the culture does as a propagandistic tool. The next stage of it then is, okay, we've raised these princes like this and they have the Latin and they have the Greek and they can impress everybody.
And then they fight a bigger, nastier, worse war than any of the earlier big, nasty wars with more deaths and more betrayals and bigger cannons knocking down cities and and burning whole areas and the wealth is centralized so the mercenaries are more numerous because people can produce more.
You know, the first generations raised by this are supposed to be philosopher princes and instead we get Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, both of whom had Latin and Greek and Cicero and Plato when they were kids. And then it grows up and Valentino sets fire to half the world. Cesare sets fire to half the world, right? So that is the war Machiavelli watched.
Machiavelli was raised on all of the Cicero and Livy, right? He was raised on the Petrarchan project. He has this famous, beautiful letter that he wrote in exile where he's describing his day to his friend and that most of the day is wasted and he mucks around hunting for larks. And then he goes to a pub and gets drunk in the company of uncultured countrymen. And then he goes home and he
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Chapter 4: How did Petrarch's vision influence the Renaissance despite its unintended consequences?
And he says, okay, well, clearly... Petrarch was wrong that just reading the Cicero would make successful rulers like the Caesars. But I still feel in my heart a deep power in the classics. So, he says. What if the libraries are what we need, but we need to use them differently? And he proposes what we would think of as political science. We observe historical examples.
We say, okay, here are five examples of battles that happened next to rivers. We'll put those examples side by side and see what decisions the commanders made to try to figure out which one worked better. We use history as a casebook of examples of what worked and what didn't. And we imitate what worked and we avoid doing what didn't. Instead of
feeling that reading about good men will make us good. We read about wise choices and we imitate those choices. This is one of the reasons Machiavelli is described by his contemporaries as a historian. And he says we need to use history and use the classics differently. He proposes that. He isn't very popular in his own day. It takes a long time for that to catch on.
Many people for decades after him are still trying to use it sort of the absorb it osmotically way. But he's writing that in the early 1500s. So it's been a little over a century since this started. We have to remember how long this process is. From Petrarch's first call to Machiavelli writing that is as long as from Yuri Gagarin's space flight back to Napoleon.
the childhood of Napoleon to the space race. That's Petrarch to Machiavelli. We think of it as one time period, but a lot changed in that they had a plan. They tried the plan. They brought the plan to its maximum. They raised all the princes in this new way. The wars happened. It clearly failed. Machiavelli then thinks about why it failed. We're still only halfway through Renaissance.
Shakespeare's grandparents have barely been born. We have a lot more time to go. So what do we need? We need new ways of thinking about it. And we're reading the ancients, so we have bigger libraries. We have the printing press now. We're having libraries in smaller towns. More and more people can read. It's easier and easier to get an education. More people are starting to learn about science.
It also is important that they're inventing micro technologies of book production like footnotes. And glossaries in the margin that explain the hard vocabulary. So that when Petrarch's successors like Ficino was young, you had to be a masterful Latinist to read these agents. You had to have an enormous vocabulary. There are no dictionaries. There are no glosses. There's nothing to help you.
Only a tiny slice of expert classicist could actually read this stuff. By 100 years later, there are translations into the vernacular. There are footnotes that tell you the hard vocabulary. Any med student can read Lucretius' discussions of materialist information. When Poggio found it, there were two dozen people in the world who could read it. 100 years later, 30,000 people can read it.
in the 30 print editions that are printed before 1600. When all different kinds of people read it, med students, law students, people in different countries, people in different places, they ask new questions. They wonder whether they can test the hypotheses. They do test the hypotheses. They're the generation that discovers that the heart is a pump.
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Chapter 5: What role did the printing press play in the rapid changes of the 16th century?
It's one ongoing information revolution.
Do you see, maybe other eras also have this, and I just haven't read the books about them, but from your book, I'm just like, oh, history just seems to be happening really, really fast and seems to have sped up, especially religious and political history. So obviously the things happening in Italy, but even aside from that, Martin Luther, Reformation, and then just 20 years later. Yeah.
England splits off from the Catholic Church, which is like unprecedented in two millennia.
Yeah, and then it has a bunch of tumults that flap, flap, flap, flap, flap, so that every decade feels different. Yeah, and here you are in 1506 being nostalgic for how the world was completely different in 1490. Right. And you're like, that's pretty fast. And here we are in 2026 often feeling nostalgic for how things were in the year 2000, right?
Right. And is it fair to trace that back to the printing press or its offshoots, or is it just independent?
It's more that history has always moved fast. But when we teach it in high school, we're trying to move over large chunks of time quickly. And so we pretend that it moved slowly. We have this lie that there were long periods of stagnation. But you can zoom in anywhere, and you're going to find every decade feels different. And people in the 1320s are nostalgic for people in the 130-aughts, right?
And it's always felt like history was moving very quickly and things rose and things fell. It's the lies we tell ourselves in history books written in the 19th century that are trying to group all of these things together and make modernity special that confused us about this. So, like, I'm working on a paper right now about the video game Civ, right?
Civ is the number one teacher of history in the world. Right. And it has shipped 70 million copies and 65 percent of people on Earth who have technology play video games. Siv is the number one teacher of history, bar none, since 1991. And what does Siv tell you? Siv tells you that in antiquity, a turn is 50 years. And then in the Middle Ages, a turn is 25 years.
And then once you get into Industrial Revolution, a turn is 10 years and then five years. And in modernity, a turn is just one year. Because in one year, as much happens now as happened in 50 years in antiquity. And that lie is also what our textbooks tell us. But it doesn't matter where we zoom in.
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Chapter 6: How did the Inquisition contribute to the development of peer review?
