Renaissance Without the Myth with Ada Palmer

What if the Renaissance wasn’t a rebirth at all, but a survival strategy dressed in marble and Latin? We sit down with historian and novelist Ada Palmer to unwind the stories that turned a chaotic, war-ridden Italy into a “golden age” and explore why those stories still shape our politics, schools, and museums. Ada shows how nineteenth-century nationalism carved custom Renaissances for each country, how rulers redefined legitimacy as “having Roman stuff,” and why art, libraries, and Latin became tools of intimidation in a Europe full of insecure thrones.

Step inside Florence with a visiting envoy and feel how a courtyard of emperor busts, a child reciting Greek, and a bronze that looks alive can flip alliances overnight. Follow the printing press not as a spark but as a response to a library boom, amplified by Venice’s trade networks and the first book fairs. Track how Europe exported “no columns, no culture” across empires, pushing colonized elites to argue their rights in Ciceronian Latin because that was the only language of power the conquerors respected. And watch the myth of superiority assemble itself, piece by piece, into a worldview that still colors public debate.

Ada also challenges the feel-good claim that destruction breeds creation. Michelangelo’s own letters describe years lost to stress and war; peace and stability, not crisis, are what grow output and invention. Think of history as a river: trickles, leaf-widths, canoe-widths, all real beginnings depending on what you measure. Along the way, we touch on Machiavelli’s brutal eyewitness era, the Ottoman refusal to play a game Italy would always win, and the practical mechanics of censorship—past and present—that rarely resemble Orwell.

If you’re ready to rethink the Renaissance, question neat timelines, and see how propaganda becomes common sense, this conversation will give you new lenses. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves history myths, and leave a review with the one “truth” about the past you’re now willing to revisit.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 0:00 Why “Early Modern” Misleads
• 6:07 Dark Ages, Golden Ages, And Useful Lies
• 14:47 Nationalism Manufactures Many Renaissances
• 25:47 Humanism, Scholasticism, And Coexistence
• 35:17 War, Disease, And The Italian “Apocalypse”
• 46:47 Art As Power: Roman Legitimacy Games
• 58:17 Printing Press Demand, Not Spark
• 1:08:27 Europe’s Superiority Story And Its Spread
• 1:18:47 Rivers, Beginnings, And False Origins
• 1:25:47 Crisis Doesn’t Create Better Art

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 0:49

Hello, and welcome to Varmblog. I am here with um Ada Palmer, professor of history and uh also a novelist. Um, but we're not talking about the fiction today. Um Although I knew you as a novelist first, ironically.

Ada Palmer: 1:07

Um they usually braid together.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11

Yeah. So I recently almost literally tripped over your your book over the resistance because it's about 600 pages. Um about 650 pages, actually. And I got fascinated with it because I've been interested in the way historiographic debates now actually affect contemporary understandings of politics. Um and you're not the first to question Renaissance. I've also interviewed Ed Simon many years ago, who was actually defending the category, um, but agreed that it was basically a late historiographic invention. Yeah. Um I wanted to ask you why right a massive tome on uh uh the Renaissance now when you know most scholars refer to this as the early modern period now, which is about the most boring-sounding name that you can have.

Ada Palmer: 2:14

Yeah, well, and also boring as well as misleading, right? Because you say early modern people think so people are taking off their top hats and starting to have early cars. You know, early modern sounds like 19th century at the earliest, right? And is and if we used it for 1400, everyone is just, what are you even talking about? Uh and you remember there's that whole chapter in the book about the word modern and how terrible a word it is, and how we use it for different things in every uh every arena. So modern art isn't the same period as modern architecture, which isn't the same period as modern history, which isn't the same period as modern baseball or modern computing or modern fashion. Uh and modern can mean anything from you know uh 2020s, uh, if you're talking about modern computing, to 27,000 BC, if you're talking about modern genetics. Right. Um so it's people don't usually believe this, but inventing the Renaissance, even though it ended up as a 600-page book, began as a very long blog post. And when it hit 40,000 words, I realized it wasn't a blog post. And I kept going until I finished my thought. And I couldn't believe when I found a publisher for it, they were like, Yeah, keep going, make it longer, it's great. And I was like, Really? Every publisher in existence wants short things. And they're like, no, we want a big fat tome. And I'm like, okay. So I gave them a big fat tome. Uh, because it was born from the fact that during COVID, I and many, many colleagues who work on the Black Death and its aftermath got many iterations of the same terrible question. And the question was: if the Black Death caused the Renaissance, does that mean COVID is going to cause an economic boom? And it's such a complicated, bad question that rests on so many interesting and complicated false assumptions about what the Black Death was, what the Middle Ages were, what the Renaissance was, how quickly it moved from one to the other, what economic booms are versus what a golden age is, even how history works. That after a couple of attempts of giving a journalist a short answer to it, I realized I couldn't do a short answer. And I started writing what I intended as a long blog post to be a sort of a long answer that I could refer journalists to. But then that got way too long. So instead it's a book. We have this idea somehow that dark ages or crashes or disasters burn everything down and then stimulate growth, and then things grow back afterward, like a forest after a wildfire. And you get this a lot in contemporary ideas about what the fall of Rome was or the Black Death was, what the Dark Ages were, that somehow the dark age was necessary for there to then be a golden age afterward. Uh, and you get this odd accelerationist idea that somehow, if we want a better future, the best way is to burn down everything we have now. Because if we burn it down, we'll have a dark age and then we'll have uh a golden age. I remember actually when the book was coming out, uh there was an interview with Trump where he actually explicitly said that his economic plan was, well, there's going to be some pain and a bit of a dark age, but then there's gonna be a golden age, which shows the way this idea of creation via destruction is in the way some people think about economics and think about politics. And to explain why is it not just that it doesn't work that way, but that the concepts it's based on are themselves false. There's no such thing as a dark age, and there never has been. And there's really no such thing as a golden age, and there never has been. Uh requires a longer unpacking of, but then why do we think that these things did exist? Why did my high school textbook tell me that the Renaissance was a golden age? And why was it lying to me? And it's like this is a really useful lie. Uh, and going into why it's such a useful lie is a long story that's not just about the Renaissance period, it's about the 19th century and the 20th century, and why the idea of this golden age keeps being useful for different political purposes at different moments in time, and therefore every refutation historians come up with is overridden by, but it's so useful if it's true, so we still want to pretend that it's true.

