Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age
Autor Ada Palmeren Limba Engleză Hardback – 28 mar 2025
Recomandăm Inventing the Renaissance ca o resursă esențială pentru nivelul de licență și master în istorie, fiind o lucrare ce provoacă fundamentele modului în care predăm și înțelegem tranziția spre modernitate. Descoperim aici o deconstrucție fascinantă a miturilor pe care istoricii le-au țesut în ultimii două sute de ani în jurul acestei epoci. Ada Palmer nu se mulțumește să enumere realizări artistice, ci investighează „de ce” am ales să vedem Renașterea ca pe o perioadă de aur, ignorând adesea contextul disperat, războaiele crude și pragmatismul economic brutal al epocii.
Subliniem modul ingenios în care autoarea integrează analiza economică — menționând, de pildă, că o carte putea costa cât o vilă — pentru a explica dependența gânditorilor de elitele financiare precum familia Medici. Structura cărții este neconvențională: după o primă parte dedicată istoriografiei și modului în care Florența a devenit o sursă de auto-confirmare istorică, Ada Palmer ne oferă portrete vii ale unor figuri precum Machiavelli, privit aici ca patriot, sau familia Borgia.
Comparabil cu Palgrave Advances in Renaissance Historiography de J. Woolfson în rigoarea academică, volumul de față se distinge prin stilul narativ vibrant și personal, fiind actualizat pentru noile direcții care pun la îndoială excepționalismul european. Deși Ada Palmer este cunoscută pentru seria de speculație politică Terra Ignota (începând cu Too Like the Lightning), în această monografie ea își folosește talentul de narator pentru a scoate istoria din arhivele prăfuite și a o plasa în sfera dezbaterii vii. Este o lectură care echilibrează erudiția profundă a unui doctorat la Harvard cu verva unui podcaster modern.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780226837970
ISBN-10: 0226837971
Pagini: 768
Ilustrații: 33 halftones, 3 line drawings, 3 tables
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 51 mm
Greutate: 1.13 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press
ISBN-10: 0226837971
Pagini: 768
Ilustrații: 33 halftones, 3 line drawings, 3 tables
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 51 mm
Greutate: 1.13 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press
De ce să citești această carte
Această carte se adresează studenților la istorie și pasionaților de științe umaniste care doresc să treacă dincolo de clișeele manualelor clasice. Cititorul câștigă o perspectivă critică asupra modului în care se fabrică istoria, înțelegând că Renașterea a fost o epocă a supraviețuirii și a ingeniozității născute din disperare, nu doar un muzeu de artă în aer liber. Este un instrument metodologic rar care face istoriografia accesibilă și antrenantă.
Despre autor
Ada Palmer este profesor de istorie la Universitatea din Chicago, specializată în Renașterea italiană și istoria gândirii radicale, cu un doctorat obținut la Harvard. Dincolo de cariera academică, este o figură polivalentă: compozitoare de muzică a cappella și scriitoare de science-fiction premiată cu premiul Hugo pentru seria Terra Ignota. Această dublă identitate, de cercetător riguros și narator speculativ, îi permite să abordeze istoria modernă timpurie cu o prospețime unică, transformând analiza documentelor de arhivă într-o experiență intelectuală captivantă și accesibilă publicului larg prin blogul său, ExUrbe.com.
Descriere scurtă
A New Yorker Best Book of 2025
An irreverent new take on the Renaissance, which reveals it as anything but Europe’s golden age.
From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we’re told) heralds the dawning of a new world—a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we’ve told ourselves about Europe’s not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity.
Palmer’s Renaissance is altogether desperate. Troubled by centuries of conflict, she argues, Europe looked to a long-lost Roman Empire (even its education practices) to save it from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similarly nostalgic vision, only now they looked to the Renaissance and told a partial story. To right this wrong, Palmer offers fifteen provocative portraits of Renaissance men and women (some famous, some obscure) whose lives reveal a far more diverse, fragile, and wild Renaissance than its glowing reputation suggests.
