In this illuminating conversation with Ada Palmer we discuss her new book, Inventing the Renaissance, an irreverent new take that reveals the Renaissance as anything but Europe’s golden age.
We discussed Palmer’s fresh insights that challenge conventional understanding of this transformative period in history. In this conversation, she shared how she uncovered a more diverse, fragile, and untamed Renaissance than traditional narratives suggest, revealing a troubled Europe looking to the long-lost Roman Empire for salvation from centuries of conflict.
Lecturer bio:
Ada Palmer is an Associate Professor of Early Modern European History and the College, UChicago. Her research on intellectual history, or the history of ideas, is her way of exploring how history and thought shape each other over time. The Italian Renaissance is a perfect moment for approaching this question because at that point the ideas about science, religion, and the world that had developed in the Middle Ages suddenly met those of the ancient world, reconstructed from rediscovered sources. All at once many beliefs, scientific systems, and perceived worlds clashed, mixed, and produced an unprecedented range of new ideas, which in turn shaped the following centuries and, thereby, our current world.
Video Transcript:
Seth Green: We are thrilled to have you here for our conversation on inventing the Renaissance. It is a book discussion with a fabulous faculty member and author at the University, Ada Palmer. My name is Seth Green, and on an afternoon like this one, where we’re talking to one of the greats of our university. I’m especially grateful to say that I’m the Dean here at the Graham School at the University of Chicago, where we have the joy of having Ada occasionally teach. and where our students have learned so much from both her work in areas like the Renaissance, as well as her extraordinary creativeness as a Science Fiction author. For those who are not familiar with this photo, it means that you are probably new to what we see as the great university of our time, the University of Chicago welcome virtually to our campus. It is actually a gorgeous day here, and it is very green. So this picture was taken some time ago. It reflects the beautiful setting here on campus where big ideas are born and for those who are not familiar with our school. We are the home for lifelong learners at the University of Chicago, and have been since the University’s founding in 1890, because when the University was being set up by William Rainey Harper. He and John D. Rockefeller, the founding philanthropist, had a vision that this university’s great intellectual assets not only be invested in the incredible students and in knowledge for the world, but also for individuals across all ages and stages of life. And so we began our 1st courses in downtown Chicago in 1892, and ever since have been meeting learners where they are across all stages and ages of life, and making sure the intellectual journey continues well beyond the undergraduate or graduate years. For those who want to get more involved. I’ll just acknowledge that we have a number of exciting opportunities. Although we have a mistaken photo in here. We have Ada showing up on our 1st Friday lecture, so apologies for that. You’re going to see her in a moment, and we should have another photo in the right box. But I’ll start on the left here for those who are interested in crafting your next chapter program. We have our info session next week. On the 3rd, we’re going to have a very interesting conversation on the 4th, that is, being led by our playwright, Doug Post, who teaches about playwriting. He’s talking with 3 other playwrights about writing political plays in an era where we have a deep amount of polarization and then we are going to have a different person than the one pictured here, leading a 1st Friday lecture on radical evil from Kant to nuclearism and I’ll just finish by saying we have our summer course registration now open. So if you want to go deeper in the world of our, you know, intellectual universe. Here we will put an email in the chat that you can use to sign up for summer courses. And with that I’m going to stop sharing my screen, because the reason that you are all here is because of my wonderful colleague, Ada Palmer, and Ada is an associate professor of early modern European History and the college, and she’s also an open enrollment instructor at Graham.
She is a bestselling author for those who read the New York Times. She was just featured in a full story there for her extraordinary class, where they have a papal election, and they have a conclave, and she was in many ways one of the major experts in the recent month, as we were going through the election of a new Pope, so she has many sources of leadership, and we are grateful to have her here at the Graham school, among her many different forms of involvement. And so, Ada, with all of that introduction. I want to start with a very interesting question, and it’s a question that you ask, because in your new book you have a chapter and the title of that chapter is, Why did Ada Palmer start studying the Renaissance? I thought the answer was fascinating. And so I want to start with that question for you. What initially drew you to Renaissance study, and what specifically motivated you to write this particular book, challenging the assumptions that we have about this period.
