Ada Palmer - Myths of "the Renaissance"

So, the book is a weird-ass book. I'll start with that. It isn't structured like anything usual because part of what it's about is trying to talk about the discipline of academic history and how it works and how it continues from the history-making process of our ancestors. So it looks at the question of the Renaissance. Where does the idea come from that there is a golden age? Where does the idea come from that there was a dark age? Are dark ages and golden ages even real? No. But where did this myth come from? And then why has this myth been transformed over time? So it's a story about the invention of a historical time period. And so it looks at Petrarch, the first person to describe the dark ages as dark. It looks at Renaissance figures and why, in their period, it was politically convenient to talk about coming from an age of ash and shadow to a more golden one. But it continues that story forward and it talks about the 17th century and the 18th century and the 19th century and the 20th century and all the different reasons that we love in our imaginations the idea that there was a fall and then there was a grim dark age and then there was a golden age that comes after it. And this is a very satisfying and simple narrative that has been evergreen and useful for different people, especially people who want to claim the Renaissance, because in many ways what the Renaissance really is is the claim that there was some factor which makes modern people different from medieval people, and that when that arrived and began, there was a new era that was the beginning of moving toward modernity. In other words, the Renaissance isn't about the Renaissance at all; it's about our ideas of what makes us modern. And a lot of books that talk about the Renaissance formulate it as, you know, 'the first modern man was...' and then they'll say Machiavelli or they'll say Petrarch or something, and that, you know, the beginning of the modern mind was here. And so when you read a dozen different books about the Renaissance, they'll make a dozen different claims that the arrival of this X factor began the change from what had been a stable, stagnant thing toward the ever-going arc that is modernity. And different people will claim a different thing. And so if I go to a museum gift shop at the Uffizi where there's this shelf that has 10 different books about what is the Renaissance and who are the Medici—because it's Florence, so it's Medici there—depending on which of the 10 you pick up, you're about to go through a portal into a parallel universe in which a different thing will be credited as the heart of the Renaissance, each of them being credited as the heart of what makes us modern. And to give one of the easiest and therefore crassest examples—the others are subtler—one theory that has been proposed about what made the Renaissance begin is the development of modern banking and finance and double-entry bookkeeping and insurance and the growth of these large banks, which meant that sort of the proto-stages of modern banking begin in the late 1300s and in the 1400s. And then as they explode, they facilitate the movement of people, the movement of goods, the movement of ideas via these channels of trade, and that everything burbles up from the advent of banking. And this thesis was really popular during the nastier phases of the Cold War because you could say that therefore the good golden age of the Renaissance was born from the beginnings of capitalism, and you can then compare communism to the bad, stagnant, communal, negative, uncaptitalistic dark age. And you would get not only books about this, where a historian whose book normally sells a thousand copies suddenly sells 10,000 copies because it's hit a nerve with the public, but you also get journalists who turn it into something that they can run in the Times or the Post. So, you know, there would be these flashes of moments where somebody's idea of this thing defined the Renaissance hits popular zeitgeist and feels like, yes, this is what we want modern to be. And all of these different X factors, as I argue in the book, all of them are right. Like, all of them are true. All of them are a real thing that really happened in the Renaissance. It's just that when you try to narrow down to a single factor, you get a weird distortion that is often used for political purposes—like 'capitalism is what caused the Renaissance' political purpose, which is a very simplistic example, but there are dozens of others. And I try in the book to create a portrait of a messy, plural, complicated Renaissance in which all of these different factors are real and all these different factors are happening at the same time and braiding with each other, and we can't define it by one characteristic or say this is what makes the world be turned toward modern. A whole bunch of different processes were underway, intermingling with each other, making the world different, making the world shapeshift, making the world complicated. Some of which were changes that to us can feel modern. Some of which are changes that to us don't feel modern at all. And we have to go forward several more centuries before things feel modern. The book is about the fact that we like golden ages and dark ages. And we've used this myth over and over to make a simplified and less messy past. And if we want to really understand both the past and how history works, we need the messy, complicated, multi-factor one instead.

Yes. Just a touch.

