Ada Palmer | Inventing the Renaissance | Graham School

Thank you. And it's a funny chapter to include in a book, but it's a, it's a funny book. And the presence of that chapter, I think, is indicative of the way the tone of the book is aiming to throw off the veil of anonymity that is usually part of the performance of objectivity in a nonfiction book, certainly in the genre of history in which the personality of the author and even the first person are usually invisible. But because it's a book about the construction of history by historians and the continuity of historians constructing and reconstructing this field over hundreds of years, I felt it was more appropriate to be present within the book and to place myself in that genealogy of historians from Petrarch through 18th-century historians, through my own teachers, to me, to my students.

So shockingly, when I started studying my, when I started on my PhD on Renaissance, I knew absolutely nothing about it whatsoever. And I could not have found Florence on a map. But what I was interested in within history is the question of how events and ideas shape each other. Because in a tradition of looking at great books, and I went to a liberal arts college that uses Chicago's very traditional core great books sequence, one tends to end up with an impression that the innovative ideas of major thinkers appear like Athena from the head of Zeus, spontaneously out of that moment when the philosopher is sitting in a cabin with a raging sea, philosophizing and perhaps responding to a book by one of his peers, but in isolation from the lived realities of the world around.

But what I became fascinated by as an undergraduate was the reality of how much major ideas and major thinkers are directly responding to the lived events and crises of their day. The first one where I really understood this, and I remember vividly, it was in, you know, a core great book sequence that we were reading Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. And I had simultaneously been taking a class on the First World War. And I remember thinking, I bet his death instinct idea isn't there in the stuff he wrote before the war. And I remember vividly going to the stacks to where the complete works of Freud were, sitting down on the floor in the stacks and pulling out all the volumes and going through. And I was right.

And it was an epiphany moment of thinking about how it is not separate, but interconnected: the political events, the tumults, the wars, the technological changes, the lived experience, and these books, which appear so often as classics that match each other on a shelf and don't have the burn scars and bullet holes and raggedness and pristine-ness to tell you which ones originated during a civil war, which ones originated during an era of peace, and so on. I wanted to study history that asked that kind of question, and I got into touch with my future dissertation thesis advisor, Jim Hankins at Harvard, who was asking the same kinds of questions I wanted to ask. And since he wanted to study the Italian Renaissance, and I had the Latin necessary to do so, I decided that I would follow him to the Renaissance and trust that any era, at any time and place, would be equally exciting to approach, so long as I got to ask that kind of question.

Yeah. So these are 15 individual chapters, and each one is a mini-biography of 15 different people, but you're going through the same events as you go to each one. And one of the things I'm doing in this section is borrowing from my science fiction writer hat the practice of writing a time loop, that you experience something one way, and then you loop back and you experience it slightly differently, and you loop back and you experience it slightly differently. But rather than our time travelers changing events, it is now we are in the point of view of the assassin. Now we are in the point of view of the princess. Now we are in the point of view of the court musician. Now we are in the point of view of the secretary. Now we are in the point of view of Lucrezia Borgia. Now we are in the point of view of Machiavelli.

As we revisit and pass through these tumultuous, tumultuous decades that we often read about via a book about someone who lived in the time, there'll be a book about Leonardo da Vinci which will have these elements in the background, but you're always zooming in only on the parts of it that intersect him. Yeah, and that intersect that figure. But by reading a bunch of short ones in a row, you realize, oh, each of these, every single one of them is vastly incomplete, because the ones from the point of view of a princess don't give me anything about the details and experiences of the courtiers dependent upon them. The one from the point of view of the people for whom the Borgias are the enemy give us a completely different sense from the people for whom the point of view has the Borgia as friend, and all 15 are accurate.

