Inventing the Renaissance with Ada Palmer

Given that the term literally means “rebirth”, the Renaissance throws some not-so-subtle shade on the period that comes before it. So, where did the idea of the Renaissance actually come from? And was it truly a golden age? This week, Danièle speaks with Ada Palmer about Petrarch, Machiavelli, atheism, and how we should look at the period formerly known as the Renaissance.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode two hundred and ninety
four of The Medieval Podcast. I'm Danielle Zabowski, also known
as the five Minute Medievalist. It's true the medievalist can
sometimes be a wee bit sensitive about our historical era,
especially given the regularity with which people tend to disparage
and dismiss the entire period. So maybe it's no surprise

(00:38):
that a simple pair of words might just set your
favorite medieval historian's teeth on edge. The Renaissance. Given that
the term literally means rebirth, the Renaissance throws some not
so subtle shade on the period that comes before it.
So where did the idea of the Renaissance actually come from?
And was it truly a golden Age? This week I

(01:00):
spoke with doctor Ada Palmer about the birth of the Renaissance.
Aida is, as they say, a Renaissance woman, not just
in her scholarship on the period, but by virtue of
the fact that she does it all. She's a writer
of sci fi and fantasy fiction, including the Terra ignot
A series, as well as nonfiction, including reading Lucretius in
the Renaissance. She's also a composer, singer, blogger, and manga

(01:24):
and anime consultant. Her new book is Inventing the Renaissance,
the myth of a Golden Age. Our conversation on Petrarch, Machiavelli,
the notion of progress, and how we should look at
the period formerly known as the Renaissance is coming up
right after this. Well, welcome to the Medieval Podcast. This

(01:46):
is a place where I hope you will feel at
home as somebody who talks about the Renaissance and reclaiming
it sort of from this idea of dark ages that
is coming out of So thank you so much for
coming on and telling us about your new book.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
This is a treat I've been looking forward.

Speaker 1 (02:02):
Oh I'm glad to hear that I've been looking forward
to this too. So okay, As a medievalist, I'm always
telling people the Renaissance is not really like a rebirth.
All this stuff existed, and the question everyone asked me
then is where the heck did this come from?

Speaker 3 (02:18):
So where did this come from?

Speaker 4 (02:20):
Right?

Speaker 2 (02:20):
And that's that's what this book is. I mean, I
conceived it. I'm good friends with David Perry, co author
of The Bright Ages, and he and I spent a
long time discussing almost imagining this as Bright Age's volume two,
where Bright Ages is about the Middle Ages and how
great they are, and then you get this, but if
they're so great, why do we think that there's terrible?

(02:42):
And that's a question, and that is a Renaissance question,
because it's the Renaissance that comes up with this idea
of deciding to describe the previous era as an age
of ash and shadow. So inventing the Renaissance is partly
about the Renaissance invention of the Dark Ages and the
first figures at the end of the thirteen hundreds and
in the early fourteen hundreds who call this age of

(03:03):
dark Age and then call their age something else. But
it's also partly about the nineteenth century and the twentieth
century and why this lie keeps being told because it's
a really great lie, because the idea that there are
dark Ages and golden Ages is a really appealing idea.
You can make a wonderful plot for your fantasy world

(03:25):
where long ago there was a Golden Age and then
a dark lord came, then there was a dark Age,
or long ago there was a golden wonderful republic. You
can have you in your science fiction story, right, the
idea of golden ages and dark ages coming in a
kind of a cycle of history. It's very narratively satisfying.
So that's one reason it's hard to get rid of.
And the other is that it's really politically useful because

(03:47):
the rhetoric that there are dark ages and golden ages
means you can say, my political party, my business, my
startup corporation, my policy, my bank, whatever it is, will
be like a golden age, or create a golden age,
and to give us a golden age, and my rival
slash predecessor, slash other party slash opponents slash the other

(04:10):
company you could use is like the bad, no good
dark ages. And this has been used as a rhetorical
tool by political leader after political leader, party after party,
corporation after corporation, ideology after ideology over the course of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in the nineteenth century

(04:31):
when it gets really harvested by nationalism, and a lot
of the construction of the Renaissance versus the Dark Ages
is a nationalistic construct. So I wanted to as a
Renaissance historian, I'm always hanging out with my medievalist friends,
and they're always like everyone bad mouse our guys, and
everyone loves your guys, and I'm like, yes, and it's

(04:51):
my guy'ss fault, and I apologize on behalf of my guys.
It's totally them. Every medievalist deserves an apology from the
Renaissance for screwing up your stuff. So because it is
archives's fault.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
Yes, well, thank you for saying that. We've been waiting
a long time to hear it, right, So this started
a really long time ago. So maybe the question is
why do medievalist hate Petrarch?

Speaker 2 (05:20):
Medievalist hate Petrarch. It may be helpful to remember that
often Petrarch, who was also depressive, hated Petrarch, so there's
plenty of hate to go around. Petrarch, who is late
thirteen hundreds, he lives through the Black Death, so mid
to late thirteen hundreds. He thought about it, described the
age he was living in as an age of ash

(05:41):
and shadow. He was a very profoundly unhappy person. He
was born in exile, so a Florentine family, but that
was living in exile in Avignon, where he also saw
the papacy as being in exile, and as he traveled,
he thought of himself as a person who was born
not only in exile in space, but also in exilent time.