Well, so it's a book that's very important and informative to me. And so here's the autobiographical side that is very candid. Stephen was finishing writing that book when I was finishing my dissertation at Harvard, and we were both at Harvard, and he reached out to me knowing that my dissertation was on the reception of Lucretius in the Renaissance. This is my field that I was finishing my first academic book on, which is called Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance. And so in my final year as a PhD student, he proposed that we trade manuscripts, and he sent me the drafts of The Swerve, and I sent him the draft of Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance. And I went through The Swerve and I gave him lots of details because I knew this field and sort of the technical 'what family was who and who was where' kind of things much more. There are many individual sentences in The Swerve where my craftsmanship is present. But I was then a graduate student, and one thing a graduate student has is the trees but not the forest—which is to say the zoomed-in details of who was where and what was happening and what the thesis of a particular text is, but not the zoomed-out maturity of a historian who can say what are the larger sweeping problems. So every individual paragraph in The Swerve is right, and yet the larger sweeping portrait that it makes is very complicated. And to give a sense of its complication, the year after it came out, when I was then a young professor just starting in my first professorship and my book was on its way out and coming soon, and I had had a big article that was a sort of preview for the book that was in the Journal of the History of Ideas, and then I had the experience at the Renaissance Society of America conference that year, the big conference in my field, of having 37 separate people pull me aside to say how much they hated The Swerve and to ask me, as someone who was doing my dissertation on exactly this and was therefore an authority of the field, to validate their hatred of it.

Because it's a book you can't hate simply. It's a complex book to hate because all the trees are right, and the question of why is the forest giving me the heebie-jeebies when the trees are all right is a really weird feeling. And it was when I had those conversations over and over and over, and I had a semi-answer but I didn't have a real answer, that got me thinking hard about if this book is bothering the experts in this field this much, then it merits a really good deep answer of what is the problem with The Swerve and what is going on. Right? When a book is merely wrong, people are like, 'Well, that book was wrong,' and then they move on and they don't care. And giants in the field don't pull a PhD student aside to ask for validation of their feelings about a book. And so I spent the first decade of my historian career working on an answer to Greenblatt, working on an answer to The Swerve. And he's a great person who, you know, read through my dissertation, gave me good advice which made my book better, and who was sincerely working hard on a good book. He merits a really sophisticated answer, and it took me a long time to get to that answer and a lot of practice at conferences and so on. So that answer is, as you know, in part four, I think it is, of Inventing the Renaissance where I talk about it. It's also in an obscure journal that nobody can get a hold of, which is why I repeated it in the book. But more generally, you know, when you zoom in on Giordano Bruno and you have this dramatic trial, or you zoom in on Poggio and he is trudging through the Alps because he has this great ideal of finding Lucretius, you're 100% correct that those individual panels within the comic book happened, but it's an image as if you've taken two panels from a comic book and blown them up into portraits and hung them on the wall, and you don't have the rest of the narrative that goes around them in which the things that those individuals were doing were part of larger movements. So I'll take Poggio first because, you know, Greenblatt gives us this vivid marching through the snow, searching for Lucretius, but you don't march through the snow searching for Lucretius unless people want it. And similarly, when people talk about Gutenberg inventing the printing press and then there are exponentially more books, why in 1450 and not before, not after, is the movable type printing press happening? It's because there was already a movement of people excited to find this stuff who were looking for it. The people who were exchanging letters with Poggio and sending him money, his friends, his teachers, the correspondents to whom he sent copies of this—there was a movement of people already, right? Just as there was a movement of people which made Gutenberg say, 'Hm, if I could produce 300 copies of a book cheap, I might be able to sell all of them because there are 300 people who are actually building a library who want books,' which is unprecedented at that point, right? That the momentum precedes the instant.

