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Inventing the Renaissance

Myths of a Golden Age

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Inventing the Renaissance

By: Ada Palmer
Narrated by: Candida Gubbins
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Bloomsbury presents Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer, read by Candida Gubbins.

The Renaissance is one of the most studied and celebrated eras of history. Spanning the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of modernity, it has come to symbolise the transformative rebirth of knowledge, art, culture and political thought in Europe. And for the last two hundred years, historians have struggled to describe what makes this famous golden age unique.

In Inventing the Renaissance, acclaimed historian Ada Palmer provides a fresh perspective on what makes this epoch so captivating. Her witty and irreverent journey through the fantasies historians have constructed about the period show how its legend derives more from later centuries’ mythmaking than from the often grim reality of the period itself. She examines its defining figures and movements: the enduring legacy of Niccolò Machiavelli, the rediscovery of the classics, the rise of the Medici and fall of the Borgias, the astonishing artistic achievements of Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Cellini, the impact of the Inquisition and the expansion of secular Humanism. Palmer also explores the ties between culture and money: books, for example, could cost as much as grand houses, so the period’s innovative thinkers could only thrive with the help of the super-rich. She offers fifteen provocative and entertaining character portraits of Renaissance men and women, some famous, some obscure, whose intersecting lives show how the real Renaissance was more unexpected, more international and, above all, more desperate than its golden reputation suggests.

Drawing on her popular blogs and writing with her characteristic energy and wit, Palmer presents the Renaissance as we have never seen it before. Colloquial, funny and brilliant, you would never expect a work of deep scholarship to make you alternately laugh and cry.©2025 Ada Palmer (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Art Europe Renaissance Middle Ages Funny Witty Humanism
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Critic reviews

A fascinating look at how ideas ripple and spread.
Generous, brilliant, and inviting, Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance is a triumph... this is a work of deep erudition worn lightly but excitingly that offers a history of the Renaissance with a unique and personal imprint. If you are a scholar of the period, you will find new insights and interpretations, and if you are coming to the Renaissance for the first time, you will find an engaging and eloquent companion in Ada Palmer.
Inventing the Renaissance does something magical: it manages to take a tightly-held conviction (that there was a thing in European history called 'the Renaissance'), dismantle it with humor and intelligence, then put it back together as something different and more true to the past itself. But maybe more importantly, Palmer’s expertise and storytelling helps us better understand how golden ages are imagined, and why rejecting those invented constructions of the past provides us with hope as we confront our own contemporary world. As she says herself: 'we can do better than the Renaissance.'
An urgent corrective to modern myths about an ill-used past. Palmer has written a vital, absorbing and incredibly entertaining history of the so-called Renaissance. Challenging conventional wisdom, Inventing the Renaissance delves deep into the historical circumstances that have given rise to one of the most pervasive and frustrating narratives of the early modern period. It is a must read for all history enthusiasts.
Palmer is one of the most fascinating writers, thinkers, performers, and speakers I know. This is the book for every history nerd in your life, and also a magic artifact with the power to transform normies into history nerds.
This is a work of supreme importance, in that it takes a fascinating period of human history and brings the reader to confront many issues that are often overlooked, including the prejudices of our own views. Profound scholarship and imaginative powers support what is clearly the author’s aim: to help the reader exercise critical thinking on the material before them. While this may be primarily intended for younger history students, its lively narration and perceptive analysis bring joy and delight to seasoned scholars too.
An enjoyable, capacious book about an inexhaustible subject
[A] jauntily written corrective
Strewn with learned allusions, humour and demotic wit, Inventing the Renaissance is the work of a remarkable scholar
All stars
Most relevant
A great modern interpretation of the renaissance, easily accessible to a non-historian.

I was pipelined into this by the slippery slope of Ada Palmers science fiction series beginning with Too Like The Lightning. She obviously had great historical knowledge so when she released this book dared take the leap to non-fiction.

I was not disappointed. If you like her other books you will likely enjoy this read. Her style carries over well.

If I must say something critical, it is that this book, where it makes comparisons with our time, shares the usual progressive tendency to be very much centered in liberal western democracy. Like our societies are the norm and our experiences shared by all humanity.

Are liberal democracies not the exceptional outliers in our modern day. Not unlike the renaissance republic of Florence and its contemporaries?

A great modern interpretation of the renaissance!

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This book is definitely a case of you are either going to get it, or not. Despite the rather excellent concepts, the jokey style and intrusive author made the ever complicated Italian 15th and 16th centuries at times incomprehensible. I also wish the editor had encouraged the author to remove all the anecdotes (we get it, you did an MA exam, you have students, well done you). I know it is fashionable to try to make history more accessible by personal author engagement, but I fear my background led me to misunderstand many of those anecdotes... I suggest listening to the full preview to see if you understand.

Baffling narrative style

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I am quite certain that Ada Palmer is a profoundly knowledgeable cultural historian. She could, I am certain, write a seriously insightful, iconoclastic book about the years of the greatest artistic rebirth and flourishing known to western civilisation. I dearly wish she had. Instead, perhaps out of a feeling that the general reader of modern times is a social media addict with a butterfly mind who lacks the attention span to take it all straight, she has done it up as a kind of gossipy blog thing. So what we get is an extremely long-winded, whimsical (not particularly witty) prattle mostly about the inessential details. Peeping through the gaps in this bubbly, rather repetitive discourse are some really interesting ideas, criticisms and perspectives that I wish she had pursued in, dare I use the word, serious way. I had to give up after 10 hours.

Renaissance history done as a gossip column

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