Episode Summary
We live in an uncertain age, one in which wealthy and powerful forces are working tirelessly to overthrow democracy, turn back the clock on human progress and destroy the middle class. The sheer magnitude of the West’s crisis of democracy can be overwhelming, however, and that’s why in this episode, I wanted to take more than a few steps back to explore the Renaissance, a period of world history that is much discussed in popular media, but often in a way that overshadows the real people and their actual intentions. Where did the Renaissance come from and what exactly were the people who made it hoping to achieve with their efforts? And are there any lessons that we can take from that time period for today?
These are very big topics, needless to say, and I could think of no better person to discuss them with than Ada Palmer. She’s a historian who teaches at the University of Chicago, and she’s written a fantastic review of the entire time-period called “Inventing the Renaissance,” which also discusses the historiography of one of humanity’s most written-about eras.
Besides this and other history books, Ada writes science fiction as well, which we get into at the very end of our conversation in the context of what lessons modern people can take from the Renaissance.
The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full page.
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Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So your book is called Inventing the Renaissance; before we get into the stories that you tell in the book, let’s just get into the larger question of the myth of the golden age. Because I think a lot of people may not be aware that a lot of this was kind of concocted by Protestant fundamentalists, which was then ironically picked up by atheists. There's a bit of an irony there.
ADA PALMER: Yeah, I mean it's a myth that begins and has its earliest roots in the Renaissance itself and the invention in 14, 12, 14, 15, basically of history into three parts with ancient, middle, and then modern, which begins in the Renaissance itself, gets reinvented very heavily in the 18th century and the 19th century, and then many times [00:03:00] in the 20th century.
Because once you have the idea that there is a golden age, you want to be able to claim that what you're doing is like that golden age, with the Renaissance, what we really mean by the Renaissance is the theory that there's some transitional phase at which the way things were pre-modern world suddenly gets changed by the arrival of something that changes it and makes the world start moving toward modern.
And world begins to become more modern somewhere in the 14 hundreds or 13 hundreds or 15 hundreds, depending on when you center the Renaissance. And eventually it's to us. so the myth of the Renaissance is really about claiming what defines modern and then claiming that it comes in at a certain point and that this modern process is somehow good.
Right. And that the Middle Ages are somehow bad, or the pre-modern world is somehow not as good or not as correct or not on the right path and trajectory of progress that [00:04:00] modernity is on leads to the utility of being able to claim it. And if you can say, X caused the Renaissance and we are continuing X, then that makes we good.
And in the 18th century and in the 19th century, there kept being moments when people could claim X caused the Renaissance and then for some reason X stopped dominating in Italy and Spain and where the Renaissance sort of started.
But we, whoever we continuing it so that the true spirit of Renaissance Florence and, Renaissance, Venice and so on, used to be in Italy but is now in Berlin, or is it now in London or is now in Boston, or whoever the speaker is, who can claim in some way that the ideology, which shape the Renaissance has its true continuation in.
they are, usually not Italy. And so there are all of these constructions in the 18th and 19th century saying, look at all these geniuses, looking at all these beautiful artworks that we all go see on the grand tour. They were enabled [00:05:00] by X and now X resides with us in London or with us in Germany, or with us in America.
And we are the true continuation of the ideology that brought us these geniuses and this of progress toward modernity. So the Renaissance keeps getting reinvented and whatever its cause is keeps changing based on what lets people claim it.
SHEFFIELD: So it's like, using the, past as a narrative to justify your present tense, your present ideas.
PALMER: ones to summarize, which is a 20th century, mid 20th century.
One, there's a hypothesis that the Renaissance is enabled by advances in banking and finance and that new methods of lending money at interest and international cur currency exchange and insurance and investment would develop over the course of the 13 hundreds and, create these banking fortunes mean that and therefore exchange of materials and therefore innovation in materials are starting to flow in [00:06:00] this period in a way they didn't, things become more interconnected.
Populations mix the stagnant Middle Ages turn into the dynamic mobile, commercial world of the Renaissance, and that's what enables all of the art and all of the innovation, and therefore one can say in 1970 capitalism is the true continuation of the Renaissance and our bad communist rivals are like the bad, no good communal, dark ages, right?
This is a really popular theory in the West during the Cold War because it lets you claim that capitalism is the correct trajectory for the future, and communism is backwards. so that particular theory, which competes with dozens of other theories of whether renaissance happens, has a vogue when it's politically useful.
And other theories have their Vogues either decades earlier or decades later whenever they approve politically convenient for somebody who wants to be able to claim. What I'm doing is the trajectory of modernity and the future. What my rivals are [00:07:00] doing is the trajectory of the backwards pre-modern, bad world.
The continual mythic refounding of the Renaissance
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and in fact the term, as, you were saying earlier, the narrative about the Renaissance as a, a refounding, if you will, away from the, a dark ages. I mean, that was a narrative that started in the Renaissance itself through one of the key figures who you talk about quite a bit in the book.
PALMER: Yeah, through, through, a pair of figures in a lot of ways through Petrarch and then Bruni.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
PALMER: So these are figures living respectively just before and during, thus just after the year. 1400 bruni being of the student generation relative to Petrarchs, teacher generation. and Petrarch first articulates the idea that was this wonderful golden age, and now we are in a fallen age of ash and shadow.
And that the world has become wretched and broken, with the absence of the stability of Rome and that something must be done about this. [00:08:00] He doesn't say the Renaissance is a golden age. He says, we must try to make a golden age in contrast with this bad age we are in now by trying to imitate the arts and methods of the ancients and their golden age.
Bruni then, who is one of his successors, invents the three part division of history into ancient medieval, and for them present for us Renaissance. Saying there are three eras, the good past, the bad, recent past, and the present in which we are about to, and in the process of creating a golden age. it's an
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
PALMER: rather than a factual claim, right?
He's saying, we must make a golden age. Now it's just beginning. Here are the exciting new things. Let's do more.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and the thing about all of this is that, the study of history, it is about multiple causes [00:09:00] happening to things. And, I think ultimately that's unsatisfying to a lot of people who want to say no. It was this one thing that of why all this stuff happened.
