The book that got me to purchase an e-reader! The paperback edition of this is a brick and I couldn’t handle hauling it around anymore, but I really was enjoying it and wanted to finish it. The e-reader made this possible, and I am pleased to say that I now have a much better grasp of this period and the historiography around it. The Renaissance is not my specialty so I learned a ton from this book. Ada Palmer does a fantastic job at showing the craft and art of doing historical research and how different interests and desires of the person doing the research can have a huge impact on how we see an era or a historical figure. There were a lot of takeaways here, but some main ones for me was how the concept of the Renaissance itself is a invention that’s been used to obfuscate the complex realities of what life was really like, and the different waves of historical scholarship and how they reflect the tensions and longings of each era. Based on what we want to see in the past to support how we see ourselves, we will project that back onto the past and ignore what undermines our vision of some glorious golden age. For example, the continued religiosity and superstition into what people want to see as an increasingly “humanist” (Palmer does a lovely job exploring what humanist even means) and scientific era challenges and upsets people, so we tend to ignore that or try to explain it away.
Palmer points out that this denies history its true nuance and complexity, which I fully agree with. I also really enjoyed the times she would examine historical figures who have had bad reputations or who have been seen a certain way and how she was able to broaden and question that reputation. Palmer is an extremely smart person and knows a huge amount about this area, although she does a great job at reminding the reader that they should question her as well and keep her prejudices in mind. This book is a prime example of why I do love history, because you can examine things from so many different points of view and there’s always something else interesting to learn that has a resonating impact on the current day.
There was a chunk in the middle that I struggled through where Palmer talks about philosophy for a while — mine is unfortunately not a philosophical mind generally, and I had to plow my way along until she got back to historiography. This is a long book (767 pages) so it’s covering a huge amount of ground, some of which I found more compelling and some of which I found less (at one point she gives you pocket biographies of 15 people, and being about halfway through and knowing there were still a bunch more to go was a bit grinding for me), but the package as a whole is so good that I thoroughly enjoyed my time engaging with the ideas presented here. If you love history and are curious about the Renaissance and what it even is, this is the perfect read.