C. Derick Varn: 6:38

One thing that your book really got me thinking about, and we can get the specifics around Machiavelli, but but the framing and how much 19th century framing really did set the way for 20th century framing. I even think about this in terms of like, why do we think of the Roman Empire as are the ancient Greeks as dead white guys? Their empires are mostly in the we're in like Anatolian Asia and North Africa. I don't really know what you're talking about. Um and usually it's the the the geopolitical competition between the British and the Germans in philology, and like then you gotta explain.

Ada Palmer: 7:17

Claim Greece and claim Rome and claim Mediterranean culture. Um and uh I often joke with fellow historians that the 19th century is the real villain of every story, and they always laugh and agree, and it's half because of the colonialism and the industrialization and the other disasters that happened in the 19th century. But the other half of it is that it's the 19th century that messes up our project as historians in basically every field. Uh, and the practice of history as we know it now is a 19th century origin. You know, things like Renaissance studies originate in the 19th century, and they're all born out of and deeply shaped by nationalism. Uh, and this is why we have these funny terms like the Italian Renaissance versus the Northern Renaissance versus the French Renaissance versus the English Renaissance, because each of those countries constructed its own idea of this excellent golden age that was somehow the beginning of modernity, in which they were able to celebrate their special thing that their country did, which is why the dates of when Renaissance is are completely different in every country. And if you're talking to somebody who studies England and you say, When is Renaissance? You know, I can go out of my office and turn right down the hallway to the English department and ask them, when is the Renaissance? And they'll say, Well, the Renaissance is Shakespeare, and you know, the heights of English theater and then Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth. So, you know, the height of the Renaissance is 1600 when Hamlet debuts, and it's getting going by 1550, uh, and it's having its little antecedents and you know preview of the Renaissance in the early 1500s, but really it doesn't start until 1550. But if I turn left down the same hallway and I go to the Romance Languages Department, and I knock on the door and I'm like, Ren is Renaissance. The Italianists are like, oh, the Renaissance is Dante and is you know the 1300s, and it's really getting going by 1350, and the you know, early half first half of the 1400s is the best part. And it's really winding down after 1500, and it's over by 1550. Um, so in one part of the hallway, the Renaissance is over by the time it's begun in the other end of the same hallway, because each country is celebrating the moment when they had their hero. They had their great thing that they could claim was a break from everything that was before it, which was somehow bad, and the beginning of everything after it, which is modernity and was somehow good, which is one of these hints, the fact that nobody can agree about the dates of when the Renaissance is, that tells us that this is a really made-up thing, right? Everyone can agree the dates of the French Revolution. The French Revolution definitely occurred at a time. We can argue about its causes, we can argue about its consequences, we can argue about the most important phases of it, but like it has concrete dates. Everyone believes it's real. Um, it's when you get these amorphous concepts like Renaissance that begins vaguely within 200 years and ends vaguely within another set of 200 years, that you have your warning sign that this is constructed by, in this case, as is usually the case with history, the nationalist projects of the 19th century, all wanting to be able to claim this excellent achievement as being a national achievement.

C. Derick Varn: 10:25

Right. Even though some of the nations we're talking about did not exist for another 500 years. But I always think about that in the the Italian Renaissance because I'm always I'm always arguing with my students. I'm also a teacher.

Ada Palmer: 10:39

Um there's no such thing as Italy at this period.

C. Derick Varn: 10:43

Right. We can't talk about Italy before then the late part of the 19th century, guys.

