Published on February 3, 2026 10:01 PM GMT

 Inventing the Renaissance is a 2025 pop history book by historian of ideas Ada Palmer. I’m someone who rarely completes nonfic books, but i finished this one & got a lot of new perspectives out of it. It’s a fun read! I tried this book after attending a talk by Palmer in which she not only had good insights but also simply knew a lot of new-to-me context about the history of Europe. Time to reduce my ignorance!

ItR is a conversational introduction to the European Renaissance. It mostly talks about 1400 thru 1600, & mostly Italy, because these are the placetimes Palmer has studied the most. But it also talks a lot about how, ever since that time, many cultures have been delighted by the paradigm of a Renaissance, & have categorized that period very differently.

Interesting ideas in this book:

• Claim: There has never been any golden age nor any dark age on Earth. Ages tend to be paradoxical juxtapositions of the downstream effects of the last age & the early seeds of the next age. 
• In 1500, Florence feels familiar to us moderns. It’s literate & cosmopolitan. We have detailed records. There are even life insurance companies. Yet it’s also still full of exotic medieval violence. Torture & public executions are not rare. Slavery is normal. When the police arrest a wealthy man, they quickly withdraw from the streets into the police fort, then the man’s employees besiege the police. Aristocrats can order a commoner killed with no consequence. Sometimes the pope hires assassins. It’s a very interesting time to read about, because it’s well-documented & familiar, but also very unstable, dynamic, personal, & high-stakes. 
• The world everyone thought they lived in was very supernatural. It reminds me of a D&D setting. A army might attack a city merely because it has the fingerbone of a certain saint in its cathedral, & this bone would magically make the army’s projectiles more accurate. No one questioned this - the city defenders were simply desperate to deny this magical advantage to the attackers. 
• During wars, nuns got more funding. Nuns have great relationships with dead people, who in turn can talk to God. They were basically lobbyists for Fate. Convents were often built next to city walls, as spiritually defensive buildings. 
• This era saw a ‘space race’ for grammarians, historians, & old books. It was believed that by adopting the culture of the past (old is always better than new, they thought), they could raise the virtue waterline & end war. 
• Like today, poor people went to budget doctors & rich people went to expensive doctors. Unlike today, the rich people got no real medical benefit from what they bought (magic crystals). Their healthcare was no better than the budget healthcare.
• Claim: Machiavelli gave us modern political science & fact-based history.
• Claim: Machiavelli gave the West utilitarianism. (Mozi gave it to the East.) This was caused by a specific moment when Aristocrat A broke his oath to Aristocrat B & killed him. (Bear with me on the names; i’m no historian.) This betrayal was unforgivable; it’s literally what gets punished in the lowest circle of Dante’s Hell. But this ended Aristocrat A’s obligation to reconquer Aristocrat B’s birth city. So one man died to stop a whole war. Many thousands of common men would have died, & (if i’m reading between the lines correctly) many many women would have been sexually assaulted by the pillaging soldiers. Machiavelli got his bad reputation from saying ‘shut up & multiply’. He wrote that when a tradeoff averts so much violence, it IS the ethical choice. Nobody agreed with him … except by the 20th & 21st centuries, everyone’s practical attitude to politics is far closer to Machiavelli’s than to any of his sin-deontology contemporaries. 
• Emotionally, we want our favorite Renaissance geniuses to care about human rights, or democracy, or empiricism. Similarly, they wanted Plato to care about Jesus. But even the smartest & most likeable people from the past had worldviews & values very divergent from our own. 
• In 1500, atheism was like modern Creationism: a worldview with more holes than cloth. Who designed the animals? Some unknown process. How does gravity work, if not by the pull of Hell upon sin? Some unknown process. You’d have to argue against a huge mainstream of physics experts & doctors, & many textbooks of detailed, internally-consistent explanations for all phenomena. God was as deeply integrated into phenomena as our Four Fundamental Forces. Atheism was considered so out-there that the Inquisition didn’t expect anyone to actually believe it. And they were generally right. It was hard before the scientific method, Atomism, the microscope, or natural selection.
• Gutenberg went bankrupt. He understood his press was a big deal, & sold books to all local buyers … then ran out of buyers. Knowledge didn’t get exponential until merchants set up trade networks for books. 
•  There was a long interval between Galileo’s scientific method & Ben Franklin’s lightning rod - the first time science led to a technology that directly benefited people. In this interval, science awkwardly coexisted with prophecy & magic crystals: All of these seemed cool, but it was debated which was most useful. 

The worst things i can say about this book:

• Similar to most books by academics for the popular audience, it’s kindof just a assortment of interesting results from her research. Fortunately her research is about some of the most high-stakes junctures in history, & she has many little-known things to share.
• The part i found most boring was the chapter about the most interesting lives from the era. The content wasn’t boring (female commanders winning wars, democratic takeovers), but if we zoom in too much on history i’ll be here all day.

You should try this book if:

• You’re curious about this placetime. The book talks about a lot of fun weird pranks, scandals, & strange disasters. Civilization used to be very different there!!
• You want to learn more about the history of ideas via grounded examples.
• You want to learn about the early causes of the scientific & industrial era.