It was this one thing and everything else. it was there a little bit, but it was just this one thing. My favorite thing, as it happens always. But you know, at the same time, there were, as, as there were specific people who were involved with this, and they specific choices.
one of them, was as, you talk about it, length, is, trying to. Unifying Italy or at least, maybe not unify, but
PALMER: and
SHEFFIELD: yeah,
PALMER: going bunch. Countries, right? The different city states are different nations, but to get them to
SHEFFIELD: yeah.
PALMER: with each other, it's not,
Solidarity vs. unity in Italy
PALMER: the European Union, but it's one of the bits of earliest rhetoric that the European can Union can look upon as a, we should have solidarity amongst [00:10:00] ourselves in order to defend ourselves against a world that doesn't share as many values as we share, even though we are also still separate countries with deep histories of fighting wars against each other, and in fact, loathing each other in the case of the Italian city states.
SHEFFIELD: yeah. Well, and they definitely, and nobody achieved that until, many hundreds of years later, in terms of unifying Italy. And so, I mean, ultimately probably the political I. The politics probably were the main that,
PALMER: I mean, I,
SHEFFIELD: you know,
PALMER: to
SHEFFIELD: that, that was different,
PALMER: I think it's
SHEFFIELD: I guess.
PALMER: talk about the difference between unity and solidarity.
Right, not no Petrarch does not imagine Italy unifying to one country,
SHEFFIELD: No.
PALMER: and his peers, if ever they do discuss the possibility of Italy unifying, Dante discusses it in his De Monarchia, they agree the only way this would happen would be if a foreign conqueror cape came over the Alps and conquered all of us. Other than that, is just [00:11:00] not happening. But solidarity is, it's hoped. Could the solidarity in which city states that our neighbors stop viewing their neighbors as arch enemies and become willing to ally with each other, against outside threats, because this is a period in which gorgeous Italian city states of central and northern Italy are so sackable, right?
They're so sackable, they're really, wealthy. The great banking fortunes are piled in bags of gold in people's basements. The treasures are everywhere. The agricultural fruits are everywhere. This is also the center of. production fabric
SHEFFIELD: They don't have huge armies. Yeah.
PALMER: they have tiny armies because they only have very tiny countryside.
They can't press the thousands of
SHEFFIELD: Where are they gonna put 'em
PALMER: can.
SHEFFIELD: where are they get 'em from? Yeah.
PALMER: all they can do is spend their money hiring mercenaries. But a mercenary by his very nature can be bought for money and therefore will often be bought out from under you by [00:12:00] arrival. And so if you wanna sack anything, right, if you're a young king and you wanna come home covered with glory and bring loot and make your people like you, do you wanna go anywhere else in Europe or do you wanna go into Italy where these tiny countries with few defenses and more treasure than anyone else?
And it's useful to remember, these are large cities by European standards, right? Only Paris and, later on in the Renaissance, London can rival these Italian cities in scale. There are multiple cities over a hundred thousand, which for a period is enormous. Milan, Florence, the edges of Venice and, Padua combined, Naples, which is humongous, right?
So there is a very strong incentive for any outside power. Is it the holy of an empire? Is it France? Is it Spain? Castile, Aragon, anybody Portugal, you want to come see some things. Italy is your oyster. It's the best place to have a war. It's also warm. It's agriculturally rich enough that you don't have to carry food for your soldiers.
[00:13:00] Your soldiers can just get the food off the land as they move. It's the ideal place to wage a war. And so what Petrarch looks around and sees is. If all these Italian city states agreed to help defend their neighbors against the French, when the French come, or the ese, when the ese come, then we could defend ourselves.
But instead, what happens is they arrive are two Italian cities. They hate each other because they're living in the plot of Romeo and Juliet. And the Montagues want nothing better than to see the deaths of the caplets and vice versa. So inevitably, one of them will side with the invader to help spite the other, because they loathe each other and then they both get conquered.
Or one of them gets conquered short term and the other gets effectively politically dominated. And so solidarity in which these countries are willing to defend their neighbors instead of sell out their neighbors is very far from unity. But it is what Petrarch is imagining could be achieved if, the values of ancient [00:14:00] Rome, of service to the state of valuing the good of the people above other things.
The values of the Roman Republic could somehow be dredged out of the libraries of antiquity.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah.
Rediscovery of ancient texts
SHEFFIELD: and the other thing about that, I think I mean, I guess I, think a lot of people have this idea that nothing from ancient Rome in Greece was known to people who lived during the medieval times. And needless to say that's not true at all. But nonetheless, a lot was kind of buried.
And So, so,
can you talk, about
that if you would?
PALMER: and no. the, backbone of medieval education is the bits of Cicero they have Virgil and of it, they're all reading it. They're all studying it. These are books you used to learn Latin grammar to then move on to theologians. medieval kings are constantly comparing themselves to ancient ones.
the coins have portraits on them, which are copied from [00:15:00] portraits of ancient Caesars. Ancient Rome is all over the place, all the way through the Middle Ages. The belief that it wasn't is propaganda of the Renaissance claiming, barbaric things have been using the antiquity wrong, and they've been using Latin wrong, and they've been using Aristotle wrong, and now we're gonna use all these things.
Half Using things in a new way and using things with a new sense of urgency. Because when people talk about the rediscovery of ancient texts in the Renaissance, people are always imagining, Indiana Jones prying open a tomb, and there is the, tome next to the ancient Knight in his sarcophagus, or somehow finding them in lost places.
And the answer is they're on library shelves. They're around, in Europe, they're on library shelves in Constantinople, they're on library shelves and being actively studied because Byzantium is huge and wealthy and thriving. and these studies never cease there. they only cease further west where there isn't the wealth necessary to [00:16:00] sustain large libraries. always useful for us to remember that the further east you go, the richer people are. and that Western Europe, even parts of Italy, are struggling in the Middle Ages to have enough wealth to support libraries due to the economic contractions after the end of the empire. So.
Petrarch's plan to unify Italy through classical zeducation
PALMER: When Petrarch and Bruni and their peers say, Italy is in this chaos of fractious disunity, we are going to be conquered and sacked by outsiders unless we change our ways.