And yet, if you read only one of them, you would come away with... If I imagine that this were suddenly a class, and each of you, I divide it up into, you know, and each of you is reading one of these lives, and then we were going to have a discussion, you would surreally be entering a different Renaissance depending on which one of them you read. And I wanted to do that because on a larger scale, we do that every time we choose which book about a period to read. You know, so as you're in an art gallery and you come out and there's the exhibition bookstore, and there will be a shelf and there will be five books about whatever that was, right? Whether it's ancient Egyptian mummies or whether it's the Italian Renaissance, or whether it's that great exhibit on early Balkan kings that I, that was at the Field Museum last year. There will be five books or maybe eight books about the topic. And what you don't necessarily realize is that each one is going to give you an alternate universe.

And depending on which one you pick up and take home, you're about to believe in a different ancient Balkans, a different Leonardo da Vinci, a different Renaissance. And the ones in my own field that I've looked at, all of them, I'm conscious of how incredibly different they are and how somebody who is a hero and feels almost like a saint in one book will be a terrible villain in the book that is next to it on the shelf, right? And so I wanted to write a book that wasn't that, that was a meta view of that, that zoomed out and talked about that shelf and talked about how many books are parallel universes in the science fictional sense, and all of them are accurate most of the time.

But because each of them is necessarily limited in its scope and asking certain questions, the ones that ask the question, 'Where does the music come from?' yield a different Renaissance from the ones that ask the question, 'What was happening in banking?' which yields a different answer from 'What caused the genius of Leonardo da Vinci?' Right. And each of those is going to include, exclude and make judgment calls about who is helping and who is hindering that bring you into a different cosmos.

Yeah. I mean, one of our clues that the Renaissance is a very artificial, constructed, made-up thing is that there is no consensus as to when it begins and when it ends. And if I go to campus and walk out the front door of my office and turn right and go down the hall toward the political science department, and past that to the romance languages people, and I ask them—sorry, English department. English department is to the right. If I go to the English department and say, 'When is Renaissance?' they'll say, 'Well, the Renaissance is Shakespeare. So it's coming to its peak in 1600 when Hamlet debuts, and it's really getting going by 1550. 1550 to 1600 is the peak of it. There's a little bit before that.' But if I turn left on the same hallway and end up at romance languages and ask my Italian colleagues, 'When is Renaissance?' they'll say, 'Oh, you know, Renaissance is Dante and is really, you know, getting going in 1250 and is starting to fade out by 1400, and it's really over by 1450.' So in one direction down the hall, the Renaissance is over 100 years before it starts.

When I turn the other direction, which is very different from the French Revolution, we can all agree that it was an event, that it occurred, that it had dates. We might talk differently about its predecessors and its consequences, but the French Revolution is real in a way that the Renaissance is a construction. So what is the Renaissance? In general, any given account of it will agree on a vague sense that there was a medieval period characterized possibly by stagnation, etc. That is a tricky claim in itself. And then something happened, which was a period in which some new factor appeared that started to cause a change that made people less medieval and more modern. And that was the beginning of becoming like the world we're in, and that there was a transitional period from medieval to modern when some factor, some thing, some X factor came in and caused and stimulated a bunch of changes that made the world more like us.

In many ways, these constructions of the Renaissance aren't about the Renaissance. They're about how we define modernity. And people will say, when X began, that was the beginning of the path toward modernity. And people will have a different answer to what X is. So you'll run across claims that it is a turn toward rational thought and scientific thinking and reason and humanism, or celebration of the human, and turn away from superstition or the dominance of the organized organizations of religion. You'll get claims that it was banking and trade and the beginning of modern concept of finance and the new sophisticated techniques for lending money at interest, which caused the economy to start to boom and transform and move people around.

You run across claims that it was the advent of new forms of political development, that the first articulations of nationalism and the idea of a nation and a people having a right to self-governance and a shared identity are first articulated by Renaissance figures like Petrarch, Machiavelli. You'll run across different claims of what X is, but whatever X is is always something that the claimant believes is a defining factor of the modern world. And if we look at the history of histories of the Renaissance over the last 150 years, you'll often see patterns between what X factor is in vogue and what political claims people are making on the larger scale.