Ada Palmer: Thank you. And it’s a funny chapter to include in a book. But it’s a funny book. And the presence of that chapter, I think, is indicative of the way the tone of the book is aiming to throw off the veil of anonymity that is usually part of the performance of objectivity in a nonfiction book, certainly in the genre of history in which the personality of the author and even the 1st person, are usually invisible but because it’s a book about the construction of history by historians and the continuity of historians constructing and reconstructing this field over hundreds of years. I felt it was more appropriate to be present within the book, and to place myself in that genealogy of historians from Petrarch through 18th century historians, through my own teachers, to me, to my students so shockingly. When I started studying for my Phd. In the Renaissance, I knew absolutely nothing about it whatsoever, and I could not have found Florence on a map. But what I was interested in within history is the question of how events and ideas shape each other because in a tradition of looking at great books, I went to a Liberal Arts college that uses Chicago’s very traditional core. Great book sequence. One tends to end up with an impression that the innovative ideas of major thinkers appear like Athena from the head of Zeus, spontaneously out of that moment when the philosopher is sitting in a cabin with the raging sea, philosophizing and perhaps responding to a book by one of his peers. But in isolation from the lived realities of the world around. But what I became fascinated by as an undergraduate was the reality of how much major ideas and major thinkers are directly responding to the lived events and crises of their day. The 1st moment in which I really understood this, and I remember vividly it was in a core great book Sequence. And we were reading Freud’s Civilization and its discontents, and I had simultaneously been taking a class on the 1st World War, and I remember thinking. I bet his death instinct idea isn’t there in the stuff he wrote before the war, and I remember vividly going to the stacks to where the complete works of Freud weren’t sitting down on the floor in the stacks and pulling out all the volumes and going through. And I was right, and it was an epiphany moment of thinking about how it is not separate, but interconnected. The political events, the tumults, the wars, the technological changes, the lived experience, and these books, which appear so often as classics that match each other on a shelf, and don’t have the burn scars and bullet holes and raggedness and pristineness to tell you which ones originated during a civil war which ones originated during an era of peace, and so on. I wanted to study history so I asked that kind of question and I got in touch with my future dissertation. Thesis advisor, Jim Hankins, at Harvard, who was asking the same kinds of questions I wanted to ask since he wanted to study the Italian Renaissance, and I had the Latin necessary to do so. I decided that I would follow him to the Renaissance, and trust that any era, at any time and place would be equally exciting to approach. So long as I got to ask that kind of question.
Seth Green: Well, so you do ask this question, and you present the lives of 15 different Renaissance figures who lived through the same tumultuous years, but experienced vastly different realities.
Ada Palmer: Yes.
Seth Green: So can you talk a little bit about how you use these individual portraits in the book to kind of challenge our monolithic view of the period, and really bring to life how people are responding to their lived realities.
Ada Palmer: Yeah. So these are 15 individual chapters, and each one is a Mini biography of 15 different people. But you’re going through the same events as you go to each one, and one of the things I’m doing in this section is borrowing from my Science Fiction writer hat. The practice of writing a time loop is that you experience something one way, and then you loop back and you experience it slightly, differently, and you loop back and you experience it slightly differently, but rather than our time travelers changing events, it is now we are in the point of view of the assassin. Now we are in the point of view of the princess. Now we are in the point of view of the court musician. Now we are in the point of view of the secretary. Now we are in the point of view of Lucrezia Borgia. Now we are in the point of view of Machiavelli. As we revisit and pass through these tumultuous decades that we often read about via a book about someone who lived in the time. Right. There will be a book about Leonardo da Vinci, which will have these elements in the background, but you’re always zooming in only on the parts of it that intersect him and they intersect that figure, but by reading a bunch of short ones in a row, you realize, oh, each of these, every single one of them is vastly incomplete because the ones from the point of view of a princess. Don’t give me anything about the details and experiences of the courtiers dependent upon them. The one, from the point of view of the people for whom the Borgias are the enemy, give us a completely different sense from the people for whom the point of view has the Borgia as friend and all 15 are accurate and yet, if you read only one of them you would come away with, if I imagine that this were suddenly a class, and each of you I divvied it up into, you know, and each of you was reading one of these lives, and then we were going to have a discussion, you would surreally be entering a different Renaissance, depending on which one of them you read and I wanted to do that, because on a larger scale we do that every time we choose which book about a period to read you know. So as you’re in an Art Gallery, and you come out, and there’s the exhibition bookstore, and there will be a shelf, and there will be 5 books about whatever that was right, whether it’s ancient Egyptian mummies, or whether it’s the Italian Renaissance, or whether it’s that great exhibit on early Balkan kings that was at the Field Museum last year there will be 5 books, or maybe 8 books, about the topic, and what you don’t necessarily realize is that each one is going to give you an alternate universe, and depending on which one you pick up and take home. You’re about to believe in a different ancient Balkans, a different Leonardo da Vinci, a different Renaissance, and the ones in my own field that I’ve looked at all of them. I’m conscious how incredibly different they are, and how somebody who is a hero, and feels almost like a saint in one book will be a terrible villain in the book that is next to it on the shelf, right and so I wanted to write a book. That wasn’t that. That was a meta view of that that zoomed out and talked about that shelf and talked about how many books are parallel universes in the science, fictional sense, and all of them are accurate most of the time but because each of them is necessarily limited in its scope, and asking certain questions. The ones that ask the question, Where does the music come from? Yield a different renaissance from the ones that asked the question, what was happening in banking, which yields a different answer from what caused the genius of Leonardo da Vinci, and each of those is going to include, exclude, and make judgment calls about, who is helping and who is hindering, that bring you into a different cosmos.