We need to change our ways and create the possibility of cooperation and solidarity. How do we turn Montagues and Caplets into Brutus and Cicero and Seneca, and people who were faithful servants of the state? We need to reproduce the educational system of ancient Rome and raise the next generation of young Romeos and young tibbles and young Juliets on the books that produced the Roman Brutus and the Roman Porsche and the Roman [00:17:00] Cato and so on.
And maybe then they will act as the Romans acted and be faithful to the state and care more about the good of the people than about their family honor or personal honor. so this is a new use for the same books. So these books were being read the Middle ages for different ends. and just as a new cultural movement comes about and is like, now we're gonna do linguistics, now we're gonna do game theory, now we're gonna do this the same books, Virgil Avid, that we're already being used, are being used to a new end.
Let's revolutionize the educational system we use to raise our elites and make it focus more on ethics than on sort of theology and other worldly ethics make instead make it work on theory and practical ethics, perhaps is a good way to put it. and so they're, going to libraries and saying, Hey, those old books that you don't use very often that were written by people who are peers [00:18:00] of avid infertile that we all know, can we have copies of those?
They're using the same books that are already available in a new way. And we can be familiar how, and every amount of time a society will have a new intellectual program, which will make it care newly about some bodies of knowledge that it has had for a long time. Think about how when the first discovery of the existence of DNA suddenly makes people much more interested in the mathematics of helical structures and textbooks about helical shapes that may have sat on the back shelves of a library for decades since their obstru marginal mathematicians were like, Hey, I'm interested in helical shapes suddenly matter to biologists and the fundamental nature of life, those fly off the shelves because they're suddenly people interested in them. But they were always a few people interested in them. They just developed a new application.
So similarly, there were always medieval people reading these books. They just developed a new application for them in this [00:19:00] moment of perceived political crisis.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, one of those applications was reading these accounts of ancient battles and whatnot not as moral lessons or, grammatical instruction, but as well, what if we can get ideas for how they conducted themselves and why they won this battle. And that wasn't a, that was one of the new interpretations that, ended up emerging.
Right.
PALMER: Although there, you've jumped a hundred years ahead
SHEFFIELD: I know. Yeah. I am. Yeah,
am.
PALMER: jumping around in time and the way that people sort of always do with the Renaissance, which is, as one of the themes of the book as well, we have this idea perpetuated by timelines on classroom walls that somehow. In the 20th century, every decade is a unique era, and the Roaring twenties are radically different from the Great Depression, which is radically different from World War ii, which is radically different from World War I, which is radically different from the fifties and [00:20:00] those from the sixties, as if, whole eras happen every decade now, but didn't in the past.
The whole Middle Ages were the same, and the whole Renaissance was the same. And when we're jumping from patriarch to what you are just articulating now, which is Machiavelli, people talk about those two texts as if they're from the same moment. And when people say a rival theory to the Renaissance was caused by banking and finance is the Renaissance was caused by nationalism and the birth of national identity and the idea of national solidarity, first articulated by Patriarch and Machiavelli.
The two works people are talking about when they say that were written as far apart as Napoleon's childhood and Yuri G's. We would never claim that Napoleon's childhood and Yuri in space light are the same era. We have 15 eras in between those two. And yet we tend to think about the Renaissance as if difference of a hundred years doesn't mean [00:21:00] anything because these eras somehow were longer and moved more slowly.
But if you zoom in, as the book does you see all of these fine grain differences so that somebody in the in the 1520s remembering the 1490s feels like it was a different world as much as we in the 2020s feel about the 1990s.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, granted, yes. but I, guess still though, I, the idea of them just to read them, I think that was a, thing that Petrarch was, trying to, put out
PALMER: Yeah,
SHEFFIELD: and to say,
PALMER: what
Patrick.
SHEFFIELD: let's, just read this history. This is something we to learn from. He didn't, so he didn't even necessarily know what was in it, a lot of these books, he'd never read of them himself. So how would he know?
PALMER: these books, which we don't have and which
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
PALMER: can't read, and which I hope to be able to read if we get Greek back, [00:22:00] if, people travel across the Alps and find them, if people gather them as I gather them. And he worked to gather the first library of over a thousand books that had existed in Europe since antiquity.
he doesn't know what's in these books when he starts, right. He just has faith that whatever is in these books, reading them birthed Cicero. Reading them birthed Augustus and reading them birthed the good gay emperors Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, under whose Rule Italy knew the only period of extended peace in the entire record of Italian history.
And all he knows about the books is they shaped them. Maybe they will be able to therefore shape our ruling class to have the same values that cause the p. And caused the rise of Roman, caused the unification of Italy under the Rams having faith that whatever these books are, they did that. Therefore, if we have them, we'll use them.[00:23:00]
it takes then the decades after him to assemble these libraries and start applying this new educational system. And it's Machiavelli, who's one of the generation who grows up with this new educational system where he's reading all these books. He then says, actually, I think we also need to read these books in a new way, as you referenced, about them, not just as ways to osmotically absorb the morals of the people we are reading about, but to analyze them as we do now in modernity as case studies of who won this battle, why did they win this battle?
Can we find three similar battles or their patterns to what made somebody win the battle? Can we put these side by side? What policies did these different cities states have? What kinds of Tyrannies ended up ending these city states? Are there patterns between their policies and the way they ended kinds of questions, which are a new way of reading the newly assembled libraries that, in turn, Petrarch just wanted us to say, get the books.
Once we have the books, then we figure out what to do [00:24:00] with them.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. What.
PALMER: more than half a century.
SHEFFIELD: It did. Yeah. Because it was so painstaking and expensive to, to have a book in those days.
PALMER: Yep.
SHEFFIELD: yeah, and, I mean just the osmotic view of, libraries, it didn't really work though to facilitate solidarity.
Machiavelli's new interpretations
SHEFFIELD: and so we did, take so, so I guess we'll fast forward then to Machiavelli here for a second not just was he, was advocating new readings of these ancient books, but also I. he elevated one of the Roman concepts, which they borrowed from the Greeks. the Roman concept of Weir two, or virtue as, we, Amer, English people say. And, but, it was not at all what people nowadays who are English speaking think of when they hear the word virtue, that's not at all what these guys [00:25:00] meant. And, I think that's worth talking about.