So, for example, the claim that the Renaissance was caused by the advent of finance and banking and the beginning of proto-capitalism, super popular during the Cold War because it lets America and the West claim to be the inheritors of the Renaissance golden age, and then compare communism to the bad, dark, backwards, superstitious medieval Dark Ages. And this gets us at how and why it's been so hard to eradicate the lie that the Middle Ages were a Dark Age, and that the Renaissance was a golden age. Because it's not true. It's never been true. There's no such thing as a dark age, and there's no such thing as a golden age. It's entirely made up. But it's really narratively satisfying, right? It's easy to believe in cycles of history when we're making up the history for a science fictional world or a fantasy world.

You know, there was an ancient era when there were elves. Everything was great. It was a golden age. There was a fall, there was a dark age, and a dark lord. Like these are very easy, recognizable, satisfying narratives and ways to understand our world. And they're really propagandistically useful. Because if you can claim that the thing you're doing, whether you're a politician or a party or a literary movement or a bank or a corporation, if you can claim that the thing you're doing is going to cause a golden age and is a continuation of what caused the Renaissance, and that your opponents slash predecessors slash competitors are backwards-looking and medieval, you make yourself seem good in a traditional, moderate, reliable, you know, solid as a marble column kind of way.

That is very rhetorically useful, which is why we see the claim of 'X is going to be what I'm doing, I will create a golden age' recur so often rhetorically, which is then why it's been so hard for historians to come along and say, actually, the Renaissance is not a thing and the Dark Ages is not a thing, and none of this is a thing, because we all want it to be, because it's very satisfying.

So, I mean, it's interesting that you ask that because this project is less a result of anything new than a result of taking time to synthetically zoom out and reflect on simply reading and rereading the core books that I was assigned to read as a graduate student when training up in this field. And historiography, right? The history of histories, what past historians have argued about something. When you're in graduate school, you're always sort of force-fed this stuff. And when you write your dissertation, there is this lump toward the beginning, which is the mandatory historiography section, and it's dense and dry, and you have to do it, but you're looking forward to get through it. And it's usually the most stiltedly written section, because you can tell the author's heart was—even the author was bored, and everyone knows it's going to be cut mostly from the public version, but it must be there because you need to understand the background to do stuff. And, you know, if a dissertation is a snake, this is the like lump toward the front where the snake has recently swallowed a rabbit. Right. And you have to get past it to the rest of the dissertation.

And then these things tend to be cut down to just a footnote in an academic book, or completely absent from a publicly facing book. But historiography is awesome and fascinating and fun and full of the human beings who loved what I love in earlier generations. And who are the transmitters, right? And the links through whom this process has been passed. And time after time I would simply be in a bookstore and pick up one of the books for sale about the Renaissance on the table of identical-looking Renaissance books, and be struck by the complete absence of an acknowledgment of the transmission and genealogy of the study of this.

And the study of this is really interesting, because all of these historians like Burckhardt and Kristeller—and I saw a question popping up asking, who are these people? And the answer is there's chapters about them in the book. It'll introduce you to all of them, also to their female peers that usually get left out of the narrative, like Janet Ross and Iris Origo, who are the hostesses at whose houses these men whose books have been read longer and celebrated more. And when I was doing my training, I was assigned to read all the men's books and none of the women's books, even though they were both writing these at the same time. There's a great new book by Margaret Meserve about those women, but there's a section in my book about them as well. And to understand how history is made, we have to understand the human beings who make it. And in the construction of that, I sat down and said, I want to write historiography that is human, lively, emotional, fun, tender, grateful.

And all these people, even though we still read them, we all now believe they're totally wrong, right? All of their theses about what the Renaissance was have been subsumed by better later theories, in the same way that the Big Bang theory will in time be replaced by the better-than-the-Big-Bang theory, which will have elements of the Big Bang theory combined with improvements. Right? That is how knowledge advances. And we need those not-very-good theories, because they're the stepping stones that get us to the work, that gets us to the better ones and to the better ones. And usually when such steps in the genealogy of knowledge are acknowledged, they're acknowledged only negatively and hostilely. Right? Without an acknowledgment of the fact that we invaluably depend upon books that were totally wrong. And I wanted to include that as well.