And similarly with the trial of Giordano Bruno, momentum preceding instant. The really useful statistic to make yourself go, 'Wait a minute, this is more complicated than I want,' is that if you go through the records of the Inquisition, of which there are hundreds of thousands of cases of trials—the Roman Inquisition, the Italian one, that's the center where he is—and I've talked and worked with a lot of Inquisition scholars, and this whole project and the desire to respond to Greenblatt led me to understand how the Inquisition works. And so my next book is going to be on censorship and the Inquisition, and I've really dived into this stuff. If you go through the hundreds of thousands of cases of trials in Rome in this period, there are 12 of scientists, and they're all from the same decade. And the Galileo trial and the Giordano Bruno trial are in the same decade, and they're all in that decade because something hot was happening. Not long-term, right? These trials are not what the Inquisition is normally like. They were the hot topic of that moment. And in general, when you go through Inquisition trials, what you'll notice is that there are spikes and then it goes away again because a particular thing is being scapegoated. A particular thing is what people are scared of. And so you'll, for example, go through the Inquisition archive in, um, what is it? Sicily. Let's say we're looking at the archive in Sicily. This is one of the ones I've looked at the numbers for. And you'll be looking at one particular decade. And in that decade there will be, you know, over a thousand trials for Judaizing—this thing where people believed that formerly converted-by-force Jews were infiltrating Christianity, trying to seed it with sort of undermining theology that would make Catholicism collapse from within. This was never true, but it was a thing, a phantom people were afraid of, right? And in one decade there would be a thousand trials for this. In the next decade, in the same place, there would be eight instead of over a thousand. You'd be like, 'What happened?' The answer is that the paranoia about that particular thing spiked and then went away, in exactly the same way we see in modernity where there will be a big spike in anxiety about, like, Dungeons and Dragons. And it'll be all over the news, and then the next decade it's gone and no one cares about it, right? Or the comic book craze that happened in 1954, and then there was, you know, national fear about comic books destroying our youth, and then, like, my students have never even heard that that happened because it happened and it went away, right? So what your question is: when you find something where all the trials of scientists are the same decade, you haven't found what the Inquisition did all the way through the Middle Ages, you found what the Inquisition was doing in the year 1600, between 1590 and 1600, and that something was going on that made them do that. Just as when you have Poggio hiking through the Alps, something was going on in 1415, 1417, that meant that somebody who's suddenly unemployed because his pope got deposed—and when your pope gets deposed, you're out of work—his pope got deposed, he found himself unemployed. What does he do? He has friends who will send him enough money to live on to hike through the Alps looking for these rare manuscripts because there are people who already want them. And so what needed to happen with Greenblatt is the linking of these flash portraits of a real thing that happened to the larger trends that they were part of, to show that this isn't one unique genius doing this thing. And it isn't chance. It's a systemic project in which a lot of people got together and said, 'We want to change the world. We want to change the world this way.'

Yeah. I'm in the process of writing what's going to be a monumentally long article for my website, which I've been putting off for years, about Galileo and trying to debunk the myths of Galileo. One of the things I try to argue with people is that the Galileo trial was about politics and mainly about interpersonal politics. And your section on patronage and the importance of patronage in this period—that was a classic example of where a courtier annoyed his patron. Yep. Quite justifiably. And so the patron stomped on him. And this is what I often say to people: if you read the actual documents of the Galileo trial, science almost never gets mentioned. It's largely about did you break this order in 1616, and also implicitly, did you lie to the Pope by not telling him about that order? And really, he was going to get found guilty regardless because the Pope had basically said, 'Find a way.' So it had virtually nothing to do with science. Science was peripheral. Bruno as well, right? He had already been examined by the Inquisition twice, and both of those were 'don't you know, be good and go home.' But the third time, it's his own patron that denounces him and is pissed at him and thinks that he's a charlatan and has been scamming the guy. And when your own patron hurls you to the wolves, the wolves devour you, because this is a system in which the judicial system itself and the patronage system are intertwined with each other. And there is the assumption that the vast majority of legal cases will result in the patron talking to the people in power, the people in power relenting because of the trading of favors. Yeah. And you know, I don't want to derail fully onto the issue of how patronage works, right? But there's that really telling scene in Richard III when King Edward IV is on the throne and he's upset and a bunch of stuff is happening, and then a dude we've never seen before and we'll never see again comes in and kneels before the king and says, 'My servant has murdered a guy. I must beg your majesty to get him off.' And Edward gives a speech that concludes in, you know, 'This is totally unjust, but I have to do it anyway,' because that's how things work, and does, right? And it's not even a 'my man is innocent, please protect him, your majesty.' It's 'my guy is totally guilty, totally murdered this dude. However, I work for you, therefore please get him off.' And the king says yes, and 'I have to do it even though I know it is unjust,' right? And that really is how the political system works at the time. The social safety net is a patronage system, and if you are in the patronage system, then you get the mild punishment. You get the small fine and the chide and 'don't do it again' for things that are on the books as a capital crime. So we're all aware how, you know, sodomy is on the books as a capital crime. But 99% of the time when you're denounced for sodomy, you talk to your patron, they talk to people, you apologize, you pay a small fine, you're let off. If you've pissed off your patron, that's when it goes all the way to the end, and you get genuinely cracked down upon. We have these wonderful letters of Machiavelli and his friends about a point in Rome when there was a particular cardinal at a bee in his bonnet about gay men having too much gay sex. And you know, the friend is writing to Machiavelli saying, 'Everybody I know who doesn't work for a cardinal is really scared.' And they're all trying to get a job working for a cardinal because if you work for a cardinal, you can be as gay as you like and do anything, right? Which is what protects Michelangelo and others.