PALMER: Yeah, I mean there are, I have two entire shelves of books about what Machiavelli means by veer two. It's such a, it's such a disgusted topic about Machiavelli that secretly in my classes I make a point of not bringing it up because I can tell when students are plagiarizing 'cause they'll always talk about it.
Right. It's the thing to bring up with Machiavelli, I think is very interesting is the way he is pushing against the fascination with virtue is dominant in the new educational system that Petrarch has set up. And there's a very useful term that my own dissertation advisor introduced into this discourse, which I talk about actually the history of the term in the course of inventing the Renaissance.
'cause as it's not just about the Renaissance being invented in the 14 hundreds and the 17 hundreds and the 18 hundreds, but also in the 19 hundreds and in the two thousands and in my own education and what it means to be a historian. Now continuing to invent and [00:26:00] reinvent this virtue politics, referring to the idea if they created this new virtue focused of education in which one would read these classics and from them absorb justice, prudence, temperance, fortitude, caution, generosity.
Courage, the other virtues that are discussed at such length by the agents Petrarch for example, talks about how the Greeks are superior to the Romans in philosophy and via Homer in poetry, but that nobody can match Seneca and the Romans on virtue. And that these are the, books that teach how to hone a soul toward excellence in the platonic sense, right?
That theory is saturated in the works of all of the peers of Machiavelli and the authors he is [00:27:00] reading when he is young and aspiring to join when he is writing his first works. And their focus is let's instill these virtues justice, prudence, et cetera, into the ruling class. And Machiavelli is then after observing the fact that this is.
The generation that grows up alongside him and then fights the horrible Italian wars that happened between 1494 and 1512 and beyond the, Italian wars as, as it's called in French and English, or the Cal as it's called in Italian, right? The calamity of Italy. These wars that are infamous, the bourgess are the most infamous part, but not the bloodiest.
Those were fought by the people who grew up on these virtues. So if that's the case, then the virtues didn't make people successful. virtue politics was the theory that not only would these [00:28:00] virtues make rulers, or wise, they would also make them successful. That they would be able to be successful the way the ancient Romans were successful, that their balance of prudence and courage and careful thought would make them make better political decisions.
then watches ruthless and unscrupulous and treacherous rulers succeed and defeat those who are following the precepts of Plato and Cicero and Seneca and goes on to discuss. We usually don't translate it. 'cause if you say virtue, it's being weird. Virtu, which is focusing on a sense of courage and grasping the moment fortitude to some extent, but certainly not.
Justice or mercy or temperance or those portions of it, but a kind of a col calculated prudence or what the next generation will call [00:29:00] reason of state or rationalist or what we might call utilitarian political calculation. is to him what makes, yeah, what makes people really successful is the opportunistic, prudent grasping of the moment.
the moment when Ezra Borja realizes, wait, at this moment I betray the mercenary captain who has been loyal to me all this time, that will lead me to actual success because I need to seize his land. a well-timed betrayal will serve me better than faithfulness, therefore, I will betray and it works.
And the men he betrays who follow all the precepts of Seneca, fail and lose their stuff, and Machi wants to describe this and say. may well be true that from studying these books, we learn the qualities, let's use the word qualities that make a successful ruler, but these qualities do not necessarily include traditional valued faithfulness, charity, [00:30:00] et cetera.
They include a kind of a, what we would call utilitarian, opportunistic prudence. And that is the quality, the virtue. Virtue in the sense of the virtues of an object or qualities of an object, right? That is the virtues that we want people to absorb if we want them to be successful. Rulers,
The myth of underground modernists during the Renaissance
SHEFFIELD: and, related to that, moving to a more kind of oriented viewpoint of, politics or, when people read Machia Machiavelli a lot of modern day people, modern people look at his writing and they, and, as you talk about in the book that, this is a, that they wanna think, oh, this guy was just like us.
PALMER: Yeah,
SHEFFIELD: And that
he was a person even though, and he was an atheist. and we
PALMER: Yeah. Yeah. So I, what you're talking about is, as I discussed in the book, Machiavelli is one example, Leonardo is another, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola is a third people in the modern day often really like to claim and, look at and [00:31:00] feel like they've found somebody in the past they would agree with.
And there are common depictions, I'm using that word carefully of the Renaissance that make an advance, a of claim that in the Renaissance there was a radical underground was rationalist and anti superstition and anti organiz religion, and possibly anti-religion in general, but certainly sort of pro reason and pro-science that saw their era as in the shackles of superstition.
And that breaking the shackles of superstition and opening the door to broad inquiry, was what would shepherd in modernity. And that somehow this. Semi-organized, sort of present groundbreaking of people who were way more modern than their time. And we often use the phrase he was ahead of his time.
were responsible for kind of kick-starting a process of change that moves us away from the supposedly [00:32:00] stagnant middle Ages toward the present. And that these are the agents who shape the Renaissance. Machiavelli gets pointed at as an exemplar of them. So does Leonardo and I say depicted because these depictions range from, here is a history book that names these people and gives these specific bits of evidence about what they were doing, or assumes they were doing it and analyzes how they were doing through, here's a video game or a.
Second tier fantasy movie, like, of the Delta Knights or Assassin's Creed that just says there is a conspiracy. We'll make up our name for them. They're a secret order of, rationalist proto scientists who carry on the tradition of reason from Arch and are gonna shape right? That, that we, tell this both in nonfiction and in fiction because it's very narratively satisfying and it's narratively satisfying because it makes the claim that the world came to [00:33:00] be our world and have us in it thanks to the intentional efforts of people like us and that people who shared our values.
Looked at the world and said, we want to change the world into a world where these values will dominate and then worked hard to do so and then succeeded, and that our world was made by people who would agree with us. This is very narratively satisfying, partly because it suggests strongly that the future will have the values we want it to have.
If we are now trying to shape a future that our values, just as we resemble the values that we imagine this to have had, and people who think this way about the Renaissance, often I'll run into them at a party and I'll say, I study the Renaissance, and they'll be super eager to talk to me about their favorite Renaissance person, lead around to the question of my favorite Renaissance person.