Ada Palmer: 10:48

Like we can talk about Italy the way we talk about Europe, right? We can talk about it as a region. We can't talk about it as a nation or something that has shared national identity. And I think that's a useful way to think about it. Um and I'm always intentionally giving my students letters where you know somebody from Florence is complaining about weird foreigners like people from Venice and Milan, uh, to get them to hammer in that this is a region and that it's very much not a national identity, but it's still a region and that has meaning in the same way that Europe as a region has meaning. And people can feel that being European has some component of identity beyond being from beyond uh the European world. Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 11:32

Well, I guess this this leads me to a question on the Renaissance and its Europeanness. Um, because we get a bunch of explanation for the Renaissance. My favorite one most recently was it's involved with the with the crashing of the medieval scholastic institutions, uh, largely during the religious wars of the 13th century, just petering them out.

Ada Palmer: 11:54

And yeah, but that's just actually untrue because in Mullerworth's actual Atham went up and their funding went up and their libraries got bigger. Uh, and every century moving forward from the 1100s, there are more scholastics and more universities. I always have fun talking with people who come out of the philosophy department. They're like, yeah, scholasticism, which is a medieval movement. And I'm like, Yeah, the vast majority of scholastic books were written in the 17th century. Doesn't sound very medieval to me. Um, but uh it's funny, we have this idea that when movements come after each other, they must replace each other. And people talk about scholasticism being replaced by humanism uh in the same way that people will ask me, you know, oh, when printing comes in, when do people stop making manuscripts? And the answer to when do people stop making manuscripts is walking to a Barnes and Noble, how many blank books are there for sale in that Barnes and Noble? We're making more manuscripts now than we ever did in the Middle Ages. We never stopped making manuscripts. They are a technology that coexists alongside printed books and then fulfill different services, and the functions of them get passed back and forth. So, similarly, new intellectual movements like that of the humanistic, the humanists in the Renaissance come in and they debate with and compete with and are employed alongside and talk to and respond to the books of the scholastics. But more and more and more scholastic stuff is being put out over the whole course of the Renaissance.

C. Derick Varn: 13:24

Um for my listeners, not that I shouldn't read the book, but what do you think led to the need to construct this idea of a period in the time?