(06:01):
Because he read about the Roman Empire, and reading about
it from far away, in a war torn and play
gridden patch of time, the Roman Empire always seemed way
better than we think it really was, right because when
we tell stories about ancient Rome, we're excited by the
corruption and caligula and crazy emperors. Right, But when you're

(06:24):
living in Petrarch's day, what he reads about and is
in awe of is the Pax Romana, right, And this
period the only recorded period of extended peace in all
of Italian history, all the way back. This is the
patch under the good gay emperors Trajan, Hadrian and so on. Right,
when Italy was at peace and the roads were safe,

(06:47):
there were no pirates on the seas. Right, there are
pirates on the seas now, we have never matched the
degree of stability of the Pax Romana. And looking at
that and thinking about long ago, there were rulers who
kept things stable. The roads were safe. You could walk
from one end of Italy, or indeed one end of

(07:07):
Europe to the other carrying a bag of gold and
nobody would attack you was a distant dream to somebody
who is living in the plot of Romeo and Juliet, right,
because he's living in that bit of Italy that is
so full of factionalism and families who care a lot
more about their honor than they do about the well

(07:27):
being of the city and are constantly feuding with each other. Petrarch,
like all Florentines in this period, sees the streets run
with blood multiple times, as Ricuccio, Tibolt, and Romeo are
in the streets killing each other with no expectation that
there will ever be justice. Right, there is no expectation
that anyone's ever going to actually sentence Romeo to death
or even a meaningful sentence for the slaughters he's doing

(07:51):
in the streets. It's you know, banishment or a tiny,
finer slap on the wrist or nothing. Because this is
a period when families care more about their own interests
than they do about the state, and Petrarch and his
peers are watching city after city turn from being a
republic to being conquered and taken over, sometimes internally, by
one family that gets rich enough to corrupt the republic

(08:11):
from inside and take it over. Sometimes we're outside by
a family that works as a mercenary, gets a good
career going as a mercenary, gets a lot of money,
and then eventually picks a city state to take over.
And reading then about the Roman Republic and the early
republican Brutus, not the one who killed Caesar, but his ancestor,

(08:31):
who was one of the first consuls of Rome, and
his sons plotted to take over the city and make
him king, and he executed his own sons to preserve
the state. When you're living in the plot of Juliet,
that sounds like amazing fantasy of stability and peace right.
So that is what Petrark is imagining as ancient Rome.

(08:55):
And he's also reading Cicero and knows how Cicero sacrificed
himself for the state. He's reading Seneca and Seneca's wonderful
moral advice, knowing that Seneca stayed close to Nero, even
at the risk of his own life and ultimately died
for it. But to be there being the virtuous person
whispering virtue in the ear of the tyrant. And based

(09:16):
on this he constructs this fantasy that if we reconstruct
the libraries that raised Cicero and raised Seneca, and raised
Marcus Aurelius and Hadrian. And we then take little Romeo
and little Juliet and little Tibbalt and raised them in
that library with a tutor who whispers to them as

(09:40):
Seneca did to Nero. Maybe when they grow up they
will act like the Republican brutus and not like they
do in the play. So this is a fantasy, right,
He really is a fantasist, And this is not the
ancient Rome we believe in. It is an ancient room
that is one hundred times better than real ancient Rome.
But when we remember that Petra lived through the Black Death,

(10:02):
the Big One, and the letters that he wrote during
in are heartbreaking, as you know. The first letter, one
of his friends is dead, and he's like, well, I
know this is God's plan. I'm going to trust, you know.
And then the third letter, five of his friends are dead,
and he's like, it's getting really hard to believe that
this is God's plan and I know I need to trust.
But and then there's a letter when he just loses it.

(10:24):
I think it's the tenth friend. He and a bunch
of his scholar friends had just bought a villa on
a hill. They were going to go live like permanent
to Cameron where they were going to go live on
a hill, reading sister old and they all died one
by one. And in that letter he can't take it anymore,
and he just says, I can't understand the plan, I
can't trust I can't see what we did. It was

(10:46):
so much worse than every other generation that we deserve this.
You can just see him lose it, and even religion
can't can't help him. And after the Black Death was over,
he thought all of his friends were dead, but he
got a letter two of his scholar fronts survived and
they set out on a trip to come meet him,
and on the way one of them was killed by bandits.

(11:06):
So the other one was brutally wounded by bandits and
disappeared into the hills for ages. So that is why
Agent Rome is a fantasy to Petrarch, the idea of
safe roads, the one thing, the one horseman of the
apocalypse we can do something about right war and violence
which are human caused. When he's in despair that we
could ever do anything about the great Horseman plague, he

(11:30):
then kicks off a desperation campaign in which other people
who feel much like him try to assemble these libraries,
and they use a whole lot of rhetoric about this
being new. Now when they're assembling these libraries. All of
this is stuff that's around in the Middle Ages, right,
This is continuity, not different. All of this is stuff.
They're getting it by visiting monastery libraries and saying, do

(11:51):
you have books? May we copy them? May we bring
them to a place. They're doing it by actually bothering
to get on a boat and go to Constantinople and
get the Greek manuscript which of all always been there,
and bring them back. They're getting it because they've come
up with a new use for something people already had.
And so people always imagine the rediscovery of antiquity as
if these books were like in a tomb in Indiana.

(12:11):
Jonas to crack it open and pull them up from
the air, and then no, they're just on a shelf.
Except for Quintillia. Quintillion was propping up the leg of
a table. Our most complete copy of Quintilia had been
propping up the leg of a table of a monastery
in Switzerland, where it had been for six hundred years
because monesteries don't change. And once a book nobody wants
is used to prop up the leg of a table,

(12:32):
it stays there for a very long time.

Speaker 3 (12:34):
So it's the perfect size.