Wouldn't they agree with me about X, Y, and Z? And if the person is an atheist, they'll often say, wasn't Machiavelli or Wasn't a secret atheist? [00:34:00] but other times it'll be somebody who's strongly Protestant and be like, wouldn't they have shared my anti-Catholic sentiments? Or wouldn't they have shared my values about education?
Or there'll be a wide variety of what people are hoping that I as an expert will be able to say. Yes. the shapers of the Renaissance would've agreed with you about this thing. but when you actually read what they are doing in the Renaissance, the answer is a no. They wouldn't have agreed with us about just about anything.
and B the people we wanna point to as being in this underground aren't the biggest shapers of it. They're there. But when we wanna look at Machiavelli and say, yeah, Machiavelli sort of causes the Renaissance. Machiavelli's work is incredibly obscure and unpopular except for his comic play. and to some degree his history. Nobody's reading the Prince not for, decades after his death well into when the Renaissance is, mostly over. He's not a shaper, he's a commentator on. And when we look at who are the really influential people that a lot of people are [00:35:00] reading, they're doing wacko awesome, bizarre cult stuff.
Like, here's Marsilio Ficino teaching you how to use Plato to project your soul out of your body in order to achieve a rip fan winkles styles medical stasis so that your body can sleep in perpetual youth for a decade, while you fly around the cosmos and spy on your neighbors and cast love spells, right?
and that's being read by two orders of magnitude more people than I ever read Machim in the period. it's a messier, more plural, more complicated world. Lots of people were coming up with new ideas, uh, not only the people who would agree with us, and I try to get people, in the, fine grain.
Nobody likes plural explanations of things, but this is a desperate time.
And as articulated by Petrarch, as articulated by Machiavelli, northern Italy finds itself in more and more dire fear as bits of Italy are being [00:36:00] conquered, as cities are being conquered from the inside through coups, from the outside through wars or from mercenary captains saying, it's about retirement time.
Let me look through my menu of nearby cities and decide which one I wanna conquer and make myself the duke of, as I hit retirement age. It's a desperate time, and therefore time for desperate measures. And the desperate measures are incredibly plural, they try a million Jillian things.
And in the 19th century historians read through and picked out the like three or four things they tried that felt like what we were doing in the 19th century that felt modern, celebrated them and put those figures on a pedestal and said, look, these people made the future, their ideas agree with us.
And the more we studied, the more we're like, no, actually most of their ideas weren't popular until the 19th century. They had small impacts, but they didn't have huge impacts. Other people that we totally wouldn't agree with at all had huge impacts.
The rise of pluralism
PALMER: But more importantly is the pluralism. This is throwing spaghetti at a wall and 15 strands stick and the [00:37:00] other, a hundred fall and only one of those 15 strands as Machiavelli.
others are just as influential and they braid and they counter each other and they disagree and they shape an enormously, complex in which people we disagree with were just as influential as those we agree with. But it was a process of dynamic discovery and above all of discovering that the earlier things people had been confident in were wrong.
Right? Before we can get the beginning of modern science and what is sometimes called the scientific revolution, have to get to the state of people looking at their current science and saying, wow. This doesn't describe what we see. this, four humorous theory, this Galen stuff this old tomic geometry, all of it appears your geography, all of it appears to be wrong.
get to all of it appears to be wrong. What you actually need isn't one person who's right. It's 50 people have [00:38:00] rival theories and
SHEFFIELD: Oh, you have to have the question should let's, is what we know. Correct.
PALMER: Right. And
SHEFFIELD: That's
PALMER: is
SHEFFIELD: and that's what's key. Yeah.
PALMER: rival theories that are making people
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
PALMER: a minute. We don't, this disagrees with this, which disagrees with this, which disagrees with this. How do we sort them out? We need a new method for sorting them out. That new method will be the scientific method.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
PALMER: the Renaissance as a point at which there's a radical pluralization of how many different rival theories there are about things.
As we get the ancients back and discover that Plato totally doesn't agree with Aristotle and neither of them agree with the epicureans and they don't agree with the stoics and they don't agree with the skeptics.
And when we get antiquity back, right? There's not one, there's not one antiquity. There's many antiquities. They were expecting a lot more agreement. when Petrarch said, go find the ancients. He was imagining they would all agree with Cicero, and he would've been very surprised to learn how much they didn't.[00:39:00]
then there's also the multiplication of medieval authorities becoming more available because the libraries don't only include the ancients, they also include all the commentators on the ancients, some of them coming in from the Islamic tradition or the Jewish tradition, from rival Christian traditions.
And then the reformation starts. And that too multiplies the variety of people claiming I can prove X is true about theology. I can prove Y is through true about theology.
You need the radical pluralization of truth claims. Before you get to the crisis at which people say, wait, we need a new method to weigh these truth claims.
And so you can see the Renaissance is the moment at which Petrarch said, find all the books. People found all the books. All the books totally disagreed with each other. People's theories about the books totally agreed with each other more. as a result, there ended up being an overwhelming competing world of questions, which is what opened the door to people feeling like they needed answers.
Now, somebody who is an atheist and somebody who [00:40:00] is an incredibly pious theist can be equal contributors, and were equal contributors to the pluralization of options. That is really what triggered the need for questions. It isn't the case that rationalism and atheism or skepticism naturally breed more questions than theism.
Theism also breeds lots of questions. It's having many theisms and indeed many skepticisms. All twining and multiplying and bouncing off each other. That makes an avalanche of questions that makes people say, we need a new shovel to dig ourselves out. That shovel is the new methods of bacon Descartes on the scientific method.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. and, you do speaking of, Renaissance atheism you talk at length about just this, in the same vein of trying to find, trying to project our past,
PALMER: Sorry.
SHEFFIELD: Ideas or trying to pro let me say this again. [00:41:00]
The rarity of Renaissance atheism
SHEFFIELD: well, and, you also do talk quite a bit about just how few actual atheists there were,
PALMER: Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: in those days.
PALMER: Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: despite a kind of somewhat recent modern day, series of books that people have been coming out with trying to say that, oh, well, these, ancient figures, actually, they were atheists.