Seth Green: Well. And so, speaking of those different cosmos, is there a way that you can summarize our mythical understanding of the Renaissance, the dominant one. And then how does your book and the deep looking at all of these different figures and their different contexts? How does it help us to reframe what you see as the real Renaissance and reality? That is probably a more mixed card at the time.
Ada Palmer: Yeah, I mean one of our clues, that the Renaissance is a very artificial, constructed, made up thing is that there is no consensus as to when it begins, and when it ends.and if I go to campus or walk out the front door of my office and turn right and go down the hall toward the Political Science Department and pass that to the Romance Languages people, and I ask them, sorry English department, English Department is to the right. If I go to the English department and say, When was the Renaissance? They’ll say, Well, the Renaissance is Shakespeare, so it’s coming to its peak in 1,600 when Hamlet debuts and it’s really getting going by 1550 to 1,600 is the peak of it. There’s a little bit before that. But if I turn left on the same hallway and end up at Romance languages and ask my Italianist colleagues, when is Renaissance? They’ll say, Oh, you know the Renaissance is Dante, and is really getting going in 1250, and is starting to fade out by 1,400, and is really over by 1450. So in one direction down the hall. The Renaissance is over a hundred years before it starts. When I turn the other direction which is very different from the French Revolution, we can all agree that it was an event that occurred that had dates. We might talk differently about its predecessors and its consequences, but the French Revolution is real in a way that the Renaissance is a construction. So what is the Renaissance in general, any given account of it will agree on a vague sense that there was a medieval period characterized possibly by stagnation, etc. That is a tricky claim in itself. And then something happened which was a period in which some new factor appeared that started to cause a change that made people less medieval and more modern. And that was the beginning of becoming like the world we’re in, and that there was a transitional period from medieval to modern, when some factor, something, some x factor came in and caused and stimulated a bunch of changes that made the world more like us. In many ways. These constructions of the Renaissance aren’t about the Renaissance. They’re about how we define modernity. And people will say when X began, that was the beginning of the path toward modernity, and people will have a different answer to what X is. So you’ll run across claims that it is a turn toward rational thought and scientific thinking and reason and humanism, or celebration of the human to turn away from superstition or the dominance of the organizations of religion. You’ll get claims that it was banking and trade, and the beginning of modern concept of finance and the new sophisticated techniques for lending money at interest, which caused the economy to start to boom and transform and move people around you run across claims that it was the advent of new forms of political development that the 1st articulations of nationalism and the idea of a nation and a people having a right to self-governance and a shared identity are 1st articulated by Renaissance figures like Petrarch and Machiavelli. You’ll run across different claims of what X is. But whatever X is is always something that the claimant believes is a defining factor of the modern world. And if we look at the history of histories of the Renaissance over the last 150 years, you’ll often see patterns between what X factor is in vogue and what political claims people are making on the larger scale. So, for example, the claim that the Renaissance was caused by the advent of finance and banking and the beginning of Proto-capitalism super popular during the Cold War because it lets America and the West claim to be the inheritors of the Renaissance Golden Age, and then compare Communism to the bad, dark backwards, superstitious, medieval dark Ages, and this gets us at how and why it’s been so hard to eradicate the lie that the Middle Ages were a dark age, and that the Renaissance was a golden age. Because it’s not true. It’s never been true. There’s no such thing as a dark age, and there’s no such thing as a golden age. It’s entirely made up. But it’s really narratively satisfying right? It’s easy to believe in cycles of history. When we’re making up the history for a science, fictional world or a fantasy world. You know there was an ancient era when there were elves. Everything was great. It was a golden age, and then there was a fall. There was a dark age, and dark lords like these are very easy, recognizable, satisfying narratives and ways to understand our world. And they’re really, propagandistically useful. Because if you can claim that the thing you’re doing, whether you’re a politician, or a party, or a literary movement, or a bank, or a corporation. If you can claim that the thing you’re doing is going to cause a Golden Age, and is a continuation of what caused the Renaissance, and that your opponents slash. Predecessors, slash. Competitors are backwards, looking and medieval. You make yourself seem good in a traditional, moderate, reliable, solid as a marble column kind of way that is very rhetorically useful, which is why we see the claim of X is going to be what I’m doing. I will create a Golden age recur so often rhetorically. Which is then why it’s been so hard for historians to come along and say, actually, the Renaissance is not a thing, and the Dark Ages is not a thing, and none of this is a thing, because we all want it to be, because it’s very satisfying.