Speaker 2 (12:36):
It's the perfect size that nobody needed it. What was
it about. It was about how to teach kids to
do orations like Cicero, which was not particularly useful at
the time. But once Petrok says, actually, we think this
might save the world, then quintillion becomes popular. This gets
implemented these libraries which try to teach these studio hu manitatis,

(12:57):
from which we get the term humanista umanista, the teacher
of the studio umanitatis, from which we get humanities and
also humanism. This becomes a vogue in which wealthy people invest,
not necessarily sincerely, but competitively, because if you're a ruler,

(13:18):
you're always looking for cheaper alternatives to war, because war
is expensive, and one thing you can do is intimidate people.
One way to intimidate people is to get a pampus
scholar to write really, really hard Latin for all of
your correspondents, so when your correspondence arrives that other people
are trying to translate it for their boss. They're like,

(13:39):
I can barely read this thing. It reads like Cicero,
and it intimidates people. And this is therefore something that's
quickly adopted around the Renaisance because the political situation is
so bad. It's a symptom of things being bad and unstable,
not becoming good and stable. Right, you invest in a
moonshot when you're in the middle of the Cold War

(13:59):
and you're scared. You don't invest in a moon shot
because everything is fine and you didn't know what to
do with your extra money. The Renidance is happening because
people are experiencing increases in warfare, increases in instability, increases
in disease, increases in death. The life expectancy actually plummets

(14:20):
compared to the medieval average life expectancy. In the Renaissance,
it gets worse, not better, as larger kingdoms have therefore
better taxation, meaning more concentrated wealth that can raise larger
armies and have bigger, deadlier wars with larger canyons that
blow larger holes in cities, a result with more civilian deaths,

(14:40):
and also as trade is accelerating and trade paths are
reconnecting and trade almost on the scale of what Rome
had had is starting to be there, so that instead
of Britain processing it's woll domestically which produces itchy wol,
you could instead export wl to the Mediterranean where they

(15:01):
have lots and lots of olive oil, which is what
you need to make wool not itchy, and to process fine,
light quality wool, and then sell it back to England
and then everyone's like, this is great. We have non
itchy wool and we've made more money off of our sheep.
This is great. The problem being that the more trade
you have, the more people are moving around, the more
germs are moving around, the more diseases happen, And the

(15:22):
biggest increases in death rates are actually kids between the
ages of four and twelve who made it through the
original deadly childhood early years, which infant mortality remains the same,
but they're dying of pachs and things hitting cities more
often because the movement of trade means movement of germs.

(15:44):
So Petrarch describes an age of ash and Shadow, by
which he really means his own time. He doesn't really
mean the period behind him, but he projects it backward
and then says we're living in an age of ashen shadow.
We could live in a golden age if we do
this thing. Let's do this thing, And they start doing
this thing not out of affluence and stability, but out

(16:07):
of desperation.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
Yes, to me, it seems like calling ourselves a rebirth.
Calling ourselves a new time is like when you're starting
a new year with New Year's resolutions and you're like,
this is going to be my year. So it's like
it's more ambitious, an actual reflection.

Speaker 2 (16:24):
Of that's cerational, and you do it because you felt
like the last year wasn't your year, right right, Yes,
anybody who says this is the beginning of the best
thing is not happy with the current thing, and that
should be our warning that the Renaissance is not a
happier place to live than the Middle Ages. And if
it's changing faster, people are working to change it, and

(16:48):
they're trying to change it because they don't like it.

Speaker 1 (16:51):
Yes, exactly, and it's really really stuck. It stuck to
the Middle Ages like glue. We're still trying to shake
it off to this day. So the pet Tark is
obviously a major figure when we're talking about the idea
of inventing the Renaissance, which is the title of your book.
Another major figure that you sort of senter everything around,
sort of come back to as a reference point is Machiavelli.

Speaker 3 (17:13):
So tell us a little bit about this guy.

Speaker 1 (17:15):
Why you decided to structure around him, at least for
part of the book.

Speaker 4 (17:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:21):
He I mean, I love him and he's great. But
so I'll start the way I do in the book.
There's this amazing letter that Machiavelli got in fifteen oh
six from Ecole Bentivolio, a mercenary captain that he knew
from the wars they had just fought. And Machievelli had
been writing a history of that decade, his decanal it,

(17:42):
and he'd written sort of half of it, and Benevelli
had read this half history and wrote and said, Machievelli,
you have to finish your history of this decade because
without a good history, future generations will never believe how
bad it was, and they will never forgive us for
having lost and destroyed so much so quickly. This is

(18:05):
the decade spanning fifteen hundred, which means it's the decade
when Michelangelo carved the David, and when Leonardo painted the
Mona Lisa, and Raphael is at work, and Justscuain de
Prey is composing his gorgeous polyphony, and all of the
things that make us look in museums and see a
golden age are at their peak. And when you read
art historians, they're like, this is the best decade of

(18:27):
the entire history of time. But if you lived through it,
it felt as if the future could never believe how
disastrous it was. And what's interesting is to say, how
can both of these things be true at the same time.
Michiavelli is a full century after Petrarch. But what's really
neat about looking at them together is that the project

(18:48):
Petrarch proposes, the let's educate little Romeo, little Julia and
little Tibble with these libraries, takes several generations to take off, because,
you know, Petrarch suggests this. Petrarch's friends and students around
fourteen hundred start trekking across the Alps to get the manuscripts,

(19:09):
going to Constantinople to bring them back. They're starting to
bring them back. They have some Greek. You know, Petrarch
had it first. No Greek. There's an incredibly moving letter
in which he writes about how he has Homer's Iliod
in his hands, but he can't read it, and he
doesn't know if anyone will ever be able to read
it again because this language is lost. But you know,

(19:31):
friends of his go to Greece or can sent noble
that come back. They start translating it. By the time
Petrarck dies, he has a partial translation of the Iliad
in you know how you're when you're in like your
second year of a language class and you're translating stuff,
and you're translating it into English. It's so stilted that
features sometimes refer to it as translation ease, because no

(19:53):
human whatever actually community. So he gets that quality of Homer.
He's like, I can tell what the nouns are in
these sentences, but if this is supposed to be the
most beautiful thing ever written, like not a shadow. It
takes another generation to get the ability to teach Greek competently,
particularly because the only people who were teaching Greek at
the time were native speakers of modern Greek who are

(20:16):
used to teaching ancient Greek to people who speak modern Greek.
So if you can imagine teaching the language of Beowulf
or Shakespeare to an English speaker and then being asked
to teach it to a Spanish speaker. You'd be like, well, actually,
this is really hard.

Speaker 4 (20:28):
Now.