An irreverent new take on the Renaissance, which reveals it as anything but Europe’s golden age.
From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we’re told) heralds the dawning of a new world—a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we’ve told ourselves about Europe’s not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity.
Palmer’s Renaissance is altogether desperate. Troubled by centuries of conflict, she argues, Europe looked to a long-lost Roman Empire (even its education practices) to save it from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similarly nostalgic vision, only now they looked to the Renaissance and told a partial story. To right this wrong, Palmer offers fifteen provocative portraits of Renaissance men and women (some famous, some obscure) whose lives reveal a far more diverse, fragile, and wild Renaissance than its glowing reputation suggests.
Notă biografică
Ada Palmer is associate professor of early modern European history and the College at the University of Chicago. She is the author of many books, including Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance and the award-winning Terra Ignota series of novels.
Cuprins
Family Trees
Prologue: The Great and Terrible Renaissance
1. Machiavelli the Patriot: SPQF
Part I: Why You Shouldn’t Believe Anyone (Including Me) About the Renaissance
2. Everybody Wants to Claim a Golden Age
3. The Flexible X-Factor of the Renaissance
4. Time for a Tangent About Vikings! (It’s Relevant, I Swear…)
5. The Quest for the Renaissance X-Factor Begins
6. Super Sexy Secular Humanism
7. A New X-Factor: The Baron Thesis and Proto-Democracy
8. Another X-Factor: Enter Economists!
9. Florence: A Self-Fulfilling Source Base
10. What Makes People Start to Study the Renaissance
11. Lorenzo de Medici: Hero or Villain?
12. Or Were We Brought Here by Romance?
13. The Invention of the Middle Ages
14. The Un-Modern Renaissance
15. Why Did Ada Palmer Start Studying the Renaissance?
Part II: Desperate Times and Desperate Measures
16. Desperate Times
17. Cruel Wars for Light Causes
18. A Strange Peace, A Stranger War
19. Rome: The Eternal Problem City
20. Medieval but Ever-So-Much-More-So
21. The Desperate Measure: Reviving Antiquity
Intermission: Are You Remembering Not to Believe Me?
22. Antiquity Was Not New Either
23. The Umanista’s Rival: Scholasticism
24. Studia Humanitatis—The Words That Sting and Bite
25. Italian Renaissance Becomes European Renaissance
26. The Supremacy of Antiquity
27. Is This About Virtue or Power?
Part III: Let’s Meet Some People from This Golden Age
28. Patrons and Clients All the Way Up
29. Our Friends So Far
30. Alessandra Strozzi: Labors of Exile
31. Manetto Amanatini: There Is a World Elsewhere
32. Francesco Filelfo: Between Republics and Monarchies
33. Montesecco: An Assassin Fears for His Soul
34. Ippolita Maria Visconti Sforza: The Princess and the Peace
35. Josquin des Prez: The International Renaissance
36. Angelo Poliziano: Patronage Repays
37. Savonarola: Saint or Demon?
38. Alessandra Scala: The Girl of Our Dreams
39. Raffaello Maffei il Volterrano: A Scholar Fears for His Soul Too
40. Lucrezia Borgia: Princess of Nowhere
41. Camilla Bartolini Rucellai: Spirit of the Last Republic
42. Michelangelo: The Great and Terrible
Interlude: Let’s Ground Ourselves in Time
43. Julia the Sibyl: A Prophetess in an Age of Science
44. Our Friend Machiavelli
Machiavelli Part 2: The Three Branches of Ethics
Machiavelli Part 3: Enter the Prince
Machiavelli Part 4: Julius II the Warrior Pope
Coda: Many Machiavellis
Part IV: What Was Renaissance Humanism?