But the reality is that even the epicureans were not atheists.
PALMER: It's, a really
SHEFFIELD: what.
PALMER: it's a really complicated and difficult question to answer because, people always come to the Renaissance and say, well, we know the Inquisition existed and we know that there is this threat of force or indeed death. And that atheism is a capital offense. therefore when we read these texts, we don't expect people to say, I'm an atheist. We instead pe expect people to code and veil their ideas between the lines and make us hunt for it. Right? And so, methods of looking for atheists have always been period, looking for closet atheists, looking for people who don't [00:42:00] express their atheism, but whose other sentiments make it feel like they might be vulnerable or, but whose other sentiments make it feel like they might be sympathetic atheism?
My own dissertation, which was supposed to be looking for atheists the Renaissance, took this as a. That I knew as many do that Lucius's de Ram Naura, the nature of things, this poem of epicurean cosmology and physics that denies the afterlife and denies divine action and posits, a materialist universe would be of great interest to any atheists that are around.
So the theory of the dissertation was, well, if I study the people who read lucretius, who commented on it, who we know worked with it, my secret hidden atheists will be among them. they'll still be camouflage. They won't admit that they're atheists, but there they will be. In the margins of lucious underlining their favorite passages, right?
And so I set out to look at [00:43:00] all the surviving copies of left from the Renaissance, and after looking at 350 of them determined that everybody underlined the sex scene the lines that sound like Virgil and, the bits about moralistic stuff that sound like they're coming outta Cicero and Seneca.
And that only two copies underlined any of the aism and atheism at all, which was Machiavelli's. And so, one might say to me, as many people did in conferences, well, aren't people just not underlining the atom because they're afraid of getting in trouble with the Inquisition, which is a microcosmic version of the question.
Aren't people hiding their atheism because they're afraid of the Inquisition? Wouldn't they be silent about that? It took a long time thinking on how best to answer that question. And this is me, somebody who's excited to go study atheism, right? I want these people to be atheist. I was looking for atheists and then I was reading their actual statements and I'm like, no, atheist would say this.
I wish you were an [00:44:00] atheist. You are a sweetie pie. But I, you sound like atheist. And the ultimate answer that I think really shows it is this. These guys often voiced quite publicly things that were way more dangerous to say in the period than atheism.
The Inquisition had certain things that cared about more than others. there were in, if you look at Inquisition records for a particular decade, say the 1510s, there would be a thousand trials. quasi Lutheranism and four for atheism, right? They really are hunting for A and not B and indeed the sex scene and sex stuff is more dangerous to underline than the atheist stuff.
The Inquisition had its priorities, and so I use, as this simile in the book, if you worried about. Government agents raiding your house, would you carefully hide [00:45:00] like slightly illegal smuggled Canadian sleep pills and leave a big bag of crack cocaine out on the table? You just wouldn't do that.
similarly, if you're afraid of the Renaissance Inquisition, you're not gonna carefully, meticulously hide your atheism and then publish a pamphlet talking about how to summon demons or supporting Lutheran Sofie. No Atheist is going to publish a pamphlet supporting Lutheran Sofie. He's gonna say, I don't care.
And go home. And the Inquisition is gonna leave him alone because they care much more about certain things than they do about other things. And it's that
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
PALMER: realize no closet atheist is gonna choose to go to the stake for Sofie. The way these guys did. Were
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
PALMER: of them who are closet atheists?
Yes. And there were definitely at least two. I found them. There they are, they're saying that they're atheists or their friends are saying that they're atheists. I love them. but that's two out of 35 people that I thought would be atheists at the beginning and the [00:46:00] other 33. I go through the material and I'm like, no, this is not a thi, this is not an atheist.
What it is, a radical weirdo theist who is questioning and applying reason and bucking the system in a theist way. Often in a wacky, nothing like modernity way in a, I'm gonna project my soul out of my body kind of way. are radical free thinkers who are disrupting the system, but they aren't quasi modern.
what people have to remember. Our modern values are shaped by our modern knowledge. Right. Our
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
PALMER: science required us to find those findings first.
SHEFFIELD: And none of,
things were there.
PALMER: exactly. If you don't yet,
SHEFFIELD: of evolution.
There was no, documentary hypothesis of the Bible, just all these things that came out in the mid 19th century.
They weren't there.
PALMER: Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: as, you say in the book, that to be a atheist in those days, in the Renaissance days, it was the equivalent of being a conspiracy theorist,
basically [00:47:00] in today.
PALMER: turning your back on all science and you have no science on your side. Science is not on atheism side yet. We haven't done that science yet. It is
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
PALMER: clinging to an extremely radical position without, rather than with consensus being able to be compatible with you.
It's a very fringe theory, and so a lot of the times when I talk to someone at a party and they say, I really love these Renaissance people. Were they really atheist like me? What that person is actually asking is, if I had lived in the Renaissance, would I hold the values that I hold?
Would I still have found atheism because it's universally persuasive, regardless of time and space. Would my authenticity translate if I had been born a different time? The answer is yes and no. If, most modern atheists would live in the Renaissance, they would be radical free thinkers, but not necessarily atheist, radical free thinkers, because science isn't on that side.
They would be experimenting with Plato and Seneca and Soul projection [00:48:00] and medieval stuff. They might be ISTs.
SHEFFIELD: Or her, medicist or
something. Yeah.
PALMER: they, they would be interested in Zoroastrianism and the Kian, Oracles and all of the newfangled excited, cutting edge research that was going on at the time. But it wouldn't necessarily lead to the same thing as now.
That's natural. The whole point of progress is that we learn new things and we change our attitudes based on our new knowledge. If we would land on the same values without all the fruits of modern science that we do with the fruits of modern science, what are we bothering with? With saying that our values are based on science.
Our values are based on science and, our critical reasoning there about, and so we would come to conclusions when we had different science, and they would still be radical and they would still be freethinking they would still be bucking a system, but they wouldn't arrive at the same conclusions even if they arrived at the same question.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I think probably the best person who exemplifies that, or at least off the top of my head is Isaac Newton. [00:49:00] a lot of present day people kind of think of, oh, he's the guy that showed that, God wasn't keeping the planets in line and all that. And he was really the founder of Science and Secularist.