Ada Palmer: 13:45

We can talk like we know why in the 19th century it becomes such a big deal, but there was well let's talk a time more about the 19th century first, because I think that helps answer the second question. Um, because as you'll recall, when I talk about the the reason we keep inventing and reinventing Renaissance, is that we get to pick something to say is the cause of a change. Uh and as you know, I use the term X factor for this. The Renaissance is a period in which a historian will make the claim that some thing changes, some X factor comes in that sparks uh acceleration and transformation, and that is the end of a period of sort of a flat wiggly line in a graph uh being transformed into one where the graph is going up, caused by some change. And then people will make a different claim about what that change is, but it's always an X factor. And whatever that is causes the beginning of modernity and the move toward where we are now. And these claims will pick different things. So sometimes you'll have a claim that banking is what caused the Renaissance, and there were major innovations in insurance and money lending and the ability to deposit money in one city and take it out in another, which enabled finance, which enabled large-scale investment and movement of goods, which is what enables all of these, you know, high product quality production of metal and fabric, and the economy is finally booming again and the roads are finally grinding again, and we have a large interconnected economy the way the Roman Empire did, and that that stimulates all of the growth, which in turn enables the ideas and the art and et cetera, and that banking is what causes the Renaissance. And therefore, uh that capitalism is really what causes the Renaissance, and the excellence of the Renaissance proves that capitalism is best and will inevitably triumph over its communist rivals. And boy, was this thesis popular during the Cold War, right? Um, because it can be used to justify one political stance as the correct one whose trajectory is the modern trajectory toward excellence. And then you compare your enemies to the bad, no good, communal, in this case Middle Ages. And then a different historian will have different data that suggests that one of the things that causes the Renaissance is uh republican debates that are going on in the city republics in Italy, and that it's Florence and Venice and Siena that are republics rather than monarchies, where citizens are getting together to debate and discuss liberty and abstract philosophical concepts of how to rule best and how to be the best citizen, and that this stimulates new ideas and political economy, and that that causes everything, and therefore democracy. Democracy is what causes the Renaissance and ends the bad, no good middle ages, and democracy is therefore the correct trajectory for modern life. And these are just two examples, both of those are 19th or early 20th century examples, where people will suggest a different thing that is the cause of this everything getting better, and will therefore use it to make a claim that their faction, their political party, their momentum, their country, their language group, their corporation with its logo that invokes something renaissance about it, whatever it is, is somehow a continuation of the X factor that caused the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of this movement toward modernity, which is why every time a historian comes in with even a very moderate argument of, hey, here's data about banks. Looks like there was banking at the beginning of the Renaissance, it gets transformed via journalists and then pundits into a much more extravagant claim that X is the one and only cause of the transformation from a stagnant, no-good period into a golden and forward-moving age. So that's what gets made out of the idea of Renaissance. When we then look for the origin of the word, the word itself is an 18th-century word that has come up with to describe the artistic output and all those beautiful things that you go to the art gallery to see, which are part of the grand tour, which is a mandatory part of the education of a wealthy uh uh gentleman or lady uh in that period and in the 19th century. When you go before that to discussions of can there be a kind of a rebirth or cultural transformation in the period itself, then they're not thinking about banking, they're not thinking about um economics, they're not thinking about political change in the same way we are. Uh, and this is where, after pointing out that golden age is a propagandistic term, dark age is a propagandistic term, the whole concept of this is popular and famous because of propaganda, I then say, okay, if we carve away the propaganda and try to see what's there, what are they actually talking about? Because I do think there's an important change in the Renaissance, though it's largely one that continues trends that are already can starting in the Middle Ages, which were themselves very dynamic. And for everything someone says is new in the Renaissance, an evilist will pop up and say, here's an example of it in 915. Um but rarer, and then they become more and more concentrated over time as things continue. Uh, zooming into the Renaissance itself, what I see on paper is actually desperation and then uh desperate measures in response to desperate times. All right, so there's a wonderful letter that Machiavelli received in 1506 from a friend of his, Ercole Bentovollio, who was commanding the uh Florentine armies at the time, and they knew each other through military background. Machiavelli had been writing a history of the decade they just lived through, which is the decade that spans the year 1500. And his friend wrote to him and said, Machiavelli, you must finish your history of this period, but because without a good history of it, future generations will never believe how bad it was. And they will never forgive us for having lost and destroyed so much and defended ourselves so uh poorly. He's talking about the decade in which uh Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa and uh Michelangelo carved the David, uh, and in which Rafael is also doing the first of his uh famous and beautiful fresco work. This is the peak if we look at the artistic output that's in museums. This is the peak of what makes us, when we visit Florence or Venice, look around and say, wow, this looks like the city of a golden age. Uh but being on the ground, it felt like an apocalypse. And ironically, to us, a huge part of the reason is progress. Progress was having the bad side effects that progress does. There had been lots of technological progress, which means artillery was bigger, city walls get blasted down faster. Uh, there had been political progress, which meant centralization of power in more coherent states that could therefore raise larger armies and fight bigger wars. Uh, commerce was booming, and people were traveling with goods uh back and forth all of the Roads and uh ships were starting to interconnect again, which meant diseases move faster. Uh outbreaks happen more often, and the life expectancy goes significantly down from the medieval average of 35 to the Italian city republics of the Renaissance, which have the average life expectancy of 18, uh, 35 down to 18. And people are always like, whoa, that number is too low. You're forgetting to exclude child infant mortality. I'm like, actually, both of those numbers include infant mortality. So the number is low, but the change is the really important part, right? That it got that much deadlier. And most of those deaths are from one of two causes. One is children dying of disease between the ages of three and 12, not in infancy, but in the period after you've survived the really risky time. But outbreaks of the pox and everything else are happening much more often in vulnerable childhood. More and more kids are not making it to adulthood. The other half, men dying in war and from murder. Uh, in the political chaos and factionalism and feuding of what really was a living in the plot of Romeo and Juliet for 300 years, uh, is a good characterization of Italian history, in which there are constant family-on-family and faction-on-faction feuds within cities causing strife, and in which if Romeo commits a murder, his family absolutely expects they can just go to the Prince of Verona and demand that he be let off without consequences. And he will be because he's from one of the top families of the