45. What Was Behind the Curtain? Garin vs. Kristeller
46. Who Gets to Count as a Renaissance Humanist?
47. Back to Our X-Factors
48. Once Upon a Time at Vergil’s House…
49. Follow the Money!
50. It’s Getting Weird in Florence
51. Scraps of Philosophia
52. Was There Renaissance Secular Humanism?
53. How (Not) to Dodge the Renaissance Inquisition
54. Why We Care Whether Machiavelli Was an Atheist
55. Was Machiavelli a Humanist? Part 1
56. Virtue Politics
57. Was Machiavelli a Humanist? Part 2
Part V: The Try Everything Age
58. An Exponential Information Revolution
59. We Can’t Just Abelard Harder Anymore
60. The Presumptive Authority of the Past
61. The New Philosophy
62. A Brief History of Progress
63. Progresses
Part VI: Conclusion – Who Has Power in History?
64. Great Forces History vs. Individual Choice History
65. The Papal Election of 2016
66. Which Horseman of the Apocalypse?
67. What Did the Black Death Really Cause?
Sources and Recommended Reading
Notes
Acknowledgments
Image Credits
Index
About the Author
Prologue: The Great and Terrible Renaissance
1. Machiavelli the Patriot: SPQF
Part I: Why You Shouldn’t Believe Anyone (Including Me) About the Renaissance
2. Everybody Wants to Claim a Golden Age
3. The Flexible X-Factor of the Renaissance
4. Time for a Tangent About Vikings! (It’s Relevant, I Swear…)
5. The Quest for the Renaissance X-Factor Begins
6. Super Sexy Secular Humanism
7. A New X-Factor: The Baron Thesis and Proto-Democracy
8. Another X-Factor: Enter Economists!
9. Florence: A Self-Fulfilling Source Base
10. What Makes People Start to Study the Renaissance
11. Lorenzo de Medici: Hero or Villain?
12. Or Were We Brought Here by Romance?
13. The Invention of the Middle Ages
14. The Un-Modern Renaissance
15. Why Did Ada Palmer Start Studying the Renaissance?
Part II: Desperate Times and Desperate Measures
16. Desperate Times
17. Cruel Wars for Light Causes
18. A Strange Peace, A Stranger War
19. Rome: The Eternal Problem City
20. Medieval but Ever-So-Much-More-So
21. The Desperate Measure: Reviving Antiquity
Intermission: Are You Remembering Not to Believe Me?
22. Antiquity Was Not New Either
23. The Umanista’s Rival: Scholasticism
24. Studia Humanitatis—The Words That Sting and Bite
25. Italian Renaissance Becomes European Renaissance
26. The Supremacy of Antiquity
27. Is This About Virtue or Power?
Part III: Let’s Meet Some People from This Golden Age
28. Patrons and Clients All the Way Up
29. Our Friends So Far
30. Alessandra Strozzi: Labors of Exile
31. Manetto Amanatini: There Is a World Elsewhere
32. Francesco Filelfo: Between Republics and Monarchies
33. Montesecco: An Assassin Fears for His Soul
34. Ippolita Maria Visconti Sforza: The Princess and the Peace
35. Josquin des Prez: The International Renaissance
36. Angelo Poliziano: Patronage Repays
37. Savonarola: Saint or Demon?
38. Alessandra Scala: The Girl of Our Dreams
39. Raffaello Maffei il Volterrano: A Scholar Fears for His Soul Too
40. Lucrezia Borgia: Princess of Nowhere
41. Camilla Bartolini Rucellai: Spirit of the Last Republic
42. Michelangelo: The Great and Terrible
Interlude: Let’s Ground Ourselves in Time
43. Julia the Sibyl: A Prophetess in an Age of Science
44. Our Friend Machiavelli
Machiavelli Part 2: The Three Branches of Ethics
Machiavelli Part 3: Enter the Prince
Machiavelli Part 4: Julius II the Warrior Pope
Coda: Many Machiavellis
Part IV: What Was Renaissance Humanism?
