How Should We Think About the Renaissance?

All historical periods are created twice: first in their own age, and again in the work of their interpreters. But this truism applies in a special sense to the Renaissance, an era whose intellectuals developed a new orientation to history, before becoming the whetstone on which one generation of historians after another honed their ideas. It is this double story that Ada Palmer tells in Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, a quirky, meandering, and cumulatively brilliant popular history of the Florentine Renaissance and its many interpreters.

Palmer, an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, is well-suited to the task. Her first book, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (2014), was a study of the Renaissance reception of the Epicurean philosopher and poet. Ambitious in its questions and meticulous in its answers, Palmer’s research stretched back to antiquity and, implicitly, forward to the secularized, disenchanted world of the Enlightenment. But Palmer is not just a scholar. She is also a science-fiction novelist — her Terra Ignota novels have a devoted following — and a popular blogger. That is to say, she is a writer who ranges easily across millennia and media, at home in scholarly, imaginative, and breezily conversational modes. Inventing the Renaissance is a book that loops backward and forward in time and flits between an astonishing variety of topics, interspersing jokes, personal anecdotes, and silly catchphrases. Palmer aspires to depict a “weirder and more plural Renaissance” than the one most readers will have encountered; she has certainly written a weirder and more plural book than most. Yet for all its playfulness, it is ultimately a serious inquiry into the nature of historical agency — that of the Renaissance, but also our own.

The story begins with Petrarch. Born in exile in 14th-century Florence, watching his friends die from plague and one regime topple after another, the great poet was convinced that dark ages had succeeded the fall of Rome. There was the classical world, shining like a beacon from the distance of a millennium, and there was everything in between, up to and including the dismal present. But Petrarch was sure that a better world, more virtuous in its morals and more elegant in its grammar, was possible. “Raise the next generations on studia humanitatis,” as Palmer puts it, “and we can rear a crop of Ciceros.” The philologists and philosophers, artists and politicians, who followed him agreed. By the time the architect and art historian Giorgio Vasari wrote The Lives of the Artists two centuries later, Florence’s culture industry was riding a wave of self-confidence. Vasari declared that the painter Giotto, a generation younger than Petrarch, had touched off a rebirth, or rinascita, of the skill and vitality of antiquity. Over the course of the next century, a handful of European intellectuals, including Jean Bodin, Francis Bacon, and René Descartes, began to make an even bolder claim. The moderns had not only matched the ancients but surpassed them. Gradually, history began to have a turning point.

It was not until the 19th century, however, that the Renaissance became the name of an historical era, rather than a claim about artistic revival. In the wake of two great revolutions — French and Industrial — vast chasms seemed to open between the past and present. The origins of modernity became a puzzle; the “Renaissance” was a potential solution. The first to use the term as a period designation was the French historian Jules Michelet, but it was through the writing of the Berlin-trained Swiss scholar Jacob Burckhardt that it really caught on. In The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) Burckhardt depicted a traditional world splintering into its constituent atoms. In the Middle Ages, he claimed, people slept under a “veil of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession,” but in Renaissance Italy, the veil “melted into air.” Shaking off their credulity, the men of the Renaissance began to see the world objectively, becoming free, self-fashioning individuals. For better or worse — ultimately, in the conservative Burckhardt’s view, for worse — it was a fatal step on the path to the present.

Burckhardt’s search for the origins of modernity transformed the study of history. Generations of German historians followed in his footsteps, seeking the key to their own society in the streets of 15th-century Florence. Then, with the rise of the Nazis, this individualistic and thoroughly cosmopolitan field was swept away. In an academic translatio imperii, the spirit of Renaissance scholarship fled to the New World. Two of the great German scholars of the Italian Renaissance, Hans Baron and Paul Oskar Kristeller, both Jewish, landed respectively at the Newberry Library, in Chicago, and at Columbia University. They would cast long shadows on American, and global, Renaissance scholarship. Among other things, they shaped Palmer’s career. Kristeller was the academic adviser of James Hankins, Palmer’s own academic adviser, making him her “academic grandfather,” as she observes; her research has carried on her mentors’ tradition of innovative intellectual history.

In the century that followed, new groups of scholars began to study the Renaissance, approaching it from many different angles. The history of women, history from below, and anticolonial and global history, among others, gave rise to new understandings of the era. It emerged as a period that was darker and more fraught, but also richer and more complex, than the 19th century had imagined. Yet even as interpretations and evaluations of the Renaissance changed, it remained a testing ground for theories of modernity. To explain the cultural movement that touched off in 14th-century Italy was still to explain the present, if only as the opening phase of an extended nightmare. Did the secret of historical change lie in culture, politics, economics, intellectual history, or demography? What, in Palmer’s phrase, was the “X-factor” that triggered the Renaissance, and with it, the modern world?

It should be no surprise that Palmer does not give a straightforward answer. For her, as for virtually all historians today, historical interpretation is endless and plural. “Like sculpture,” she writes, “history does not have one right view.” The Renaissance she describes has many sources, converging slowly over the course of centuries. Such ecumenicalism is thoroughly conventional and, as far as it goes, convincing. But Inventing the Renaissance would be a less interesting book if Palmer did not, ultimately, have a view of historical change. She finds its essential impetus in human beings. There are “Great Forces,” which “make some historical moments ripe for change.” But there are also people, and “individuals have real agency.” The thoughts, desires, and plans of men and women give shape to history.