city. So Italy was suffering from disunity, civil war, city-on-city war, increased disease, larger scale armies. And Italy especially was extra vulnerable to warfare and chaos because it was the best place to have a war. Italy is warm and it's agriculturally rich, so you can loot all the food your army needs as you're going through. You don't have to worry about having all the extra wagons to carry food with you, which is really difficult in this period. And the winters aren't that bad. And all these cities hate each other. So if you're attacking one city, you can usually get its neighbors to team up with you to help sack it. And then you can turn around and betray them and sack them later, but it's too late. Ha ha. Um, and these cities are incredibly rich because Italy is the center of the biggest mercantile industries of this period. I mean, we think about big oil and big auto. So for them, it's big wool, big olive oil, and big finance eternally, all of which have their center in Italy. And so these cities have literal piles of gold in their bankers' basements. They have no allies. They have tiny armies because they're city-states without very much countryside. So they have small populations, can't raise large armies. If you're a king and you want to conquer something, do you want to go after the tiny, friendless city-state that's literally filled with piles of gold? Or do you want to go after anything else? There's a wrong answer to this question. You want to have your wars in Italy. Uh, in fact, they're named, the wars of this period are named the Italian Wars. They're named that by the French during the Reformation, French wars of religion, when they would when old knights would sit around and say, Oh, remember the good old days of the Italian wars? Back when our wars were in Italy. Man, the wars in Italy were so much better than having to have wars here at home. We want to go back to Italy, not for vacation, but to have a war. Yeah, like the good old days, wars. So if you are living in the place that's the best place to have a war, and life expectancies are going down, and all your neighbors hate each other, and within your city, factions are fighting each other so that someone like Machiavelli sees blood literally run in the streets multiple times in his lifetime during feuds and regime changes, you're desperate for something that seems to promise stability and strength. And so, starting actually 100 years before Machiavelli in the late 1300s, the most famous name associated with this is Petrarch, but mostly because everyone else who was part of the movement died of the Black Death, and he was the survivor, so he's the famous name, um, thought that the main means to try to unify and pacify Italy was to look backward to ancient Rome and say this was a period when Italy was stable and was strong and was unified. We conquered the French and the Germans and Iberia then, instead of the other way around. Can we figure out what they did and replicate it? Can we imitate the arts of the ancients? And we are familiar with the fact that the Renaissance starts imitating ancient architecture, ancient anatomy study, doing the beautiful sculptures, and uh one point per uh linear perspective comes back. So they're doing these beautiful perspective paintings, all of that coming from ancient manuscripts. We're used to the technology side, uh, but their focus is more at first on the education side. Can we reconstruct the library of books that raised Cicero and that raised Seneca and that raised Julius Caesar, who was brave and able to unite people and be a charismatic leader? Can we reconstruct the library that raised Brutus, not the one who killed Caesar, but the ancestor whom he was trying to whose example he was trying to live up to when he took that brave action? Uh, the first Roman Brutus, who, when he was consul, his sons plotted to take over the republic and make him king, and he executed his own sons for treason for trying to make him king. Imagine living in the plot of Romeo and Juliet and imagining Lord Montague sentencing Romeo to death for trying to take over the Republic. No, it would never happen. So you read about these ancient figures who cared more about Rome than they did about their sons or their own lives, and it sounded like that was the hopeful lifeline. Uh, if we could reconstruct these libraries that raised the ancients, maybe the next generation of our rulers, the next generation of merchant princes and uh dukes and counts, and young Romeo and young Tibbs and young Juliet, will have the ethics and the virtues of Seneca and Cicero, who are willing to sacrifice themselves for the state, and maybe then they will rule wisely, be more successful, and cause unity. And so desperate is Italy for this project that even though this is a period when a single manuscript book costs as much as a house in terms of the labor and materials costs to produce. So that building a library is a multi, multi-million dollar undertaking that only the ultra-wealthy can do. The ultra-wealthy do it because it's that or get sacked by the French. So you invest your money in ships heading east to Constantinople to look for rare manuscripts, in expeditions over the Alps to look for rare manuscripts, in copying and constructing the libraries, and raising the next generation on Greek and Latin and Plato with the hope of raising princes who will act like the ancients did. And instead they get Cesare Borgia and political disasters and murders and feuds and terrible battle popes, and everything gets worse, not better over the century and a half of trying to apply this method. And Machiavelli is of the generation that grew up on this hard-won, hard-earned set of books, saw the terrible wars that were fought getting worse, not better, and said, actually, I think we're not in a golden age. We've done all the things we thought might make a golden age. We've got all the art, we've even got all the books, we've raised the princes on them. The princes are murdering and betraying each other. And this has not made Italy more unified, it has made it bloodier. Uh, we need to stop and we need to rethink. So there was a project to make a golden age. There was an effort to make a golden age. They sat down and said, we need to imitate or we need to make ourselves into a golden age. And they tried and they then judged themselves to have failed. And that judgment is happening in the early 1500s, and then they start trying to figure out new ways and new methods, uh, questioning everything, reading more, and it's no coincidence that it's the end of the 1500s and the beginning of the 1600s that gets us the scientific method and new approaches, and Galileo and Descartes and Francis Bacon, all of whom are saying, okay, well, the previous era didn't work. What new thing can we try? In other words, the Renaissance was, by its own measure, a failure. But it was the failure that made the libraries with which we figured out that we were wrong about so many things, with which we were then able to try again and arrive eventually at the scientific method and the things that do move us into the world we're in. So the Renaissance is a step toward modernity. Is it a beautiful time to be alive? No, it's a time that felt like living through an apocalypse, much like today feels like living through an apocalypse. And we don't know whether 200 years from now people will decide that this is a golden age. Maybe they will. They'll look at the sparkly stuff we leave in museums and they'll make their decisions based on that and not on our lived experience, just like we did about the Renaissance. But they will be correct, as we are about the Renaissance, that it's a time of change and a whole lot of stuff happening. And that that stuff is going to have effects, which will have more effects, which will have more effects, which will result in change. Will it result in what we wanted? No. Uh the Renaissance didn't result in what they wanted either. But the stuff that was created, the technologies, the discoveries, the libraries, gave the next generations the tools to do better and to do better and to do better, which is a useful and I think for us powerful reminder that as long as we work hard to make things, we work hard to make knowledge, we work hard to share that knowledge, we work hard to improve education, we are laying the foundations for later generations to do even better than we are. And what we need to then not do is burn it down because that just slows it down. Right.