45. What Was Behind the Curtain? Garin vs. Kristeller
46. Who Gets to Count as a Renaissance Humanist?
47. Back to Our X-Factors
48. Once Upon a Time at Vergil’s House…
49. Follow the Money!
50. It’s Getting Weird in Florence
51. Scraps of Philosophia
52. Was There Renaissance Secular Humanism?
53. How (Not) to Dodge the Renaissance Inquisition
54. Why We Care Whether Machiavelli Was an Atheist
55. Was Machiavelli a Humanist? Part 1
56. Virtue Politics
57. Was Machiavelli a Humanist? Part 2
Part V: The Try Everything Age
58. An Exponential Information Revolution
59. We Can’t Just Abelard Harder Anymore
60. The Presumptive Authority of the Past
61. The New Philosophy
62. A Brief History of Progress
63. Progresses
Part VI: Conclusion – Who Has Power in History?
64. Great Forces History vs. Individual Choice History
65. The Papal Election of 2016
66. Which Horseman of the Apocalypse?
67. What Did the Black Death Really Cause?
Sources and Recommended Reading
Notes
Acknowledgments
Image Credits
Index
About the Author
Recenzii
“[Palmer] goes deep into the minutiae of the lives of Renaissance luminaries to show that, far from being idealists reaching for the rebirth of a better world, they were the usual human mixture of self-promotion, self-delusion, and fakery. . . . For Palmer, then, the Renaissance is not so much a golden age as a glittering illusion—assembled, reassembled, and ultimately undone by the longings of those who came after.”
"It’s fair to say that the breezier tone of that genre has been turbo-boosted here: every page is a model of mateyness, filled with the millennial patter of social-media-ready irony."
"In this engaging, bewitching, and eminently readable doorstop of a book, Palmer invites us to reconsider the Renaissance, what it promised, what it delivered, and what it actually bequeathed to later generations."
"Nonfiction that is humorous yet erudite. . . . Palmer essentially deconstructs the Renaissance and talks about why it had to be invented and how, rather than being a set timeframe, bits and pieces of it occurred over hundreds of years. . . This is fun reading on an absorbing topic."
"In her book Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer unpacks how historians through the ages created the idea of a Renaissance 'golden age' for their own reasons—and then disagreed with each over the following centuries about the era’s definition, time period, geography and substance."
"Palmer is a writer who ranges easily across millennia and media, at home in scholarly, imaginative, and breezily conversational modes."
"The book is quite accessible, but there is a lot of serious scholarship behind the slang and the playfulness: it is that rare general-reader book that can enlighten and challenge scholars, that rare scholarly monograph that can engage the general reader."
“You may know Ada Palmer as a science-fiction novelist, but she’s also a historian at the University of Chicago who focuses on the Renaissance. This is a chunky book with many parts, but it’s very readable and thought-provoking. You’ll think differently about the Renaissance—and about how history works.”
“A book about why societies invent Golden Ages, what they get out of them, and the real changes that grow from these myths. It’s also full of really juicy gossip about the Medici family, explanations of what the hell Machiavelli was thinking, and descriptions of how badly it sucks to get your arts funding from oligarchs. . . . Palmer has a mycologist’s enthusiasm for the brightly-colored fungus of the Renaissance, and it’s infectious.”
"A lively introduction to Italy at the end of the Middle Ages, written in a humorous and highly readable style."
“[Palmer] offers her readers a genuinely new portrait of the Renaissance, making it clear why thinking about the Renaissance continues to matter to so many, even today.”
"A wry look at the mythmaking of an era. . . . Palmer argues that many things we associate with the Renaissance—innovations in art, science, philosophy and politics—actually began gradually during the Middle Ages. Also, this myth of a golden age was carefully crafted by historians and has been used repeatedly throughout history to legitimize authority and political agendas."
"[Inventing the Renaissance is] an incredibly impressive work, both of scholarship and popular history, and one absolutely worthy of the time its 700+ pages require."
