"In this new book, the award-winning novelist and renowned historian Ada Palmer seeks to dismantle the myth of the Renaissance as a "golden age" compared to the plague- and war-ridden Middle Ages. For those who inhabited what we now think of as the Renaissance, Palmer argues, it was "a darker, grimmer age than the 'dark ages' that preceded it." The book, then, is as much about the real Renaissance as it is about our constructions of it, taking a close look at how the myth of the Renaissance as a golden age came about. Palmer ably shows how this myth was constructed for different political reasons at different times, and she contrasts it with the lived reality of the actual Renaissance, which she sees as a troubled period defined by the attempt to end centuries of war and conflict by way of a revival of the educational aims and methods of ancient Rome. The author peppers her book with fifteen mini-biographies ranging from famous figures-including Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Lucrezia Borgia-to lesser-known ones, examining why history remembers some characters over others and showing in detail how different figures struggled with the trials and tribulations of their time"--
An irreverent new take on the Renaissance, which reveals it as anything but Europes golden age.
From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (were told) heralds the dawning of a new worlda 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 weve told ourselves about Europes not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity.
Palmers 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 them from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similar 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 golden reputation suggests.