Seth Green: So can you talk a little bit about how you approach the research for this book, because it’s such an interesting topic in a field that is technologically changing. You know your ability to gather evidence today and know about the past is deeper because of all sorts of different digitization and artificial intelligence. And I’m just curious how you potentially use technology in putting together. Because this is a very rich book. It has a really deep bench of information. How does that kind of technological change in historical research lead you to the ability to question concepts that previous generations of scholars have established.
Ada Palmer: I mean, it’s interesting that you ask that because this project is less a result of anything new than a result of taking time to synthetically zoom out and reflect on simply reading and rereading the core books that I was assigned to read as a graduate student when training up in this field and historiography, right? The history of histories. What past historians have argued about something? When you’re in graduate school, you’re always sort of force fed this stuff And when you write your dissertation there is this ump toward the beginning, which is the mandatory historiography section, and it’s dense and dry, and you have to do it, but you’re looking forward to get through it, and it’s usually the most stiltedly written section, because you could tell the author’s heart was even the author was bored, and everyone knows it’s going to be cut mostly from the public version. But it must be there because you need to understand the background to do stuff. And you know, if a dissertation is a snake, this is like a lump toward the front, where the snake has recently swallowed a rabbit right, and you have to get past it to the rest of the dissertation. And then these things tend to be cut down to just a fat footnote in an academic book, or completely absent from a publicly facing book. But historiography is awesome and fascinating, and fun, and full of the human beings who loved what I love in earlier generations, and who are the transmitters right and the the links through whom this process has been passed, and time after time I would simply be in the Uffizi bookstore and pick up one of the books for sale about the Renaissance on the big table of identical looking Renaissance books, and be struck by the complete absence of an acknowledgement of the transmission and genealogy of the study of this and the study of this is really interesting, because all of these historians, like Barron and Burkhardt and Christeller. And I saw a question popping up, asking, Who are these people? And the answer is, there’s chapters about them in the book. It’ll introduce you to all of them, also to their female peers. They usually get left out of the narrative, like Janet Ross and Iris Arico who are the hostesses at whose houses these men, whose books have been read longer and celebrated, more are, and when I was doing my training I was assigned to read all the men’s books and none of the women’s books, even though they were both writing these at the same time, there’s a written new book by Margaret Miser about those women, but there’s a section in my book about them as well and to understand how history is made. We have to understand the human beings who make it. And in the construction of that I sat down and said, I want to write a historiography that is human, lively, emotional, fun, tender, and grateful. And all these people, even though we still read them, we all now believe they’re totally wrong right. All of their theses about what the Renaissance was have been subsumed by better later theories in the same way that the Big Bang theory will in time be replaced by the better than the Big Bang theory theory, which will have elements of the Big Bang theory combined with improvements. Right? That is how knowledge advances. And we need those not very good theories, because they’re the stepping stones that get us to the work that gets us to the better ones and to the better ones. And usually, when such steps in the genealogy of knowledge are acknowledged, they’re acknowledged only negatively and hostile right without an acknowledgment of the fact that we invaluably depend upon books that were totally wrong and I wanted to include that as well.
Seth Green: Well, so we have a lot of wonderful questions populating the chat. So I’m going to go to those. But then I’ll come back with a few of my own later in the program. We have one here from Rachel, who has your book and is very much enjoying it. It is a big fan of your intellectual property, and how you deconstruct many myths surrounding the Renaissance. Then they go on to ask, have you tried to think about how today’s society may be influencing any of your assumptions as an author and historian. Given your point that you know you are writing in the context of your live reality. How do you think that your experiences shape you and the story you’re writing in this book?