But if you actually read Newton and, he was obsessed with Alchemy. He was obsessed with, Bible codes. He was like that, that's what
PALMER: Yes, let's congeal.
SHEFFIELD: on.
PALMER: Let's congeal sunlight into gold. Yeah. old quest. Yep. because that's where the cutting edge experimental world was.
The try-everything age
PALMER: and when I talk about Newton's era, which I do in the last section of this book my personal term for the 17th centuries, the try everything age.
When people say, okay, the Renaissance showed us that there are so many completing competing truth claims that we cannot sort what is true. there are too many different persuasive authors. We read Plato, we read Aristotle, we read Seneca, we read Augustine, we read Thomas Aquinas, we [00:50:00] read scotus, we read Bruni, we read Ficino.
They are all very persuasive and all very smart. We can't figure out what's true. Let's try everything. And this is the try everything age where they try everything. and then the things that work stick and the things that don't. Don't, and I love this quotation from a biography of King Christina of Denmark, sorry, king Christina of Sweden.
King Christina of Sweden, who is the complexly transgender ish king of Sweden at this time was really interested in science at Descartes and all of this stuff. And in the biography of her, they talk about her as somebody who believed in all sorts of marginal and super sisters superstitious arts like chemistry, astrology, and the divining rod.
And those three are lumped together 'cause they're equally experimental. Right. And, chemistry, astrology in the divining rod are all seriously tried. And then one of the three is continued and the other two, much less so because they were trying [00:51:00] everything and our modern sciences are descended from the ones that worked.
was equally vital that they tried all the ones that didn't, or we wouldn't know that they didn't work. So the, try everything, age tries everything. And of course, somebody as curious as Newton is observing movement and objects and also trying to decode Bible stuff because of people in your era say, this might be true.
You try it, you try everything.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and the, and, the reason why I think this is relevant to. Today, not just because to push back on some of this, new atheist type discourse, but it's also that, ultimately the main innovation of the Renaissance, it was the pluralism. It was the, governmental forms. And that's ultimately, in some ways you could argue that nowadays with all these conspiracy theories, we're also now again, in a try everything age. [00:52:00] And that because the government has been, cut back so much on public education, on cut back, on, secondary education for the public, college education that a lot of people are never, they're not, they don't know these facts.
Like a lot of people, millions of Americans, they were Christian homeschooled. So they have no idea about any of these scientific theories. Like people would say, oh, well the science shows this. It's obvious. anyone would believe this stuff. Well, they've never even seen it.
Growth through debate
PALMER: Yeah, and I think it's important to remember that another major legacy of the Renaissance is education, as we know it, right? Liberal arts, education, the humanities, studio, human. is the educational system Arch advocates setting up, and he argues that reading these texts and grappling with them ethically and asking big, deep questions about what is right and what is wrong and human behavior and what is just and unjust, [00:53:00] the kind of education where the class reads softly together and then debates the justice or injustice of what happens in Antigone, and whether a law can be a law while it's unjust, or whether you should obey an unjust law.
These as formations of a curious and self examined character. That a human being is most human when we debate these big questions and use them to form ourselves through a process of inquiry, that as a backbone of education is core to what the Renaissance gives us. And the Renaissance is very correct in noting as we note now that kind of education leads to change and it leads to innovation, and then it leads to dynamism and it leads to people questioning the way the world works now and proposing ways the world could work better stimulates progress, but it also stimulates rebellion.
[00:54:00] And when you see people who are against liberal education and against critical thinking, it's somebody who wants to make sure the next generation agrees with them. Rather than wanting to raise the next generation to be freethinking, self examined, and take the world in the new and rich directions that Free inquiry develops.
The Renaissance creates an educational system that in turn creates a world that does not agree with those who created it. And if you could teleport arch from the beginning of the Renaissance to the end, he would find himself scared and surrounded by worrying ideas, incredible innovations. he could tell, import himself him even further to now, he would need decades to catch up with the progress of philosophy and science along the way, and he would look around and say, this is a world that shares practically none of my beliefs, but it does share [00:55:00] my value, that the examined life makes us more human.
Through the fruits of that examined life, which are scientific discovery, better knowledge of the world, increasing human power. We have achieved things that Petrarch would weep to see us having done. Like we can cure the black death now. Petrarch lived through the black death and his letters are absolutely heartbreaking.
And his attitude coming out of it very much was one of, we are living in a plural apocalypse in which plague and the famine that follows plague When people, when agriculture fails because there's been a pandemic, the shortages those things, we cannot, as human beings battle, we cannot stop. The horseman plague.
We cannot stop the dire horseman famine. We cannot stop the dire horseman. Death maybe says Petrarch, we can stop the dire horseman war. If we can achieve solidarity, prudence, if we can make [00:56:00] wiser governments. That's what the educational system really wants. It wants to take on the, one of the four horsemen that people thought was a saleable the other three were not.
If Petrarch were here today, he would be amazed to discover that the Dread Horsemen plague was much more defeatable than the dread horseman war. and that we have gotten so successful at it that practically every disease Petrarch was familiar with is either now rare trivial. And we lose dozens of people in a year instead of tens of thousands to the diseases that Petrarch thought would never stop plaguing, humankind.
He would weep to discover that we have bested so aptly so many of the weapons of the dire horseman plague. And he would be discouraged. But ready to grapple with the fact that the dire horseman war turned out to be [00:57:00] harder. that creating human polities that are capable of peaceful prudence has been a constant challenge and that we have yet to match the stability the Pax Romana, those days under Trajan and Hadrian when there weren't pirates on the seas or bandits on the roads.
There are pirates in the Mediterranean now, right? We have not matched the stability that patriarch dreamed that we could, if we showed him there is no smallpox he would say the work was worth it.
Diderot and the promise of the future unknown
PALMER: And this is where it's useful to bring up the fact that the Renaissance is an era of very long-term thinking, right?
This is still the age of cathedrals. Cathedral thinking is comfortable with things taking 500 years, not. Five years, not 10. Our modern world really wants to judge things on the really fast currents of one election. We judge the president on or the parliament on how things are [00:58:00] doing within a few years of their taking office, when of course, major policies haven't been able to yet actually show their consequences.