C. Derick Varn: 31:15

Yeah, that makes total sense. I mean one of the things I'm fascinated by this time period, but also that your book makes pretty clear, is if you look for trends in the Renaissance, and you limit yourself mostly to the Italians here. Um we do have just a ton of confluence of factors over, I think about a 200-year period between the 13th century and the early 15th century, that sets things kind of on fire. I mean, one of the things I always think about is the fall of Constantinople, the beginnings of the of the transatlantic world in quotation developing. Um, but also um there is this uh I've always been fascinated, and you have a whole chapter in your book about this, about the idea that we just somehow forgot about antiquity during the quote uh dark ages or mid our medieval period or whatever you want to call it.

Ada Palmer: 32:22

Which we totally didn't, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 32:23

Right.

Ada Palmer: 32:25

Oh, which we totally didn't. But what we do have is that the the Renaissance guys are really great propagandists, and they come in and say, oh no, no, no, no. The Latin you guys have been writing has been bad, degenerate Latin. That doesn't count. Uh only our Latin, which is gonna sound more like classical Latin, is real Latin. You know, oh you've been reading Virgil, you've been reading Virgil wrong. Uh you've been, you know, they're using all the same stuff, they're using all the classical stuff throughout the Middle Ages. Um, but they're using it to different purposes. And, you know, Ovid and um Ovid and Virgil uh and Boethius are the backbone of education throughout the Middle Ages, and everyone is studying Latin, and everyone knows the names of all the Caesars, but they have different ideas about what this is for, and they have especially different ideas about what study and learning are for. Um, and the Renaissance guys come in with this. Our current political system does not work. The purpose of study is to transform our ruling class and make them into different people. Not, as is more often articulated in the Middle Ages, the purpose is to have an educated ruling class and an educated priestly class who will lead us well and teach us how to go to heaven. Uh, and in which a lot of the goal is heaven. And the Renaissance people come along and say, heaven is still the powerful and important force. Uh, religion is still at the center of what we're doing. But we're also thinking that making you virtuous will make you a more successful ruler on earth if you imitate all the classical things. And so also we pretend uh the way we're imitating classical things is the right way to imitate the classical things. And the way our medieval predecessors were imitating classical things was bad and wrong way of imitating the classical things. Um, and medieval people are very just and medievalists are very justly uh justified in saying, but you know, the whole crowning of Charlemagne, calling him Caesar, discussing this as the new Roman Empire that happened in 800 AD, extremely medieval, extremely imitative of Rome, keeping, you know, following Roman law, having Roman law codices, we're doing all the all the Roman stuff all the way through. But all it takes is someone to come along and say, you haven't really been doing this. The way I'm doing it is the really doing this way. For everyone to be like, oh, I guess we haven't really been doing this because we haven't been doing that one thing that the new guys are doing. So, for example, if you look at Renaissance Latin, you know, classical Latin was a spoken language that people spoke. Medieval Latin was simpler than that because it's a second language for everybody. Uh, and if you've been in language class, you know perfectly well that every so often your teacher is like, we're going to learn how to say because. Here are three different ways to say because. This one is really difficult and uses the subjunctive. This one is also really difficult and uses participles and tenses. The third one is really simple, and you just use a word that means because, and then you have another clause afterward, and you're like, well, the third one is way easier than the other two. And then you have your homework and it's like translated a thing that says because, and you're like, I want to use the third one because it's way easier than the other two. That's what medieval Latin is. It's just people being like, Well, I'm gonna say this the simple way because the other two are necessarily complicated, and it's a second language for everyone. So it becomes a simplified version of the language, it uses the simplest grammar, right? So the Renaissance people come in and say, Oh, that is bastard, terrible, no good Latin. We're gonna write Latin where we refuse to use the easy way to say anything. We're gonna use only difficult participles and the subjunctive. We're gonna use the subjunctive as often as we possibly can. Uh, I send sentences of Renaissance Latin to a friend of mine who's a high school Latin teacher to use to punish students who misbehave in class. And then she's like, take this sentence and they're like, oh my god, that sentence has three future passive participles in it. And she's like, Yeah, and none of them is necessary in any way. Now translate it. Because they're not trying to communicate with these sentences, they're trying to show off how good their Latin is. So if, you know, if if if if we compare language to walking across a room, they don't want to get to the other side. They want to do an elaborate gymnastics routine to show off that they can do three backflips before they get to the other side of the room. And the sentence doesn't actually need to do that, they're just doing it to show off. That's what medieval Latin doesn't do, and what Renaissance Latin does. It's just a gymnastics routine forever. Uh, and then they say, see, this is real classical Latin, and what those people were doing was terrible. And people try to read it and they're like, Wow, this is really hard to read. The key people writing this must be really smart. Um, and politicians find that useful because they're like, hey, I can hire that guy to write my Latin correspondence. And then when my enemies receive my letters, they'll be like, Whoa, this guy's really smart. I have no idea what he's saying. He really sounds like an emperor. We don't want to fight this guy. And they do, right? They do hire these guys. Like dur after the death of Henry V, when England is under infant King Henry VI, and all the nobles are quarreling with each other to who gets to be king. Uh, this is what is Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses, Henry VI plays, and what Game of Thrones is based on, right? All those fractious nobles, they all hired Italian Latinists to come from Florence to London to write intimidating correspondence in difficult to read Latin so that they could write letters back and forth to the English lords and the English lords' secretaries and be like, uh, I have no idea what the king is saying, but he has really impressive participles, so we should probably obey him. Because if he has participles this impressive, he's probably also friends with the Pope, right? I mean, no one else has participles like this. Uh, so you can intimidate people a lot with this ornamentation just by using antiquity differently and using antiquity more showily and more ostentatiously. And as soon as they invent this, the rapid adopters are kings and monarchs who are weak on the throne. The weaker the monarch, the faster they up the Renaissance. And they're like, yeah, you know, I'm Matthias Corvinus of Hungary. I'm literally the last surviving 12-year-old boy who was in prison when the last king was massacred. And nobody wanted to be king because kings kept getting massacred. So they took me out of prison and made me king, and I'm scared as heck. Uh, how am I gonna get the Hungarian nobles to take me seriously? I know I'm gonna get my portrait done, uh, looking like I'm a Roman on a Roman coin, and I'm gonna marry an Italian princess who knows Latin and Greek and bring her out here with all of her artist friends, and we're gonna build a neoclassical palace, and I'm gonna get a big library from Lorenzo de' Medici. And then when the Hungarian warlords visit me and in my neoclassical palace with my giant library and my intimidating Italian wife spouts Greek at them, they'll be like, Holy shit, I don't want to fight this guy. He's an emperor, sure, you can be king of Hungary, and it works. Uh, and it's way cheaper than war. So if we talk about war as politics by other means, art is war by other means. Um, they compete with each other via this in the same way that modern countries compete with each other at the Olympics in a non-military opportunity to show off your wealth and strength by showing off how much you can lavish on your athletes, right? Um, and so it's actually a symptom of political weakness when you see people be rapid adopters of Renaissance culture, which is why the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East don't do it.