The middle section of the book, at 287 pages by far its longest, gives us 15 capsule biographies of Renaissance men and women. Some of her subjects are famous, such as Savonarola and Michelangelo, while others will be known only to specialists, such as the Florentine woodworker Manetto Amantini. As Palmer narrates these complicated, tragicomic lives, her skill as a novelist is on full display. Readers are shown the same events from different perspectives, with each repetition adding a new dimension. Pope Sixtus IV’s botched plan to have Lorenzo and Giuliano de Medici assassinated during mass, for instance, is told first in relation to the reluctant hit man Montesecco, and again in the life of the humanist Angelo Poliziano, “a physically tiny man but not too tiny to help,” who “jumped between Lorenzo and the assassins’ blades.” A compelling revisionist account of the life of Lucrezia Borgia, caricatured after her death as the ultimate femme fatale, is written in the second person. “You were hiding in a country villa when your brother-in-law Cardinal Ippolito broke the news,” Palmer writes; “your father was dead.” It is a gimmick, but it works: Placed in Lucrezia’s position, the reader becomes her proxy, navigating her choices. Biography is transformed into a role-playing game (Palmer is an avid gamer). Taken separately, each life allows the reader to see how an idiosyncratic human being acted in a difficult, dangerous environment. Read together, they reveal something more. They show how the consequences of actions extend outward, ricocheting against those of others, until the whole set of starting conditions has changed.

Amidst this crowd of Florentines, one figure receives special attention: Niccolò Machiavelli. Inventing the Renaissance begins with him and returns to him repeatedly; in total, nearly 100 pages discuss his life and thought. Unlike the book’s other men and women, Machiavelli was not merely an actor in this milieu but its greatest theorist. Up to a point, to understand him is to understand the Renaissance. But understanding Machiavelli has never been easy. Philosophers as different as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Carl Schmitt, and Antonio Gramsci all claimed him as a predecessor, but each seemed to embrace a different Machiavelli. To Rousseau, he was a republican; to Schmitt, a realist; to Gramsci, a guide for revolutionaries. All agreed, however, that his searching investigations of human agency had launched a new epoch in political thought.

Palmer’s Machiavelli is an equally decisive, if somewhat tamer, thinker. He is a utilitarian avant la lettre, the first to express, with crystal clarity, the idea “that ethics should consider consequences, and that studying history can help us understand the causes of past tragedies and triumphs.” In evaluating actions in terms of their human consequences, he helped to formulate a new attitude toward social life, later taken up by figures such as Francis Bacon, Denis Diderot, and many others. By slow, imperfect steps, it would make our own world, and our own ideals, possible.

This is what the Renaissance is for Palmer: an aspiration. Amidst constant danger and intrigue, the unremitting suffering of disease and premature death, and profound political instability, men and women dreamed of improving their lot on earth. “But if the Renaissance was so desperate and so terrible,” Palmer writes, “why did it get etched into our history as a golden age? Answer: Because they tried to make it one.” The methods they took were often strange, and their success was, to put it mildly, uneven. But the very attempt pointed to the emergence of the idea that conscious, human agency might come to shape history. Past, present, and future became newly defined as phases in an evolving history that humankind could create. Renaissance writers reassessed their history, inventing terms like the Dark Ages — to the eternal chagrin of medievalists — because they were beginning to think about their future differently.

Palmer’s Renaissance is not the mythical Golden Age of Uffizi tour guides or high-school textbooks, nor is it the sharp and total break with a slumbering Middle Ages described by Burckhardt. Yet her Renaissance is ultimately entirely continuous with its historiographic origins. In contrast to the more neutral quattrocento or cinquecento, the Renaissance has always been a turning point defined by its artists, intellectuals, and inventors, and by analogy, by the human attempt to fashion ourselves and our world.

Today scholars in my own field, English literature of the 16th and 17th centuries, still meet each year under the auspices of the Renaissance Society of America, a scholarly body founded by Palmer’s academic grandfather, Paul Oskar Kristeller. But a glance at Google Ngram shows that we no longer use the word “Renaissance” to refer to the age of Shakespeare; around the turn of the millennium, we decisively switched to “early modernity.” The France and Spain of Rabelais and Cervantes are also, increasingly, “early modern,” rather than “Renaissance” or “Golden Age.” In “early modern,” the idea of a break with the Middle Ages remains, alongside the notion of historical directionality. We still turn to this particular period to explain how we arrived at the present. But where “Renaissance” evokes the human event of a birth, “early modernity” implies only the irresistible movement of time.

Does the turn away from the Renaissance as a historiographic concept, outside Italy, reflect the end of our belief in our own, collective ability to shape history? And if so, are we justified in our pessimism? Palmer does not think so. Despite her clear-eyed recognition of the horrors of the last half a millennium, and her acknowledgment of the crises we face in a tempestuous present, she is confident that progress is not only possible, but probable. Slowly and unevenly, with many setbacks and disasters along the way, we will consciously create a better world. I hope she is right, but I am not so sure. Our current condition more often seems to evoke that other German myth of modernity, the shadow image of Burckhardt’s Renaissance: the tale of Faust, unable to control the demons he has summoned. One thing, however, is certain. Any step forward will require a renewed sense of the collective agency first dreamed of in the Renaissance. Our history, in every sense of the word, depends on it.