Medieval and Renaissance people were very comfortable with beginning a project that they wouldn't live to see the end of you dig the foundation, you trust the next generation will build the lower part of the walls and the next, the middle part of the walls and the next, the upper part of the walls, and you begin building that cathedral not knowing how to build the top, but you start it anyway.
Right? Petrarch saw Florence's Cathedral going up without knowing how to build the dome that was planned to go on top. It wasn't technologically possible. They trusted that it would be by the time they got there and they were right. That cathedral isn't finished still, they're still building it. Milan finished its cathedral less than a decade ago, right?
these are big projects and if you ask Petrarch on what scale should we judge, read [00:59:00] education in order to help us be more examined and become our best selves, we'll bring about peace in Europe. what scale should we judge that? If we ask Petrarch, he would say, on the scale of a cathedral, I, would love if it were faster.
But the scale of a cathedral is a scale in which we need to think. I know right now we're surrounded by a lot of things that make us feel fear. the world is very scary right now because it isn't more alarming than it has ever been in most of our lived experience. Those of us who remember the Cold War remember it mostly as youthful memories. our elders remember it more vividly. For most of us, this is the scariest the world has ever felt. And therefore it feels like an apocalypse that's been a common feeling of generations. For centuries, there were moments that felt like an apocalypse to Petrarch. There were moments that felt like an apocalypse to Machiavelli.
Shakespeare rants about this in some of [01:00:00] his work. lifetime felt like an apocalypse. Many, eras have, but we have come so far through the aftermath of arch's call, let Us Make Education, and it's continuing to bear fruits and the adversaries of progress. And those who want the past more than the future are the adversaries of it who are trying to dismantle that educational system because they know perfectly well of that it creates change progress, and that it creates a future, which would not agree with our current values, but would replace them with more examined better.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I think that prospect is also kind of threatening to even more centrist people today. And you see that with the, current discussion that, some, more centrist democrats are trying to say, oh, well you shouldn't, Stand up for trans people and
That isn't you
lead.
PALMER: is where I always think of Diderot right? Jumping forward out [01:01:00] of Renaissance into enlightenment, Diderot, one of the fathers of the encyclopedia project, right? One of the great transformers of that age who advanced this project to enable universal education and universal empowerment, the knowledge that is power and place it in the hands of the whole population.
Diderot in his secret private writings writes the philosophical dialogue Ramos nephew. And in that he confronts the fact that the fruits of the educational system he is making the new people who will grow up more rational than his current generation would be scary to him. It would not hold his values and that there would not be a place for him in the tomorrow he's building.
He realized that Diderot knew how powerful the power that his knowledge is, and that if you unleash it and give it to everyone and empower everyone that way a generation or two, there [01:02:00] will not be a place in that world for people who were shaped by the world before it. They will be left behind. And in that philosophical dialogue, Diderot looks at this and says, the future will not have a place for me.
I will not be at home in it. And I attempt that. It will be a better future.
That is a kind of courage that we need. need to trust. generations won't agree with us because they will have gotten somewhere better, if we don't trust that, then there will never be a dome on the top of the cathedral because to
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
PALMER: what we've started building requires that our successors surpass us, not merely resemble us.
No cathedral stands. If the top level is the same as the bottom level, it's too heavy and it falls down. If we aren't willing to entrust the project [01:03:00] a new generation that will surpass us and leave us behind, then we don't believe in progress because that's what progress demands of us, and that's what it means to.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's right. What are you doing it for if you don't actually believe in the project itself? That's what it comes down to. Yeah. Well this has been a really great discussion. I think that's a perfect place to leave it, Ada. and, I definitely encourage everybody to check out your book. So if, for people who wanna keep up with you what are your recommendations for them?
PALMER: if you go to ada palmer.com, it links to everything. You could find me on Blue Sky where I share good news about progress in science every day. If you want a, break from the doom scroll. It links to my blog, Ex Urbe E-X-U-R-B e.com, or I blog about history and ideas and it links to my science fiction and fantasy novels because in my other hat from being a historian, I'm a [01:04:00] futurist and science fiction writer.
Iotta is my main series, which is about the 25th century in a future that has left us far behind and is better than our present, but still has a lot of work to go and must face up to leaving itself behind as well. so if you like big meaty, big ideas SF like Foundation series you should check out Tara Iota, which is also linked from ada palmer.com.
And it also links to my podcast where I discuss craft of writing, science fiction and ideas with fellow, bookworm and SF novelist, Joe Walton. I. What else is it linked to? My music, which is about Norse mythology and my new fantasy series, which will be out in a year or two is about Norse mythology and trying to dive us into a world.
I think it's useful for us to visit because the Norse is one in which the metaphysics focuses on the fragility of the earth, that in a vast cosmos of darkness, emptiness, ice, and fire. there is [01:05:00] one fragile world made with great difficulty in which humans can live, which is constantly under assault by the giants personifications of storm freezing cooling, the dangers of nature and in which the humans and Gods must collaborate with each other to protect that fragile world in which human life is possible.
I think this is a very useful worldview for us to visit right now as we, as a civilization struggle to wrap our minds around climate change because so many of our ancestral metaphysics. Assume the strength of the earth and the stability and un fragility of the world and the un fragility of a cosmos in which everything is according to plan.
I think it's very useful for us to imagine ourselves for a few hours within the mindset of a people for whom the world was precious, fragile, and in danger, and required human custodianship to keep it going. 'cause that's closer to the mindset we need right now. [01:06:00] So, Smith,
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. All right, well, cool. all right, well thanks for being here and look forward to having you on future episodes as well.
PALMER: It's been a pleasure.
SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody joining us for the conversation and you can always get more if you go to Theory of Change show. We've got the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And my thanks to everybody who is a paid supporter of the show. Thank you very much.
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Thanks a lot. And if you're watching on YouTube, please do click the like and subscribe button so you can get notified whenever we post a new episode.
So that'll do it for this one. I thanks a lot for watching or listening, and I'll see you next [01:07:00] time.
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