Speaker 2 (20:29):
It took until the fourteen thirties, so you know, full
generation in to get good Greek tutors going, which means
it's the generation of Marsilio Ficino, the first person to
eventually translate all of Plato out of Greek into Latin,
who's born in fourteen thirty three, after not only Petrarch
is dead, but Petrarch's peer group is dead. Who's the

(20:51):
first generation to be able to grow up with a
Greek tutor and have decent Greek from the beginning. And
so then it's him as an adult who is a
tutor to young Lorenzo de Medici, who is of the
first generation of we're going to raise Tibolton, Mercutio and
Romeo and Juliet with these classics. Right, so by that

(21:14):
time we're already halfway through the next century. We're in
the fourteen fifties to fourteen eighties, when this generation is
in their forties and fifties by the fifteen nineties. So
the first generation touched by good quality Greek is only
coming to power in the fourteen ages and fourteen nineties.
And it's the young people who are military age in

(21:36):
fifteen hundred who are the very first generation of princes
and princesses who had this their whole lives, and their
parents had it when their parents were teenagers. And it's
definitely there, which means Macumility's generation, even though we're a
full century after Petrarch, is the first generation to really
see did it work? We raised our princes and princesses
on Latin and Greek at Cicero, you know, and all

(22:00):
these other things. And they've been reading Marcus Aurelius. Actually
they haven't. They don't have that one yet. They've been
reading a fake Plagiari's version of It's not plagiaris. There's
actually a very popular fake letters of Marcus Erilis because
they don't have Marcus aurelia as yet, but they know
that he was a philosopher emperor. So guy writes a
fake one. It's great.

Speaker 3 (22:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:17):
So they're growing up on that and on Seneca and
this is cesare Borgia. This is one of the princes
raised on this is cesare Borgia, and the wars get worse,
not better, when this generation comes to power. And these
are the Italian wars. This is the French invasion of
fourteen ninety four. This is the moment referred to an

(22:38):
Italian history as the calamitad Italia. And the people who
did this are the first generation that grew up on
Latin Greek. So this is the moment at which Machiavelli,
who grew up on Latin and Greek, who loved this stuff,
who has this famous beautiful letter that he wrote when
he was in exile about how while he's in exile
he wastes most of the day mucking around and then

(22:59):
going to the tavern. But in the evenings he comes
back and he changes back into the court dress that
he used to wear when he was an envoy to
the King of France and an envoid of the pope,
and then a arraied worthily, he goes into his library
to have commerce with the classics. He is the one
who's looking back on this war he just fought, that

(23:20):
was the worst war in ages, saying okay, clearly, raising
everybody on Latin Greek didn't make them behave better, more
cities have been more selfishly conquered, more things have been sacked,
more blood has been shed. But on the other hand,
the Classics are really cool and really interesting, and having

(23:43):
studied them has refined maculas my own ability to analyze
what I'm looking at. And he got a very very
first hand look at how bad these wars were because
he was a young statesman working for his Republic of Florence.
Florence is a very large and wealthy city, but it's
a city state, but so it doesn't have big armies

(24:04):
because it doesn't have a kingdom around it to get
armies from, and because it's so rich, and it's the
center of Italian banking, so there are literal mountains of
gold in the basement of all of these great Florentine
banking families. And has no friends except for the city
of Bologna on the other side of the mountains, because
every Italian city state is surrounded by cities that hate

(24:25):
that city state. You know, you always hate your immediate neighbor.
And Florence has an international famous reputation for being the
sodomy capital of Europe, a verb for anal sex in
five European languages is fiorentinare or Varians to Florentine, right,
And in France you can be indicted for sodomy on
the grounds of ever having visited Florence. So this is,

(24:48):
you know, the everyone knows this city is the deepest
hive of scum and vility that you could possibly find
in the whole galaxy. And there are giant bags of
gold in the basement. If you have an army and
you want to loot something, do you want to fight
anything else or do you want to fight the incredibly
rich republic with no friends? You want to fight the
incredibly rich republic with no friends. So Machiavelli's job was

(25:10):
be Florence's envoid to these terrible warlords and persuade them
to sack someone else first, and be the little whisper
in their ear saying no, no, no, Florence is on
your side, Florence is loyalty, Florence will lend you money
for your wars, just you know, give us that one
little privilege of I like you, I'll kill you last,

(25:33):
which is a terrifying job to have when you are
a young statesman. So it is in this persona that
he goes to the court of France in his persona
that he is an envoid to the French king as
the invasion is happening, and it's in this persona that
he's an envoid of the Borgia Pope and to cesure
Borgia forever tasked with persuading him to hit someone else first,

(25:57):
not us, and as he watches the successes that the
terrible and ruthless and immoral men around him not only
Chesure but also after him Julius the second, the battle
pope who rules through betrayal with great success, betrayal and

(26:17):
massacre with great success. Michail is like, Okay, clearly the
virtuous people who are doing what Cicero says, they've just
all been literally murdered by these more successful, ruthless men.
But I can analyze what happened better thanks to my
classical education, having read about Caesar's campaigns, having read Livy,

(26:41):
having read all of these details of history gives me
a case book to compare to what I just saw
in these battles. Maybe classical education shouldn't be about sort
of trying to osmodically absorb the moral fiber and personality
of ancient figures. But if we instead use it as

(27:03):
a casebook of what worked and what didn't, we can
analyze what just happened and why the tactics worked that worked,
and why the tactics failed that failed. And this is
the birth of modern political science and the modern practice
of history, which when we write history, we don't do
it because you want to read about great men and

(27:24):
absorb the moral virtue, which is what history was until
fifteen hundred. You want to read about what happened. Think
about it, Compare it to other historical moments. Was there
a battle next to a river and somebody won, Let's
compare it to other battles next to rivers. Was there
a coup in a republic and this happened, Let's compare
it to other coups in other republics. That innovation is