"What is the message to take home from the long intervention of the American historian? The Renaissance was not a 'rebirth' in the modern sense and it was not the comforting fable of linear progress. It was rather a troubled era, certainly fascinating but instrumentalized by moderns as a distorted mirror to project their own illusions."
“Inventing the Renaissance does something magical: it manages to take a tightly held conviction (that there was a thing in European history called ‘the Renaissance’), dismantle it with humor and intelligence, then put it back together as something different and more true to the past itself. But maybe more importantly, Palmer’s expertise and storytelling help us better understand how golden ages are imagined, and why rejecting those invented constructions of the past provides us with hope as we confront our own contemporary world. As she says herself: ‘We can do better than the Renaissance.’”
“Generous, brilliant, and inviting, Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance is a triumph. This is a work of deep erudition worn lightly but excitingly that offers a history of the Renaissance with a unique and personal imprint. If you are a scholar of the period, you will find new insights and interpretations, and if you are coming to the Renaissance for the first time, you will find an engaging and eloquent companion in Palmer."
Descriere
Descriere de la o altă ediție sau format:
The Renaissance is one of the most studied and celebrated eras of history. Spanning the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of modernity, it has come to symbolise the transformative rebirth of knowledge, art, culture and political thought in Europe. And for the last two hundred years, historians have struggled to describe what makes this famous golden age unique.
In Inventing the Renaissance, acclaimed historian Ada Palmer provides a fresh perspective on what makes this epoch so captivating. Her witty and irreverent journey through the fantasies historians have constructed about the period show how its legend derives more from later centuries' mythmaking than from the often grim reality of the period itself. She examines its defining figures and movements: the enduring legacy of Niccolò Machiavelli, the rediscovery of the classics, the rise of the Medici and fall of the Borgias, the astonishing artistic achievements of Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Cellini, the impact of the Inquisition and the expansion of secular Humanism. Palmer also explores the ties between culture and money: books, for example, could cost as much as grand houses, so the period's innovative thinkers could only thrive with the help of the super-rich. She offers fifteen provocative and entertaining character portraits of Renaissance men and women, some famous, some obscure, whose intersecting lives show how the real Renaissance was more unexpected, more international and, above all, more desperate than its golden reputation suggests.
Drawing on her popular blogs and writing with her characteristic energy and wit, Palmer presents the Renaissance as we have never seen it before. Colloquial, funny and brilliant, you would never expect a work of deep scholarship to make you alternately laugh and cry.
The Renaissance is one of the most studied and celebrated eras of history. Spanning the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of modernity, it has come to symbolise the transformative rebirth of knowledge, art, culture and political thought in Europe. And for the last two hundred years, historians have struggled to describe what makes this famous golden age unique.
In Inventing the Renaissance, acclaimed historian Ada Palmer provides a fresh perspective on what makes this epoch so captivating. Her witty and irreverent journey through the fantasies historians have constructed about the period show how its legend derives more from later centuries' mythmaking than from the often grim reality of the period itself. She examines its defining figures and movements: the enduring legacy of Niccolò Machiavelli, the rediscovery of the classics, the rise of the Medici and fall of the Borgias, the astonishing artistic achievements of Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Cellini, the impact of the Inquisition and the expansion of secular Humanism. Palmer also explores the ties between culture and money: books, for example, could cost as much as grand houses, so the period's innovative thinkers could only thrive with the help of the super-rich. She offers fifteen provocative and entertaining character portraits of Renaissance men and women, some famous, some obscure, whose intersecting lives show how the real Renaissance was more unexpected, more international and, above all, more desperate than its golden reputation suggests.
Drawing on her popular blogs and writing with her characteristic energy and wit, Palmer presents the Renaissance as we have never seen it before. Colloquial, funny and brilliant, you would never expect a work of deep scholarship to make you alternately laugh and cry.