We just take them for granted, right? The invention of chairs with backs, the invention of scissors, the invention of improved metallurgy so that steel could do things steel couldn't do before. There was always technological change happening.
I'm in the middle of reading an amazing book about when you look at the paintings of Raphael and the few paintings we have by Michelangelo, the colors look like they're really glowing.
Yeah.
like like gemstones uh how did that happen when you compare them to paintings from just 100 years earlier where somehow the colors are flatter i'm not talking about the anatomy being more realistic that's separate but the colors are flatter and the answer is there was a sequence of revolutionary adaptations and how to process oil and how to process colors and how to mix them together and then
those were used to create fake gemstones. And there was a major industrial leap forward in the fake gemstone industry. And then people who were making picture frames realized they could use the same techniques from the fake gemstones to make fake gold by painting yellow over the surface of tinfoil.
And then those were used by artists who were like, wait, I want to make things that look like they glow like fake gemstones. So that there were 11 major technical revolutions over the course of 120 years that led to those colors changing.
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,
It clearly seems like the pace was... Yeah, I mean, it's hard to figure out, like, when are we lying and when are we right where we say the pace picked up? And one thing that makes the pace pick up in modern day is simply the population grew and grew and grew and is now much, much larger.
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Chapter 7: What misconceptions do we have about historical censorship?
Then I'll zoom out and unpack them. But in 1600, the idea is history up until now has been sort of unsystematic and people have discovered things kind of at random. But we can create history.
a method in which we observe the world and use inductive reasoning to figure things out from those observations to create systematic descriptions of the secret motions that underlie nature and from that work out technologies that are good and useful for humankind. If, as we make our observations of nature, we publish them,
and share them with each other, we can create a community of scientists that will share all of these discoveries with each other and with the world and therefore benefit it. This is where, when I'm doing this in the classroom, I deliberately provoke and shock my students with the fun claim, Leonardo da Vinci was not a scientist.
And what I mean by that is that to be a scientist is to publish your results and share them with a community of other scientists so that they can test them, so that the whole human civilization progresses a little bit.
And when my friends who are chemists or my friends who are particle physicists discover something, the next goal is to share that discovery with everyone so everyone's knowledge advances. What does Leonardo do? He writes everything he discovers down in coded mirror writing so that nobody but him can possibly use it.
And he refuses to share even with his students and assistants the secrets of what he's doing. Because Leonardo does not want to contribute to human progress. Leonardo wants to make unique masterpieces so that hundreds of years later people will see them and marvel and say... How did he do it?
No one else has ever been able to replicate that method so that he would be marveled at by the future exactly the way he and his peers marveled at the works of the ancients. And they look at something like the Colosseum or the Pantheon in Rome with its enormous dome and they say, oh, how did they do it? If only we could work that out, we could work it.
make one and then make sure no one else could. Brunelleschi, who built Florence's famous beautiful dome, deliberately burned all of his notes and schematics so that nobody else would be able to replicate his work. That is an inventor and it is an engineer, but in the sense of a community of scientists, this is not a servant of human progress.
This is actually a saboteur of human progress, if anything, who deliberately makes progress and then tries to cut it off at that point so that no one else can be his peer. So that is what you did as a learned inventor in the 1400s and in the 1500s. But as you get to 1600, the suggestion is different. And here I'm going to use Francis Bacon's gorgeous simile of the three insects.
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Chapter 8: How did the discovery of the New World impact European thought?
And the third kind, says Bacon, is the honeybee, who, gathering from among the fruits of nature, processes what he gathers through the organ of his own being to produce something which is sweet and useful for humankind. And that is the scientist who gathers from nature to produce something sweet and useful for humankind.
And with this rhetorical call and with Francis Bacon's portrait on the title page, the English Academy of Sciences is founded and starts publishing. And the standard switches over from, you are not a great achiever because you built the dome. You are a great achiever because you worked out how it can be done. and you shared that sweet and useful thing with all of humankind.
Bacon says, if we do this, if we make academies of sciences, we can make sure that every human generation lives in a better condition than the past. We will have better agriculture, fewer famines. We will have refrigeration. We will have chicken in winter. We will have all of these things that we aspire to. If we collaborate, each generation's experience will be better than the last.
He says that to be a scientist is the ultimate act of charity because there is no greater act of charity than to give a gift to every human who will ever live after you. So that is the rhetoric of what you would feel was happening if you're alive in the 1620s and 1630s.
And Galileo is publishing his observations, and Descartes is publishing his systems, and they've just discovered that the heart is a pump, pump, pump. And that they were totally wrong about the four humors theory and that the blood circulates and they're trying to figure out what it does. And they have magnification and they can see worlds of complex patterns on the wing of a flea.
And it sounds like the whole world is suddenly coming into view. And we're at the beginning of progress. Now, if we zoom out... We would say there'd been progress the whole time. People had always been inventing things. Agriculture in France was better in 1300 than it was in in ten hundred. Plows got better. Seed got better. Cabbages were bred to be bigger. People worked out better pots.
There were always artisanal inventors. And in fact, that's a lot of what Bacon is observing. He worked in the patent office as a young man, and he would see a carpenter come in to patent. I have invented a better chisel. I've invented a thing that goes like this. I'm going to come patent it.
And he would realize that it was workers and workmen and handicraftsmen who were inventing the really useful tools. He wanted to make this systematic. And so what we would say is there was always anthropogenic progress. In 1630, they realize there is anthropogenic progress. They think there hasn't been. They think they're beginning. And that history up until this point has been stagnant.
But now it's going to suddenly be full of invention as for the first time there will be deliberate anthropogenic progress. Really, we would say there always was and that it's accelerating. And at this point, we realize it. and articulate and describe it.
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