(27:47):
only arrived at by Machiavellia's observation that the Petrarchan classical
education probleuct totally failed to do what Petrick thought it
would do, but succeeded at something else, at creating the
libraries that facilitate a new form of analysis, historical and
political analysis. But in the generations that come in the

(28:10):
fifteen hundreds. Also, new analysis of biology, medicine, the germ
theory of disease is on the horizon, facilitated by these libraries.
The discovery of the circulation of the blood, up ending
Galen and issuing in new eras of science are facilitated
by these libraries. The beginning of the application of the

(28:31):
modern scientific method, and sixteen hundred with Bacon and Descartes
and others is facilitated by these libraries. So it's one
of these neat things where Petrarch tried to achieve one
thing and failed totally, but achieved a different thing because
we did get the libraries, and the libraries are useful
in one hundred ways that are not making robioid Juliet

(28:52):
be virtuous. In fact, what they shape is the libraries
that will educate the fathers of the Enlightenment, who will say, actually,
maybe aristocracy isn't a very good method of government and
we should try out democracy. We don't get those changes
without this new form of education and this new way
of using books that the Middle Ages had the whole

(29:14):
time and was using but not in the same way.

Speaker 1 (29:17):
Wow, And I mean, we can't discount the effect of
the printing press on those people having ideas, but now
they're able to share the ideas. So it's not that
a lot of these ideas didn't exist, it's just now
people can talk about it more because there's more exact
actions in more hands.

Speaker 2 (29:34):
Yeah, exactly. In thirteen hundred, a single manuscript book costs
as much as a house, and a cheap paperback costs
as much as a studio apartment, and a big, fancy
illuminated bible costs as much as building a mansion. Very
few cities can have libraries. The Great University Library of Padua,
the largest library in Europe, had six hundred books. Yeah,

(29:56):
it's the size of a little kiosk in an airport
trying to sell you, Dan Brownhaw. That's the largest library
in the European world. There are bigger libraries elsewhere. The
Middle East has libraries with seven thousand books. There are big, big,
big libraries in Ethiopia. There are big, big libraries in China.

Speaker 4 (30:13):
Europe.

Speaker 2 (30:14):
No, and by the time we get to the early
printing press days fourteen ninety, the press comes in fourteen fifty.
By forteen ninety, a book costs a school teacher's salary
for one.

Speaker 3 (30:25):
Month, which is a whole lot better, a.

Speaker 2 (30:28):
Whole lot better. And now medium sized towns can have
a bookstore and a library, and somebody wealthy enough to
have this, and any random Med student, instead of saving
up desperately to rent textbooks or maybe owned to books,
can own fifty books. And the printing press is invented

(30:51):
in response to the library building project because it's the
big demand for books that make Schutenberg sit down and say, well,
lots of people want books. Now, Jamanda's high production is low.
Can I market this? There's a reason the printing breast
comes along event. It's not a random event. It's a
deliberate event to try to tap into a market that

(31:13):
then expands so that by the time we get to
Machiavelli's day, things are being printed. Machievelli wrote one of
the very first complaints about being plagiarized. People printed one
of his books without his permission and full of typos,
and he was desperately worried that this was going to
ruin his scholarly reputation.

Speaker 3 (31:31):
Oh, we've all been there. We've all been there.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
A lot of places Machiavelli is, which, if I love
him so much, we have a lot of his personal letters,
So we don't just have his big philosophical writings. We
also have the letter where he's where his mom has
been writing of letters, fretting that he isn't eating enough vegetables,
and she's trying to send a barrel of pickled fennel
to him at the French court, and he's like, Mom,
it's okay, I don't need a barrel, book Vena. But

(31:55):
what I do need is new shirts, because I look
scruffy and I'm supposed to be representing a textile capital
and here I am holes of my shirt and everyone
can see, and I don't have enough money to buy
a new shirt. What's going on?

Speaker 3 (32:07):
I mean relatable?

Speaker 1 (32:08):
Right, yes, Well, one of the things that you started
with in your journey into the Renaissance is so hard
for me.

Speaker 3 (32:15):
To use that word.

Speaker 1 (32:16):
I have to say, like I'm so used to like
just studdying it out, complete word right right, the early
modern period. So you're early in your journey, your personal
journey into it. You wanted to discover if, at this
moment where things are all of a sudden different, if
people started to become atheists. So tell us a little
bit about this exploration that you went through and what
you discovered.

Speaker 2 (32:37):
Yeah, because my first love as a historian when I
was in undergrad was the Enlightenment, and I did lots
of study of the Enlightenment, and there would always be
these footnotes that said. And the birth of this gorgeous
atheist movement in the eighteenth century with Diderot and la
Mettrie and the Marquis de Sade, who I love because
they're so courageous, right, much much courage in being an

(33:02):
atheist in that period. I always love heretics. I love
I love heretics in any era, like it switches read
whether they're atheists or whether they're Lutherans, or whether you know,
whatever they are. But I love the people who say,
I believe this thing so much that I'm going to
risk my life on it. That's why I love eighteenth
century atheists. That's why I love my wacko soul projecting,

(33:24):
magic wielding Platonists in the Renaissance, but in the Alignment,
the books would always have this little footnote that said.
And the birth of atheism as a big movement in
the eighteenth century was due to the reader discovery of
Lucretius as day rare Amnatura in the Renaissance, and they
would not have an actual citation. They would just say

(33:45):
that this was the case and that no one had
written that book yet. So when I was starting my PhD,
I was like, well, there's a book I know people
haven't written yet, so we'll do this. And then by
the time I finished my PhD, four people had written
books about the rediscovery of Lucretius in the Renaissance, which
was that's great because they had different data from my
data and went about it in a different way. And

(34:06):
one of the books that came out as I was
finishing my dissertation was Goodblats, which many many, many people
have now seen and feel strongly about, some positively, some negatively,
which talks about Poulgio Bracciolini, who is one of these
immediate successors of Petrarch, who studied with peers of Petrarch
and trekked across the Alps to find manuscripts. One of