Ada Palmer: I certainly can think of many different ways that they are shaping me and I will give 3 very different examples. When I do what I did, I can’t remember. If it was my 3rd year, I think it would have been my 3rd year of my Phd. It was when my invisible disability, severe chronic pain, condition 1st manifested. And I’m still intermittently incapacitated by it, and I always will be, and it made me start to care about and think about and look for disability, which was not a question that had been among the questions that brought me to the Renaissance. But as I do my analysis of the intellectual figures that I already then loved, I find myself seeing and asking questions about disability everywhere, and you’ll see that here and there throughout the book in a way that I wouldn’t, because we’re shaped by our bodies and we’re shaped by our personal experiences in that way. I’m also shaped by my teaching and there are conclusions in the book that I absolutely came to through my teaching. In fact, in many ways much of the book is chunks of my lectures from my Italian Renaissance undergrad course here at Uchicago I talked to those students about the fact that I wrote this book for everybody, but I also wrote this book partly for them and the conclusion and concluding chapters, which are a study of power and the way that the telling of history deludes us into feeling like we have less power than we do are conclusions that I came to in the classroom shaped by that experience. The urgency with which I feel that we need to rethink the way we consider power and agency is then absolutely shaped by the larger lived experience, not only of the current and recent political crises and authoritarian surge, and the importance of questions such as resistance, but even deeper than that things like the social ubiquity of imposter syndrome. I think about imposter syndrome, a lot in terms of what in our culture causes that. And I think one of the big factors at fault is historians and histories, because the way we tend to tell them is to either do great people history where we’re studying X, powerful and influential people whose actions shaped this thing. And we’re widening this beyond great man history now to be great people, history. And we’re including a wider diversity of figures which is good, but when we do that we only keep and talk about the important parts of their lives, and we curate away all the secondary things that make them feel human and feel like us which they didn’t carry away. In the 19th century, in the 19th century there were these giant, massive tomes that footnoted every single time anybody sneezed, because in the 19th century you win, if your book is fatter than the other guy’s book, but in the 20th century you win by having your book elegantly choose what to include and exclude. And so we get Machiavelli, the intellectual and Lorenzo de Betty, the political leader. But we don’t get Machiavelli writing home, saying, my salary is late and my shirt has holes in it, and I’m going to look scruffy in front of the Pope tomorrow, and I’m supposed to be representing Florence, which is a textile capital. But I’m going to be there in a shirt with holes all through it, and everyone’s going to look at me in front of all the ambassadors, and I’m going to look terrible. Where is my salary? I need to pay my bills, and we don’t quote very often, although I love Janet Ross, 19 0, 5, who did quote it? One of my very favorite letters from the whole Renaissance, which is dear mom, I left my favorite purple bathrobe at home. Please bring it when you come sincerely, Lorenzo do Medici and these moments which make the figures who shaped history feel like us are vital to reminding us that it’s not superhumans who are the only ones with agency as if we were in a superhero movie. We all have agency. We all shape things, and when historians try to tell different stories they tend to be what I call great forces of history rather than great people’s history where they’ll say yes. You know the wealth, ratio, and population at the beginning of the French Revolution was X percent of wealth in the hands of the elites versus Y percent in the hands of everyone else. Therefore the war happened as if what history really is is giant gears of modern times grinding on and grinding poor Charlie Chaplin into the machine right? And that also makes us feel powerless. Because what are we, then, except for one grain of sand in the middle of a million grains of sand that don’t do anything we are bad at telling history that acknowledges that history is a hundred 1 million ping pong balls, all bouncing against each other, all of them, in fact, important with trajectories that affect and change everything else, and everybody having agency, finding ways to tell that by having 15 different perspectives sequentially so that 15 different figures feel like the protagonist, is a vital improvement we need to make in order to remind ourselves of the actual powered agency we do have, which we look at histories, and we don’t resemble anybody who ever matters, or anybody who ever changes the world in history. So we feel like we don’t matter, and we don’t change the world.
Seth Green: We have another question here, Ada, who also loves your book. They want to know which part was your favorite to write, and why.
Ada Palmer: The 2 parts that were my favorites to write were rewrites because one is the sections plural about Machiavelli which are toward the beginning, some of which are the end which I originally wrote similar things about Machiavelli on my blog. Years ago, before I came to Chicago. Machiavelli is a figure who I’ve come to know very intimately And unlike most people who read his who study Machiavelli, who read his grand philosophical works first Yeah, I had read the Prince, and but I got to know Akipiley 1st through reading his entire personal correspondence all the letters back and forth where he’s scared all the letters back and forth, where he’s confused, all the letters back and forth, where he has the hardest job and the most painful job you can imagine which is. He was the ambassador from Florence, 2 big armies that are marching through Italy, that Florence’s forces cannot possibly stop, and his job is to whisper in their ear Kill our allies first, st kill us last right? Begging for the I like you, so I’ll kill you. Last privilege. Conquer the other cities first.st Florence is your friend. It’s such a terrifying job, and his job was to postpone the conquest, in hopes that in the meantime the conqueror would fail or die, or something, and it’s such a harrowing and amazing experience, and then to be cast out of politics into exile. And so I wrote those 1st posts good 15 years ago at least, and rewriting them with greater knowledge, that let me realize I was totally right when I 1st wrote that, but all of my conclusions were correct. But now I have new conclusions to add to those, and I can see better. The importance of them was really precious, and reminded me of how often, when I’m doing peer review for junior scholars who use the 1st article or second article I’m looking at, or a dissertation. My 1st comment is almost always this thing, this conclusion of yours. It’s way more important than you think. Bring it to the fore, make grander claims about it. This is exciting. Everyone is going to care. And how often, when you are doing the primary research, you’re looking at the trees, and you’re describing the trees, and you can’t yet see the forest, and it’s the maturity of a more advanced scholar who can zoom out and see the forest and say, wow! You learned something really important when you described that tree? That, and writing the sections at the end about my students and the teaching experience and how it shaped the book were my favorites. So Rob Shapiro has a question in the chat that feels very relevant to a school that has a basic program of liberal education. Where we read great books, he asked about Plato becoming available to the volume.
