Description
A New Yorker Best Book of 2025
An irreverent new take on the Renaissance, which reveals it as anything but Europe’s golden age.
From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we’re told) heralds the dawning of a new world–a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we’ve told ourselves about Europe’s not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity. Palmer’s Renaissance is altogether desperate. Troubled by centuries of conflict, she argues, Europe looked to a long-lost Roman Empire (even its education practices) to save it from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similarly nostalgic vision, only now they looked to the Renaissance and told a partial story. To right this wrong, Palmer offers fifteen provocative portraits of Renaissance men and women (some famous, some obscure) whose lives reveal a far more diverse, fragile, and wild Renaissance than its glowing reputation suggests.
Author: Ada Palmer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 3/28/2025
Pages: 768
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.55 lbs
Size: 9.13″ H x 6.14″ L x 1.89″ W
ISBN: 9780226837970
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