Reexamining an era

Mention the Renaissance and what quickly comes to mind is the rich art heritage of 16th-century Italy—as well as the cutthroat politics detailed in Machiavelli’s The Prince. But in Inventing the Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 768 pp.), historian Ada Palmer argues that these stereotypes are only convenient fictions, tools fabricated for the use of historians to influence how we see the world.

In her telling, the Renaissance defies easy categorization. She sees it as a complicated and confusing time—confusing even to the people who lived through it. No single story of the Renaissance tells the whole truth, and historians, far from being objective truth-tellers, have their own agendas.

Inventing the Renaissance Ada Palmer

Palmer vividly portrays the details of Renaissance intellectual life, mixing accounts of generals, popes, and politicians with stories of the lives of the artists and writers who continue to shape our idea of what the culture of the time was like. Often her description of the period gives the impression that living in the Renaissance would have been very similar to life in our own day; the same political intrigues, the same calculated striving for status and success that can often seem pervasive in today’s world make their presence felt in Palmer’s description of Italy in the 1500s. At the heart of her account is the story of Niccolo Machiavelli, and she portrays him at times sympathetically, at times critically. Machiavelli is for her a sort of microcosm of the Renaissance as a whole, in all its varied complexity and contradictory goals.

Palmer gives extensive details about the lives and doings of the umanisti, the loose network of professional tutors and rhetoricians of Renaissance Italy, from which we get our word “humanist.” The umanisti, such as Petrarch and Machiavelli, were engaging in a deliberate effort to make their society a more peaceful and harmonious time in which to live. Palmer says it was their efforts that laid the foundation of the ongoing project of societal betterment that gained steam during the Enlightenment and continues to the present.

Palmer, however, does not see the hand of God in the events here on earth. For her, the project of betterment that began in the Renaissance is an entirely secular undertaking, able to be accomplished by unaided human reason. It is noteworthy that Palmer doesn’t seem aware of the effects of sin and the Fall on human perfectibility.

In addition, for Palmer to claim that the Renaissance was complex and can’t be narrowed down to a single factor, while technically right, is also in a sense misleading. Palmer would have us believe that anyone who advances a specific reading of the Renaissance is in some sense incorrect and misrepresenting the historical truth; throughout her book she gives several examples of historians who filtered their accounts of the Renaissance through their own ideological lens. Yet she does the exact same thing herself when she claims that the Renaissance stands for us as a model of how to strive toward a better and more well-ordered human society. By doing so, she undermines her book’s thesis.

That doesn’t mean Palmer’s book isn’t worth reading. Her explanation of the problems inherent in any serious historical inquiry is direct and well merited. Her prose style—full of jocular asides and pointed satires at particular Renaissance figures—has a conversational tone, one that won’t gain her any fans from readers hoping for a densely argued formal scholarship. Perhaps her popularizing tone will attract some readers to the discipline of academic history who might not have been otherwise interested. Whatever the Renaissance may or may not be, Ada Palmer certainly reveals, and with superb flair, that it can be fun to read about.