ABOUT THIS BOOK

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 BIOGRAPHY

Ada Palmer is associate professor of early modern European history and the College at the University of Chicago. She is the author of many books, including Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance and the award-winning Terra Ignota series of novels.

REVIEWS

“Generous, brilliant, and inviting, 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 Palmer."

— Christopher S. Celenza, author of 'Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer'

“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 help 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.’”

— Matthew Gabriele, coauthor of 'The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe'

"A wry look at the mythmaking of an era. . . . Palmer argues that many things we associate with the Renaissance—innovations in art, science, philosophy and politics—actually began gradually during the Middle Ages. Also, this myth of a golden age was carefully crafted by historians and has been used repeatedly throughout history to legitimize authority and political agendas."

— UChicago News

"In this engaging, bewitching, and eminently readable doorstop of a book, Palmer invites us to reconsider the Renaissance, what it promised, what it delivered, and what it actually bequeathed to later generations."

— Chicago Review of Books

"It’s fair to say that the breezier tone of that genre has been turbo-boosted here: every page is a model of mateyness, filled with the millennial patter of social-media-ready irony."

— David Butterfield, The Critic

"A lively introduction to Italy at the end of the Middle Ages, written in a humorous and highly readable style."

— Medievalists.net

"Nonfiction that is humorous yet erudite. . . . Palmer essentially deconstructs the Renaissance and talks about why it had to be invented and how, rather than being a set timeframe, bits and pieces of it occurred over hundreds of years. . . This is fun reading on an absorbing topic."

— Midwest Book Review

"In her book Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer unpacks how historians through the ages created the idea of a Renaissance 'golden age' for their own reasons—and then disagreed with each over the following centuries about the era’s definition, time period, geography and substance."

— History.com

"Palmer is a writer who ranges easily across millennia and media, at home in scholarly, imaginative, and breezily conversational modes."

— Chronicles of Higher Education

“[Palmer] goes deep into the minutiae of the lives of Renaissance luminaries to show that, far from being idealists reaching for the rebirth of a better world, they were the usual human mixture of self-promotion, self-delusion, and fakery. . . . For Palmer, then, the Renaissance is not so much a golden age as a glittering illusion—assembled, reassembled, and ultimately undone by the longings of those who came after.”

— The New Yorker

"[Inventing the Renaissance is] an incredibly impressive work, both of scholarship and popular history, and one absolutely worthy of the time its 700+ pages require."

— Stuart Ellis Gorman

"What is the message to take home from the long intervention of the American historian? The Renaissance was not a 'rebirth' in the modern sense and it was not the comforting fable of linear progress. It was rather a troubled era, certainly fascinating but instrumentalized by moderns as a distorted mirror to project their own illusions."

— Union of Catholic Christian Rationalists

“A book about why societies invent Golden Ages, what they get out of them, and the real changes that grow from these myths. It’s also full of really juicy gossip about the Medici family, explanations of what the hell Machiavelli was thinking, and descriptions of how badly it sucks to get your arts funding from oligarchs. . . . Palmer has a mycologist’s enthusiasm for the brightly-colored fungus of the Renaissance, and it’s infectious.”

— Reactor Magazine

“You may know Ada Palmer as a science-fiction novelist, but she’s also a historian at the University of Chicago who focuses on the Renaissance. This is a chunky book with many parts, but it’s very readable and thought-provoking. You’ll think differently about the Renaissance—and about how history works.”

— Scientific American, "The Scientific American Staff's Favorite Books of 2025"

"The book is quite accessible, but there is a lot of serious scholarship behind the slang and the playfulness: it is that rare general-reader book that can enlighten and challenge scholars, that rare scholarly monograph that can engage the general reader."

— The Classical Outlook

“[Palmer] offers her readers a genuinely new portrait of the Renaissance, making it clear why thinking about the Renaissance continues to matter to so many, even today.”

— Journal of Modern History

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part I: Why You Shouldn’t Believe Anyone (Including Me) About the Renaissance

Part II: Desperate Times and Desperate Measures

Umanista

Studia Humanitatis

Part III: Let’s Meet Some People from This Golden Age

Part IV: What Was Renaissance Humanism?

Part V: The Try Everything Age

Part VI: Conclusion – Who Has Power in History?

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