(34:27):
the ones he brings back is the Derarem Natura on
the Nature of Things, which is an epicurean epic poem
which describes how the universe is not ordered by an
intelligence but is random movement of atoms, floating in the void,
and they bounce off of each other, and they form
random conjunctions which tourn different substances, and then the substances

(34:50):
sometimes clump together into worlds, and then life develops on
the worlds, and different animals come into existence, and only
the animals well suited to their environments survived, and no
new species come into existence anymore, because Earth has undergone
menopause and no longer has giant placentis growing out of
the ground, which is where animal species, of course, originally
came from. And you're like, oh, I was so with

(35:12):
you through much of this book, and then I so wasn't. Yeah, half,
it's a book that feels modern for one hundred lines
and then very unmodern for ten lines. It keeps alternating,
And this book is definitely a major impact on thinking
about matter and substances and the germ theory of disease

(35:34):
and medicine. But the interesting question is whether it had
an impact on atheism, because the book itself isn't technically atheist.
Lucretia says, the gods exist, but they are one atom wide,
and they live in deep space where they experience perfect
bliss and perfect bliss definitionally means they don't hear us
whining at them about all of our problems. And so

(35:55):
obviously if the gods are eternally happy, they cannot possibly
be listening to I was whining about our problems. And
so the gods are indifferent to us and just live
out there in the cosmos, being atoms and having a
good time in the void, which is not very far
from atheism in that there is no intelligent design, there's
no providence, there's no prayer, there's no You need to

(36:17):
develop an ethics that is based just on humans and
matter and does not worry about divine law or posthumous
punishment or these things. And it denies the immortality of
the soul. It says that a death, the being just ends.
So a lot of people are interested in this as
a root of atheism, and a lot of people want

(36:40):
to clean the Renaissance for atheism and say, you know,
there was a secret radical underground moving around they in
the Renaissance, there was pro reason, pro humanity, pro science,
and that they were the big movers and shapers that
advance later things. People often point to Michielli as one
of them. People often point to Leonardo as one of them.
People of point to do you have any Pikadella Mirandola

(37:02):
as one of them? Thanks to a really really bad,
really really wrong nineteenth century translation of Pico's quote oration
on the Dignity of Man, I recommend to you Brian
Copenhager's nine hundred page book about how that's not an
oration and it's not about the dignity of man. We
have come a long way since nineteenth century scholarship. But

(37:23):
when I started, what I wanted to do is use
Lucretius as day rare im Natura as bait, because if
I'm looking for atheists in the Renaissance or the Inquisition
is going on, they're not going to admit that they're atheists.
They're going to be hiding. They're going to be camouflaged.
But maybe they will gather around this book the way
deer gather around assault like, and I'll be able to

(37:45):
see who was reading Lucretius and from who was reading Lucretius,
guessed that they're atheists, and then investigate their writings and
find secret clues to suggest that they were Radius. And
I decided to start this project by looking at the
marginal comments people left in copies of Lucretius. So I
went all around, looked at every single manuscript you can

(38:06):
get a hold of all fifty one of them, and
also all of the print editions I could get a
hold of, so over three hundred printed copies of Lucretius
from before sixteen hundred, to see what people wrote in
the margins, to then figure out who they are, who's
annotating it, what they're looking at. And the answer was
they weren't interested in atheism or atomism or anything at all.

(38:28):
They were interested in grammar, and they were interested in
rare vocabulary, and they were interested in the bits that
sound like Virgil. And they were marking all of these
things in great detail. And then they would get to
the bits about atoms and literally right in the margin.
This is stupid. Observoitas in sententia is in the margin
of some of them. Another one wrote opinio known Christiana

(38:51):
in the margin. But they also just mark and highlight
that stuff list I was like, what come on, guys,
this is the great bit, This is the bit that
in the modern editions has five as many footnotes as
the rest of it. What's wrong with you? And the
answer is they're different people from a different time and
they have different interests, and the copies from decades later.
The book is rediscovered in fourteen seventeen, it's printed in

(39:14):
fourteen seventies. The print editions are really sort of proliferating
over the course of the fourteen seventies through fourteen teens.
Then there's a bit of a crackdown on it in
Italy because it's got a sexy bit. Boy do they
all annotate the sex scene. There are lots of copies
where they've annotated only the sex scene. Everyone loves the
sex scene, and it gets banned for having a sex

(39:35):
scene in it, and you have letters of inquisitors back
and forth being like, should we ban the other cut? No,
only the sex scene. We only care about it. It's
really funny. But the copies from the universities up in
Paris and Louvain in the fifteen eighties, those have annotation
about the scientific stuff and the atoms and the vacuum

(39:58):
and the void. And in one sense you're like, okay,
so your thesis is they didn't start caring about this
stuff in fourteen seventeen. They started carrying about it in
fifteen seventy that's not a very large difference historically, why
does that matter? But it matters if you imagine the
difference between eighteen seventeen and nineteen seventy. That's actually a

(40:24):
long way. And it's important to how long the Renaissance
wasn't that it had a lot of stages, as the
Middle Ages is also very long, and people are always
trying to say the Middle Ages are all like this,
as if a thousand year period could have one quality
that was true in all parts of it. And I
like to remind people that the jump from Petrarch to

(40:45):
Machiavelli is as far as from the rise of Napoleon
to Yuri Gagarin spaceflight. And we're still only halfway through
Renaissance because Shakespeare's parents haven't been born yet. It's a
long pier, and it is a very significant difference. To
say that interest in all of this radical science stuff

(41:08):
gets going at the middles of Renaissance, not at the beginning.
And a lot of people want to attribute the Renaissance
to radical free thought instead of the other way round.
The radical free thought is an effect of the original Renaissance,
which is mostly excited about Virgil Grammar, Seneca, good borol