Seth Green: To a much greater extent during this period, and essentially he’s questioning whether or not that new availability of Plato might have triggered some of the kinds of new thinking you’ve described.
Ada Palmer: So both yes and no, which is the correct answer to most such questions. The wider availability of Plato has a huge impact but the wider availability of Plato is also a consequence of the fact that the changes had already started and Europe had had Plato and the ability to get more. Plato for a long time was always right there. You can send a boat in 1,100 as easily as you can in 1,400. A bunch of changes and a bunch of new questions had to be asked for people to want Plato and to want to use it in a new way. And this is identical with the question people often have of is it the Gutenberg movable type press that causes a whole lot of change? And the answer is also. Yes, but we only get the Gutenberg movable type press because there was a huge spike in library building and a huge uptick in the demand for books which made the inventor want to invent such a thing, and there’s only that because the changes had already begun and so both of those are the midpoint of a project getting a thing it wanted. And if we think about the intellectual project of the Renaissance, which is also a big part of the political project of the Renaissance. The micro version of it is after the Black Death in the 13th fifties, through 13 eighties. Petrarch is the most famous of a bunch of scholars who look around the world and say things are terrible. We are plagued by instability and warfare and mercenary bands roving around looting things, and we’re living in the plot of Romeo and Juliet, in which our young nobles are knifing each other in the street all the time and our city-states are following conquerors. We need stability. What had stability? Ancient Rome had stability? Ancient Rome had the Pax Romana right under the good, gay emperors, Trajan and Hadrian, the only point in the history, the entire recorded history of Italy, in which there was extended peace, no bandits on the roads, no pirates on the seas. There are pirates on the seas now. We have not matched that. And they said, Okay, how did that happen? Let’s get the libraries that have the books that educated Caesar, and educated Cicero and educated Seneca, and educated the Roman Brutus, the ancestor of the one who killed Caesar, the one who executed his own sons when they tried to take over the city. Can you imagine Lord Montague or Lord Capulet executing their own sons if their sons tried to take over the city. No, you can’t, and neither could Petrarch. But here it is in the annals of Rome that there were men who did that. So if we can reconstruct their libraries, maybe we can create a generation of leaders who will rule well and bring stability. That call is made when they don’t have Plato yet right? It takes 2 generations to get good Greek and to get dictionaries and to get manuscripts, and then to start translating it. And so there is an almost 100 year delay between Petrarch saying, Let’s build the libraries. They need to have the Plato. And the moment when Ficino’s fully translated Corpus of Plato is published. Plato is in the middle and it revolutionizes a whole lot of stuff that comes afterward. Similarly the printing press is in the middle. It revolutionizes a whole lot of stuff coming afterward because people were already working toward it And in the same way that the moonshot which really is what this project is. We’re desperate. We’re going to fail. What do we do? Let’s spell a library. The moonshot worked after a century, and then the consequences of actually doing it spilled out in a hundred directions no one anticipated, so that the after effects of the printing press and the after effects of Plato are like, how the space program gave us Velcro and new ways to heat things and have helped revolutionize agriculture. And had all these other secondary impacts that are not what the space program was for. It was for politics and stability and power, projection and self-defense, and an alternative to war. So were the libraries. But this is also what triggers understanding, circulation of the blood, turning religion upside down. Everything else.
Seth Green: Well, so I want to come to another question in the chat. And this one comes from actually a fellow instructor, Cheryl Reese, who is an expert, among other things, in Italian Renaissance art and architecture. And it’s a question that may be difficult. Given. Your book is about deconstructing these kinds of clear divides between the so-called Middle Ages and Renaissance? She asked, how do you situate Renaissance vis-a-vis, early, modern? And how have you thought about acknowledging that, you know no categorization is going to be perfectly black and white.
