Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age

ISBN: 0226837971

Author: Palmer, Ada

Condition: New

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025An irreverent new take on the Renaissance, which reveals it as anything but Europes golden age.From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (were 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 weve told ourselves about Europes not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity.Palmers 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.