(41:28):
advice and Petrarch's desperate hope to not have his friends
be killed by bandits on the road, and so clarifying
that was a long project, at hard work, and admitting
that my lovely, wonderful atheist that I was looking for
there were very very few of There were two. I
found two of them. They're two atheists. I could definitely
prove that they were there. They're great. One of them

(41:51):
is an illiterate fishmonger from Veenis. The other one is
a fun Florentine guy. They were there, but all the
people people want it have be an atheist Leonardo pomp Nazi,
even certainly Pico weren't. What they were was bizarre, weirdo
radical freethinkers in different directions. And I think the real

(42:14):
problem with us trying to imagine the Renaissance being shaped
by radical freethinking scientists is that that is an ahistorical
projection back of what we have now. Of Course, the
radical freethinkers then didn't think the same thing as the
radical freethinkers now think. We have different data. Isn't our
whole point of science that when we get different data

(42:36):
we yield different conclusions. If we don't yet have all
of these observations of spots on the moon and sun spots,
if we don't yet have the Galilean moods, if we
don't yet have Darwin going out there patiently measuring lizards
and measuring beetles, if we don't yet have cells and
DNA and the circulation of the blood, and we don't
yet have tests to confirm Newton. In fact, we don't

(42:57):
even have Newton. We yield different data. And so renaissance
radical free thinkers are awesome, and they're doing cool, bizarre
experiments where they're projecting their souls out of time to
go trance out and do drugs and having really interesting, original,
innovative thought that is as far from the Catholic norm

(43:19):
as atheism is from the Catholic norm, but not in
the same direction. And you know that's cool. It means
that every age has its own cool, wild radical freethinkers,
and that wild and radical free thought is always powerful
and is always good at shifting the paradigm and causing change,
even if it's a radicalism that is rejected by later centuries.

(43:40):
And we do other stuff because every centuries, radical free
thinkers are powerful, important bizarre, brave, and different. And the
radical freethinkers of fourteen hundred are not the radical freethinkers
of two thousand, or of seteen hundred, or of sixteen

(44:01):
hundred or of fifteen hundred. They're different, awesome radical freethinkers.

Speaker 1 (44:06):
Well, I mean, if you were to talk to somebody
who's dropped out of the Renaissance and you're like, we
all know that you guys are awesome, they'd be like yeah,
and we all know that you're atheists.

Speaker 3 (44:15):
They'd be like, what, No, this is not a.

Speaker 2 (44:18):
Say but you have radical three thinkers and they'd be like, oh, yeah,
Pico thinks apple canastasis can be proved by taking Zoroaster
and mixing it with Islam and then reinserting that via
Plato into bits of the Psalms. And we're like, wow,
I don't know what that is. When that guy's cool.

Speaker 1 (44:37):
That does sound pretty cool, right, Okay? So I mean
we could talk about this forever. And your book is
quite long now, it does not feel long, and I'm
hoping that people will read it and really go along
with the flow and the way that you explain this
and take it all apart, because I think it is
so valuable and so readable, so I do have to
sort of wrap it up a little bit.

Speaker 3 (44:57):
Yeah, I see that.

Speaker 1 (45:00):
One of the things that you reference in the book
is that when COVID hit medievalists, we'll know for sure
that everyone was like, this is like the Black Death,
and that means that something great is going to come afterward.
It's going to be the Renaissance. So this is sort
of where you wrap up the book itself. What did
the Black Death usher in? So I'm going to give
you your moment to tell us what did the Black Death

(45:20):
usher in?

Speaker 2 (45:21):
And you think about it. That's where the book was
born because journalists were contacting me and others saying, if
the Black Death caused the Renaissance, is COVID going to
cause US stock market boom? And it was such a
profoudly bad question. It's such a bad question. It's based
on so many deep, rich, complicated errors that it started

(45:43):
to write a blog post about why it was wrong.
And then the blog post hit forty thousand words and
I was like, maybe this isn't a blog.

Speaker 3 (45:51):
We've all been there too.

Speaker 2 (45:52):
Yeah, And that's how the book began. But it's also
why it has this light lively conversational voice to it
that it doesn't read like an academic book or even
like most nonfiction books. It reads intentionally, conversationally and in
times autobiographically, because half the answer to why do we

(46:13):
think the Renaissance is real? Is historians keep coming up
with new ways to talk about the Renaissance and it
being real, and so it Answering the question why do
we believe in a dark Age and a Golden Age
requires lifting the veil on what it means to be
a historian and weaving together anecdotes about Machiavelli running out

(46:33):
of shirts with anecdotes about conversations over dinner at the
Renaissance Society of America conference at which we're still creating
and recreating the Renaissance. And that required having an almost
memoir like voice rather than the sort of confident aloof
distant veiled faux in different faux neutral scientific voice that

(46:59):
is fashionable in history. The core thing I would say
about what the Black Death causes is that it causes
a period in which there is a lot of dynamism
because the bottom has dropped out of some industries, other
industries have boomed, and during COVID you know board games
and home gardening had the biggest boom ever, while you

(47:21):
know the travel industry and fashion that you would wear
out of the house had a terrible disaster. Right, The
same is true after the Black Death. The bottom falls
out of the luxury walrus ivory market, but booms elsewhere.
And the real aftermath of a pandemic is a period
of dynamic change in which some things have fallen and crashed,

(47:45):
others have boomed. Therefore, everything is mixing. New fortionnes are
being made, those who've lost their fortunes are desperate. Labor
could become more powerful because there's a labor shortage, or
policies could be passed that restricted and in the aftermath
of the real Black Death, in addition to some areas
having labor prices boom, other places make the first workhouses

(48:07):
and pass laws that make labor much more unfree. And
a lot of we think of as the bound to
the land serfdom system gets way fiercer after the Black
Death because every laborer matters, and so you want to
make them as unfree as you possibly can in order
to extort their labor. Policy was everything. Local policy was everything,
and some places boomed and some places busted, and some

(48:29):
places saw liberty increase, in some places saw liberty decrease
based on the individual immediate choices that were made. And
then it creates the sense of desperation in which people
want to remake the world into a golden age and
turn into nostalgia and are persuadable by the claim that