Ada Palmer: There’s a section in the book where I talk about early, modern. And I talk about how early modern is a terrible phrase, Renaissance is also a terrible phrase. Renaissance, because it’s full of judgment, is called early modern, because modern is one of the worst and most useless words in our language. And when you ask people, when modern is, you get an absurd range of dates, and I polled people in all departments across campus, and I have a page that the entire page is just a list of the different dates that people say modern is ranging from 1250 for the beginning of the modern Italian language up to dates past 2,000 for modern computing and modern technological developments within software and computer chips, as well as within modern development of the English language, dominated by Esl. International Esl, moving faster than 1st language. English, you know, followed by geologists saying that modernity is 250 million years ago, and evolutionary biologists say that it’s another different number of millions of years ago. The word modern is a profoundly confusing word, and when historians use it as a term of art. I think it’s a great improvement upon Renaissance, because it does not involve the judgment call of this is a golden age, and it allows us to frame it in terms of the rest, but it also still defines the period in terms of modern and it defines defines the period in terms of yeah, postmodern is an especially confusing name, especially since we’re long past postmodern at this point. What does that even mean? Modern baseball 1969, right? These wonderful dates, early modern still positions this era as being defined by being more modern than what came before it, and that itself retains the value judgment element of Renaissance. So you know, what do we do with these times? I give them different joking and jesting names over the course of the book. I’m particularly fond of calling the 17th century the Try Anything age, as both political thought and science advance into throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks to the model of trying to begin the world from nothing. This is Bacon and Descartes and their aftermath, and in putting on my other hat for a moment. In my Science Fiction novels I have fun having the characters in the 25th century mention the way they periodize, and how their periodization doesn’t matter doesn’t match ours. So in my 25th century, I have people talk about the exponential age which went from the Black Death to the world wars. What if those are where we draw the lines rather than elsewhere? And I also have a character mentioned at 1 point in the 2450 s. Historians are arguing over whether the 1st World War ended in 1945 or 1989. And when you just change those lines around, you suddenly find yourself rethinking and questioning. Wait, what is continuity? What has changed? Which is what periodization should be. It should be a chewy conversation for us to judge about what happened.
Seth Green: So we have many more questions in the chat. We have declining time to get them through. And so I’m going to try to combine a couple in this one. We have a question from John about how there is some inevitability to historians seeing the past world with some framing from their current context, and he cites Foucault’s Critique of Social Analysis, that we all necessarily reflect the current world. And then we have a comment from Kathy which is really asking about the purpose of history. And the reason I want to combine those is because there’s some arguments for history as a way of better understanding our current world, that what we’re doing is we look at the past. We’re trying to learn lessons and trying to think deeply about how we understand our current context. And what does it mean? There are also views about history being empathy, being about living in other people’s lives and understanding and depending on how that purpose is defined. You could argue for or against some of these imperfect categorizations. Right? You could say, Well, you know, the great forces is an overstatement of all of these trends, but what it allows us to do is understand that there are forces that you know material influence, or the great people is obviously an overstatement of heroism, because these are regular people that have flaws, but it allows us to have an aspiration for what a great citizen looks like, even if we acknowledge you know, Jfk is not who, you know, he may be presented as in TV. And so I’m curious if you want to just talk for our remaining couple minutes about, you know, in your view, what’s the purpose of history, and how does that then shape? How we think about the role of the historian.
Ada Palmer: Yeah. So I think that history is something we definitely turn to seeking to understand ourselves where we came from, where the institutions around us are shaped and to find value and sort of ground our identity. It’s interesting how often, for example, I’ll be at a dinner party, and I’ll mention that I studied the Renaissance, and there’ll be somebody there who just loves historical Figure X. And what they really love is that their idea of historical figure X ties into their own sense of self and they identify with that person across the diaspora. That is time. And you know, we turn to that to understand ourselves, understand the institutions that shape us, that sometimes hurt us, and where they came from and separately. We also turn to it as a casebook for examples to tell us what we’re experiencing now, what we can try, what worked and didn’t work in similar situations. Latter way of using history is new in the Renaissance in important ways, and the discussions of Machiavelli end with coming to the moment in which we have this turn from history at being something we study to understand our grandeur and ourselves and our origins, and to give us legitimacy, and especially to absorb the moral character of historical figures, and to read about great people, so we can aspire to be like those great people and read about bad people, so we can aspire to not be like those people, which was the standard way of using and teaching and discussing history. It was considered a moral genre and the practice of history was, if it was taught in schools taught under ethics as the higher branch under which history fell, sometimes under rhetoric, but often under ethics. It’s Machiavelli who’s the 1st to say, No, no, this is a case book of examples. If we’re trying to do something, we want it to work. We look at past civilizations that tried to do the thing, and whether it worked or didn’t, and imitate the things that worked, and try to figure out how and why they worked. This is the dawn of political science and we do