Speaker 1: 40:03

Right.

Ada Palmer: 40:04

Uh and there was a point at which Mehmet II was like, oh, this sounds cool. I'll bring some guys to my court, and he brings some guys to his court, and then he when he dies, his son buys it is like, we do not need this. Our culture is the wealthiest, strongest, and best culture anywhere. We do not need uh to adopt. And here's the fun part, and that comes back to the why Germany and England fight over the Renaissance. Notice if you redefine power as I'm powerful because I have Latin and Greek and Roman stuff, and I have busts of all the Roman emperors in my house. And it's very easy to redefine power that way. Let's actually pause in the middle of this and I'll show you how it works, and then I'll show you why it's a funny puzzle and why the Ottomans get to reject it. Uh, so imagine. Imagine for a moment that you are the French ambassador to Rome. And you're on your way to Rome because a new pope has been elected, and it's your job to go deliver the obedience oration. Every king has to send a special ambassador. Every polity in Europe has to send a special ambassador every time there's a new pope, and you have to bring an expensive gift and make a long speech, the uh text of which is I'm an important ambassador from a powerful king, and he's so glad you're the pope. Congratulations. Only have to do that for like two hours. Um, and so you're kind of bored with this, but it's really important, and you're gonna meet with lots of other important envoys in Rome, and you're on your way, and you have to stop off in Florence. Florence is a disgusting place to have to stop off. It's a merchant republic. There are no nobles there. If you're an envoy for the French king, you're at least the son of a count, right? You're nobody who isn't of noble blood is in the political classes. Florence is this weirdo merchant republic that executed its nobility in a merchant uprising. So there's literally not a single human being in this city of rank to talk to you, except for one or two visiting foreign nobles like yourself. Uh, and Florence has the international reputation of being Europe's sodomy capital. The verb for anal sex in six European languages is to Florentine. Uh, and in the French uh law code, you can be indicted for sodomy on the grounds that you've ever visited Florence in your life. That's enough evidence. So you have to go through this disgusting pit of scum and villainy in which there's nobody worthy to actually host you because there's no local ward. But you at least have the address of your dad's banker and you're gonna stay with him for the night and then move on from this stupid, disgusting merchant republic. But then you get there, and in the streets you see these statues, beautiful, huge, lifelike, almost looking like they're gonna come to life, statues that are like the ancient Roman statues that you've seen, like a severed hand of, that are miraculously realistic, and you have no idea how they were ever made. But these are obviously brand new. And you come to the house of the banker and you knock on the door of his palace, and he meets your excellency humbly at the gates and apologizes that he is unworthy to host your excellency, and you're like, Yeah, yeah, you are unworthy to host people, whatever. Uh, and you go in and then you're inside his house, and suddenly you're in a space like nothing you've ever seen before, with sunlight streaming in through these wide, rounded arches, so that it's so light and airy. It's almost more like outside than the cramped city streets. It's wait, wait, you have seen something like this before. The Roman ruins in the backyard of your father's castle looked like this, but that art is gone. Nobody knows how to build like that anymore. And around the courtyard are busts of all the Roman emperors in order, and above them are portraits of this banker guy and all the members of his family. And in the middle of the courtyard is another of these breathtaking bronze statues that looks like it's about to come to life. And you're like, hmm, bronze is also what you make cannons out of. If these guys are really good at that, that's intriguing. But then you're distracted because in the corner there's a bunch of guys in weird robes speaking a language you've never heard before. And you're like, Who are those guys? And your host says, Oh, they're Platonists, they're speaking ancient Greek. And you're like, But Plato is lost, and and ancient Greek is lost. We have like only fragments of this. We've never had, and you say, Oh, we have lots of Plato and ancient Greek here. Look, here's my grandson Lorenzo, he's just composed a poem in three parts in ancient Greek about the nature of the soul. Would you like to hear him recite? And now there's a six-year-old boy reciting a poem at you in ancient Greek about the parts of the soul, and you're like, Where am I? What is happening? And that is the moment at which Cosimo de' Medici turns to you and says, Would France like to make an alliance with Florence? And you can say no, right? That's the moment you can say no. The king of France is gonna come over the Alps with the giant juggernaut army, the size of which Italy has never seen. And we're gonna come here, we're gonna burn all this