I mean, you know, if we use the dark ages as a term to mean we have few textual sources for this period, right? Because that's the way historians really started using it. There's two different inventions of the dark ages. There's Petrarch, who we'll get to in a bit, you know, back in my period, saying the previous century was crap, let's make something better, and referring to the age in which he lives, not the age before him, but the age in which he is, as an age of ash and shadow and a bad thing that has come after the fall of Rome. And so here he is, he's someone who lives through the Black Death, right? So we are in the late 1300s when he says, 'This is an age of ash and shadow. Let us collaborate to build a better one.' And I hope we'll come back to that a lot because that's where Poggio comes from. But the other half of the term dark age is historians used it to mean the period when we didn't have very many textual sources. And we had a lot of textual sources from antiquity, we had a lot of textual sources from later, but then we had very few textual sources in the middle, for the very practical reasons that when medieval Europe lost access to papyrus because there were pirates on the seas and you couldn't import it safely from Egypt. And so they're not writing on cheap papyrus anymore. They're writing on expensive dead sheep. And a dead sheep is a much more expensive thing than a papyrus. If you've ever tried to buy a sheet of paper and tried to buy a whole sheep, you have understood this difference, only slightly exaggerated. Papyrus being plant-based and much less human labor than the rearing of an animal and the tanning of skin. Much less book production can happen because a single medieval book costs in labor as much as a house and in money as much as a house, and therefore there are few books produced. And 19th-century historians who are very dependent on the textual tradition for writing history therefore think of this as a patch when we don't know what happened because there's very little history. Now, modern historians really don't think about it the same way because we've developed all these great techniques to write histories of things using sources that aren't text, because we use DNA and we use carbon dating and we use, you know, sonic prints of foundations and we use what's stuck in your tooth enamel and all these wonderful techniques that 19th-century historians, when they named the dark ages, didn't anticipate we would ever have. And we can now write deep, robust, complicated histories that cover social class and upheaval and economics and so on, even in times and places when we have almost no texts or no texts, right? And there are people who study the Hittites who are like, they didn't write down their language. The Hittites only have one library. It's a list of oaths people made to mountain gods. So they can look up if somebody accidentally broke their oath to a mountain god and see whether the mountain god is now angry. And that's why there's the plague. That is the entire textual history of the Hittites, right? And yet we can write a history of the Hittites by using material culture, by using metallurgy, by using trade networks, by using horse bones. And so inasmuch as the dark ages were named that by historians, they aren't dark anymore because we have DNA and horse bones. We know how to write a history without text. And so it was dark and now it's bright because we've shone other lights of science on it, in exactly the same way that scientists explore cells or Pluto, right? And Pluto or the dark side of the moon is an exact example, right? The dark side of the moon, which isn't dark. It's just the other side. So we couldn't see it. We couldn't see the Middle Ages when we were using only text. And now we can because we've got technology to send our satellite to the other side of the moon. We've got technology to understand what's going on in what had been a textual dark age. If there is going to be another textual dark age, it will be our present because all of our records are digital and they're hard to archive. And if the software isn't supported in the future, then this might be an area where very few of our sources survive, historians are very worried about actually.