I certainly can think of many different ways that they, that they are shaping me. And I will give three very different examples. When I was in my—I can't remember if it was my third—I think it was my third year of my PhD was when my invisible disability, severe chronic pain condition, first manifested, and I'm still intermittently incapacitated by it, and I always will be. And it made me start to care about and think about and look for disability, which was not a question that had been among the questions that brought me to the Renaissance. But as I do my analysis of the intellectual figures that I already then loved, I find myself seeing and asking questions about disability everywhere, and you'll see that here and there throughout the book in a way that I wouldn't, because we're shaped by our bodies and we're shaped by our personal experiences in that way.

I'm also shaped by my teaching. And there are conclusions in the book that I absolutely came to through my teaching. In fact, in many ways, much of the book is chunks of my lectures from my Italian Renaissance undergrad course here at UChicago. I talked to those students about the fact that I wrote this book for everybody, but I also wrote this book partly for them. And the conclusion and concluding chapters, which are a study of power and the way that the telling of history deludes us into feeling like we have less power than we do, are conclusions that I came to in the classroom shaped by that experience. The urgency with which I feel that we need to rethink the way we consider power and agency is then absolutely shaped by the larger lived experience, not only of the current and recent political crises and authoritarian surge, and the importance of questions such as resistance, but even deeper than that, things like the social ubiquity of imposter syndrome.

I think about imposter syndrome a lot in terms of what in our culture causes that. And I think one of the big factors at fault is historians and histories, because the way we tend to tell them is to either do great people history, where we're studying X powerful and influential person whose actions shaped this thing. And we're widening this beyond great man history now to be great people history. And we're including a wider diversity of figures, which is good. But when we do that, we only keep and talk about the important parts of their lives, and we curate away all the secondary things that make them feel human and feel like us. Which they didn't curate away in the 19th century.

In the 19th century, there were these giant, massive tomes that footnoted every single time anybody sneezed. Because in the 19th century you win if your book is fatter than the other guy's book. But in the 20th century, you win by having your book elegantly choose what to include and exclude. And so we get Machiavelli the intellectual, and Lorenzo de' Medici, the political leader. But we don't get Machiavelli writing home saying, 'My salary is late and my shirt has holes in it, and I get to look scruffy in front of the Pope tomorrow. And I'm supposed to be representing Florence, which is a textile capital, but I'm going to be there in a shirt with holes all through it, and everyone's going to look at me in front of all the ambassadors, and I'm going to look terrible. Where is my salary? I need to pay my bills.' And we don't quote very often, although I love Janet Ross 1905, who did quote it, one of my very favorite letters from the whole Renaissance, which is: 'Dear Mom, I left my favorite purple bathrobe at home. Please bring it when you come. Sincerely, Lorenzo de' Medici.'

And these moments which make the figures who shaped history feel like us are vital to reminding us that it's not superhumans who are the only ones with agency, as if we were in a superhero movie. We all have agency. We all shape things. And when historians try to tell different stories, they tend to be what I call great forces history rather than great people history, where they'll say, yes, you know, the wealth ratio and population at the beginning of the French Revolution was X percent of wealth in the hands of the elites versus Y percent in the hands of everyone else. Therefore, the war happened, as if what history really is is giant gears of modern times grinding on and grinding poor Charlie Chaplin into the machine, right? And that also makes us feel powerless. Because what are we, then? Except for one grain of sand in the middle of a million grains of sand that don't do anything.

We are bad at telling history that acknowledges that history is 100 million ping-pong balls all bouncing against each other. All of them, in fact, important, with trajectories that affect and change everything else. And everybody having agency, finding ways to tell that by having 15 different perspectives sequentially so that 15 different figures feel like the protagonist is a vital improvement we need to make in order to remind ourselves of the actual power and agency we do have, which when we look at histories, we don't resemble anybody who ever matters or anybody who ever changes the world in history. So we feel like we don't matter and we don't change the world.