both of those things with history because we can’t stop looking for ourselves in the past and looking at the origins of our values in the past and looking at the past for validation. And we should especially give ourselves grounding to understand what we’re experiencing. And here. I’m going to defy both the question and the topic, and go on a minute or 2 tangent to give a concrete example of this, but we all feel like the world is ending and on fire and the news is cataclysmic and full of people that terrify us, and all of the loudest, weirdest, scariest voices in the world are screaming in our ears. This is because we are living during an information revolution and it is caused by something that my wonderful colleague, Kathleen Ballew, aptly named the 1st adopter effect. Every time there’s a new information technology, whether it’s Gutenberg’s printing press, or later improvements at the printing press or radio or television, or the ditto machine or Facebook.Every time there’s a new information technology among the 1st users of the new information technology are always the people who were being effectively silenced under the old one. Right? And when radio comes in and you can broadcast yourself on the radio, the people who feel it’s worth investing in having a radio tower are people who, if they wrote an article and sent it into the newspaper as an OP-ed, nobody would print it right. The 1st people to want to buy a printing press always include the people who, if they try to go, stand on a podium or at a pulpit will be chased off because the pulpit, which is also an information technology, was gate kept like every information technology which means every time there’s a new information technology. It immediately fills with sex workers, linguistic minorities, queer people, and all of the scariest fringe voices from all edges of religion and politics, because those are the people who are being silenced under the earlier system, as a result of which every time a new information technology has been developed suddenly all of the scary voices get 100 times louder, no matter what you are scared of, because it’s the political fringes in every direction. If you’re scared of the left. The scary left is louder. If you’re scared of the right, the scary right is louder. If you’re scared of the Catholics, the scary Catholics are louder. If you’re scared of the Protestants, the scary Protestants are louder. This causes senses of panic. The fear that our enemies are suddenly all around us in a way that they weren’t before. That panic is then harvested by politicians who can use it to advance agendas for their own profit, seeking or empowerment. This is a pattern that we can trace from the 14 eighties and the 15 teens and Shakespeare rants about it. It has been the native experience of humanity since 1450, because we’ve been living in a constant sequence of information revolutions since 1450. Every one of those generations you can find people saying, Oh, my God! The world is suddenly ending and from this the advice that one develops is the feeling that we’re in a panic, the feeling that everything is scarier than it’s ever been in our lives. Experience is a real feeling that generation upon generation before us has also had. We are correct, that this is the scariest moment in our lived experience. Past generations that faced the same thing didn’t come through it without tumults. The past 500 years had plenty of tumults, but we are not unique in feeling like we’re living through an apocalypse. Every generation for the past 10 generations has felt like it was living through an apocalypse. We’re not living through an apocalypse. We’re living through the 1st adopter effect spike of an information revolution, and we need to calmly think long term and remind ourselves that human beings in past generations faced exactly this level of fear, exactly this level of sense that the world was ending. They dealt with it, faced it, did the best they could, and that is what we need to do as well. So that’s how we should use history.
Seth Green: Well, that is a very concrete example, and it’s very relevant to how some people certainly are interpreting our current moment, and it gives us hope. And I think you can also say that there’s a lot of opportunities that come out of that information environment. And I know you know there are some specters of it as well, but, you know, sitting in higher education, I’ll just acknowledge that I think we have not been fully in touch with the entire country or world all the time, and in some ways, you know, having these voices raised in new ways leads us to ask new questions right and and come to hopefully. You know better. Long term answers on how we can be inclusive of different viewpoints, and make sure that we are engaging the full society that we’re a part of. And so it’s certainly loud and disruptive. But it’s also voices that we may not have heard. And so it’s an opportunity, you know, as an intellectual institution right to always be really mindful about how those voices, you know, then become part of the intellectual inquiry that is so important. So, Ada, thank you. This has been a fascinating conversation. I will say the chat is a buzz now, not only with Thank you, but also with a hope that you may teach a course like this in the future at Graham. So we’ll certainly be in touch on that front, although I know you are busy running, and with other projects.I saw some My to historyI saw someone drop a note asking when there would be a, podcast, the answer is that I’ve got a podcast, which you can get to through my website, Ada palmer.com where I discuss science fiction and the craft of writing with my often co-author and co-teacher, Joe Walton, who’s a fellow science, fiction writer and history lover But I’ve been wanting to find somebody to partner with, to develop a history. Podcast I would really enjoy doing one. But speaking as a disabled historian author with sort of 2 part time jobs between the novels and the academic work, I can’t develop one without a partnership. So whether it’s going to be Graham or somebody else, I want to do a podcast at some point. But you can enjoy the discussion, some of which are about history on the podcast that is more about books and craft of writing which you can find on my website.
Seth Green: Well, we are grateful that you thought of partnership with us among others, potentially for the podcast certainly there could be no one better to be on it. Thank you again, and thank you all for joining us, happy Friday to all, and we will certainly look at history differently after this fascinating conversation.
Ada Palmer: Thanks Everyone.
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