So I would respond twofold. Hey, if I had a time machine and could go to the 19th century and talk to the medieval history department at Oxford and tell them, 'We're going to have all of these amazing tools and we're going to be able to answer all of these amazing questions about your period that you can't now because you don't have the technology,' they would cry, right? They would be so happy and they would say, 'I never imagined the technology would come that would make our dark age light.' Right? The people who used this...

word, who coined this word, would say the dark age has become light now. And they would be overjoyed to know that we have these tools and can open the door and lift the veil upon something that they loved passionately and would love to know more about. So that's half the answer. The other half of the answer is there's a big distorting difference between how impressive and golden an era looks from the stuff left from it.

And what it was actually like to live through. And when you go to a museum collection or, you know, etc., and you see medieval stuff and you see Renaissance stuff, you're not seeing all the things that were there. You're seeing the stuff that was consistently preserved by the centuries in between. And that process of preservation is often an unconscious process of censorship. And I will give an easy to understand example and then a hard and then the Renaissance example. Right? So almost all books from Roman antiquity that were lost to us were not lost in the burning of the library of Alexandria etc. They were lost between the fourth and the sixth centuries AD when the papyri were crumbling because papyrus has a short lifespan and Europe did not have the papyrus to copy over all these crumbling books but they copied over everything that they could but the copying was done in the centers of learning in the scriptoria in the monasteries which were there because um so Benedict said monks should read books. He said a monk should read a new book every year. So every monastery had to have scriptoria.

So the monks copied over the books and there are twice as many, 10 times as many actually, 10 times as many books as they could copy. So they chose which books to copy and they copied the books they liked which is books monklike. And this is why we have more books by St. Augustine than the entirety of classical Latin. Not because the monks deliberately decided to let the classical Latin rot, but because since something had to rot, the monks copied over the books they liked. Right? This is an act of sort of unintentional censorship that distorts what survives from antiquity to tip it toward things monks liked, right? So similarly when museums and archives and churches make decisions about what art do we preserve, what art do we paint over, what art do I purchase from the small rotting church where it's going to rot, what art do I keep, what art do I destroy, people do so with criteria and because the propaganda of the Renaissance managed to make Italian art and culture from a very specific moment in time be celebrated and be beautiful and be what people wanted to have to claim that they were cultured and we can talk in a moment about why it was then but you know they did it. The stuff from that moment got disproportionately preserved compared to the medieval stuff which would be disproportionately painted over left to rot destroyed etc.

And when you go to a museum collection and you're like, there isn't very much medieval stuff and what there is is sort of okay and there's all this Renaissance stuff and it's beautiful. That's half because we kept all the Renaissance stuff and we didn't keep as much of the medieval stuff. A lot of it is gone. And because we expect the Renaissance to be beautiful and we forefronted it, we put it on our postcards and we see it and we look at it and we're learn to process it when we learn what taste is. Our idea of what is beautiful is actually shaped more by the Renaissance. If you look at Baroque art, you'll be like, 'Oh, that's too much over the top.' Right? Even though Baroque art is using all the skills of Renaissance art and yet something visceral in us says that's like gaudy like the set of the movie of the Titanic. I feel negatively about that. It is too ornate and too gaudy. That's not natural to a human brain. That's we've been shown images of the Baroque association with negative things like the decadence of the Titanic and especially Spain.

And if you're coming from the Anglo world, you have to remember that there was a vast propaganda machine trying to make us dislike everything Spanish for you know the whole formation of our civilization over the past 200 years that has made us like Renaissance and find it beautiful and tasteful because it is a language of artistic power that we use to communicate positive messages and we use the art of decadence and the art of primitiveness of the medieval to communicate negativity. So, if you've spent all of your time, you know, playing a video game where the good guy's architecture looks like Renaissance architecture, the bad guy's architecture looks like either medieval architecture or Baroque architecture, and you've been doing this your whole life, it trains us to find one thing beautiful and the other's not. So, there's a curated element of it, right? Sure. The museum collections themselves just by sitting there are not neutral. They are filtered by the preferences and tastes of the centuries that came between us and them. Just as what we have from antiquity is disproportionately Christianity shaped, right? Both Christian texts and texts that were Christianizable like Aristotle with fewer of the wonderful works of the Hedonists and the Epicureans not because they were lost but because when a monk sat down to copy something over he liked Aristotle better than he liked Epicurus. That has affected the Middle Ages too.