(48:50):
X will make us great again. Right, That's what the
Black Death did, and that is what is happening to
us now as well, which forces the conclusion policy is everything.
We are in a period of rich, dynamic change. Whatever
we put in place here is going to be ten
times as powerful as policy normally is, and it's stressful

(49:14):
to face the conclusion. What this means is that what
we try now really matters, and if we succeed, we
really succeed, and if we mess up, we really mess up,
and the stakes are ten times higher than they were
a lot of people what they really wanted out of
the question did the Black Death cause of Golden Age?
Was does that mean we can sit on our asses

(49:34):
and do nothing and there will be everything will be
great because things will naturally boom. This way of imagining
history as your giant years, the grind on as the
big forces of history mean that so long as the
wealth proportion is this, this will happen. Right, people really
want to be told your actions aren't very important. It's

(49:58):
very relaxing to be told your actions aren't very important.
It's very stressful to be told, actually, everything you do
right now matters ten times more than things you did
before the pandemic or things you will do decades after
the pandemic. That's scary, but hopefully we can also be
brave and take hope from it, because it does mean,

(50:19):
even when it sometimes feels like it doesn't, that small actions,
local elections, local politics, local policy are more powerful now
than they have been in the whole modern age, and
the small things we can achieve through influencing even little
local decisions have an enormous amount of power to do good.

Speaker 1 (50:44):
And starting by reading, yes, reading the good books, reading
all the books, this is where we need to start
right now, starting ourselves.

Speaker 2 (50:53):
In history. I always start my class on the Renaissance
by telling my undergrads every day lies to you about
history at least three times, and most of them don't
know they're lying to you about history, because they in
turn were lying too. But a journalist and a politician
and an op ed writer and a pundit are going

(51:14):
to be claiming something about history to justify their own ideologies. Yeah,
the best way to armor yourself against that prophagetta is
to know real history.

Speaker 3 (51:26):
Exactly, exactly.

Speaker 1 (51:27):
Welcome to the Medieval Podcast, where we say this every week.

Speaker 3 (51:32):
Well, thank you so much for coming on.

Speaker 1 (51:34):
I hope that people will read their book and really
get an idea of what's happening, because it is such
an interesting period in which lots of things are happening.
So thank you so much for coming on and telling
us about how the Renaissance was invented.

Speaker 4 (51:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:47):
Well, and I think of the Renisms very much as
the last stage of the Middle Ages, and I hate
that the fact that it was so mean to the
rest of it often makes medievalists not read about it.
I'm like, please count this as the Middle Ages too.

Speaker 3 (52:00):
There you go, there, you gouse.

Speaker 2 (52:01):
We're still totally medieval, guys. They're doing all the medieval stuff,
they're just doing it with slightly different art.

Speaker 3 (52:12):
It's true, It's true, all right. That is a good
selling point for the book at a good place to stop.
Thanks for being on the podcast.

Speaker 2 (52:19):
This was a treat. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (52:22):
To find out more about AIDA's work, you can visit
her website at Ada Palmer dot com. Her new book
is Inventing Them Renaissance, the myth of a Golden Age.
Before we go, here's Peter from medievali stant Net to
tell us what's on the website.

Speaker 3 (52:37):
What's up, Peter?

Speaker 4 (52:38):
Hey, Hey, So there's been this interesting study that just
came out, and it is about a female spy network
that was active in the city of Yeeps, which is
like in the Flanders present day Belgium. It was like
in the late fifteenth century. They're at war against the
Duke of Austria. And funny enough, the city records are
full of all these payments it's made to women that

(53:01):
were going around getting information from the enemy.

Speaker 3 (53:04):
Awesome.

Speaker 1 (53:05):
I mean, this has been a long tradition of ladies'
spies since the beginning of time, and yet somehow it
still works. It works every time.

Speaker 4 (53:13):
As the author Lisa Dements of the study kind of says,
just walking around people don't notice them, The soldiers don't
know us. So they were used to deliver messages across
enemy lines sometimes to go and find out what the
enemy was doing and it was quite a big network.
There was at least a couple dozen named women and
several more dozen unnamed women that were going about and

(53:35):
doing this at this war for a couple of years.

Speaker 1 (53:39):
Wow, that's incredible. I mean, not that there are networks
of spies that are active during a conflict, but the
fact that we have them actually named in records, that
is awesome.

Speaker 4 (53:49):
Indeed, indeed, and they're getting paid.

Speaker 3 (53:51):
To so yeah, get it, ladies, get it.

Speaker 4 (53:54):
Get your salary from the municipal governments the spy.

Speaker 3 (53:58):
That's right, you've got to keep those book is filled.

Speaker 1 (54:01):
And right now we're in the middle of the conference
of the Canadian Society of Medievalist so not much to
report yet, but we will have a report us to
what was going on there.

Speaker 4 (54:13):
Indeed, indeed, yeah, I do some fun papers so far.
I'm really glad just to meet up with some old
friends too.

Speaker 1 (54:18):
Absolutely, And speaking of old friends, thanks Peter for stopping
by and telling us what's on the website. Thanks thank
you to all of you who support my work by
letting the ads play through, sharing your favorite episodes on
social media, reading, borrowing and lending my books, and becoming
patrons on patreon dot com. Patrons can access all sorts

(54:40):
of goodies like medievalist dot net's book club, extensive lists
of open access articles, and access to this podcast ad free.
To find out more or to become a patron, please
visit patreon dot com slash Medievalists more everything from Golden
ages to gilded pages. Follow Medievalist dot net on Instagram
at mid devil list net or blue Sky at Medievalists.

(55:03):
You can find me Danielle Sabalski across social media at
five n Medievalist or five minute Medievalist, and you can
find my books at all your favorite bookstores. Our music
is Beyond the Warriors by gee Frog. Thanks for listening,
and have yourself a wonderful day