down, and we're gonna take the sacks of gold or you're out of your basements. Or you can say, yes, let's make an alliance. Send me an architect and a bronze smith and a sculptor and a Greek tutor and a platonist, and we're gonna do the court in France like this. And then when the envoys come from England visit, or the envoys from Aragon visit, they're gonna feel like uncultured hoodlums, right? Like I feel right now. It's redefined what nobility means and what culture means to be you have the Roman stuff, you win. And it's really effective for somebody who has you know money and contacts but not political authority to redo his court like that. So whether you're in Spain, whether you're in Hungary, whether you're in London, the trappings of antiquity are a winning game politically to intimidate others and make them take you more seriously than your rivals. But it's a game in which Italy automatically wins because nobody is ever gonna have more Roman stuff than Italy, where you just dig a hole and find the layoan. Like Italy is so full of Roman stuff. Everyone in Italy will always win at the most like Italy game. Um, so when the Ottoman world looks at this and is like, hmm, a political world in which we automatically lose because the winner must always be Italy. No, we will not play this diplomatic game. We will continue to have our own culture, our own architecture, and and you know, our own books and our own vastness, in which we are best. And we will not play the losers game in which Italy will always be more Italy than the rest of Europe, when Europe defines being cultured as having Roman stuff. Uh, which is how Europe, the rest of Europe, which is in a terrible, desperate power game of thrones crisis, and they are all weak on their thrones, and they do all adopt this quickly, and they start doing everything up like Roman palaces. That's how we get to an 18th and 19th century in which like Berlin and London are in a fight about which of them is the new Athens, and you're like, Athens is right there, guys. It's right there, Athens, still be in Athens, uh, and they're like, no, no, no, no, no, we are Rome up here in Berlin. Berlin is totally Rome. And you're like, Rome is also right there, be in Rome. No, no, no, Rome isn't Rome, we're Rome. And you're like, why are you trying to be Rome? This is the answer. Uh, that they created a new definition of political strength and authority, and most importantly, legitimacy. Political legitimacy was redefined as having Roman stuff, and that's how we kick off this competition where every other power wants to have the most Roman stuff. And like, we're building Versailles in France. What are we covering it with? Roman pediments and inscriptions in Greek and Latin. Yes, we're French, but we're covering Versailles with Roman pediments and inscriptions in Greek and Latin and porphyry, which we're putting in the um uh the porphyry, which is a symbol of Roman power that comes from polluting Roman sites. You know, all of these Roman symbols we're covering Versailles with them because even at Versailles, the more Roman it is, the more legitimate it is. Uh, and it gets the rest of Europe sucked into this weird competition where you have to be more Roman than real Rome, at which you cannot succeed. Uh, so you propagandize, and especially in the 18th and 19th centuries after the Reformation, uh, Berlin and London, their techniques is saying, oh, well, you know, the disgusting rot of Catholicism has ruined the Mediterranean world. And therefore, you know, the true spirit of ancient Rome is has come as a refugee uh from uh from terrible Italy up to live here in the true free-spirited Protestant world of Country X. Um uh which is which is how you get these surreal reconstructions of and and imitations of Italian stuff in northern European countries. And you're like, why are you why are England and Germany fighting with each other over which of them is Rome? I don't understand, neither of them is Rome. Uh and this is why they have to be Rome because they've accepted its definition of legitimacy. And then you just come up with excuses for explaining why Rome isn't Rome, your Rome.

C. Derick Varn: 49:23

Your book actually gave me insight into this because I've been wondering for I got into this for a completely different reason. I was trying, as a person interested in Marxist historiography, I was trying to figure out the origins of capitalism, something that has doomed like everybody for 200 years. Um, but there's the big 400-year shaped hole there. But one of the things I noticed in doing research, I got interested. Okay, when did this idea of Christendom fade into this idea of Europe? And there's like this 200-year period where this happens as if right around now. Um, and you know it has something to do with the Ottomans, um like, and the fall of uh the Roman Empire, aka the Eastern Roman Empire, aka the Byzantines. Um, but you the mechanism for that actually doesn't make sense, and it looking all Roman makes even less sense because yeah, that was a legitimacy myth in the ninth century, too, but it's one that the prior 500 years have moved away from.

Ada Palmer: 50:27

Um the more the more unstable things get, the more people want a new source of legitimacy. And when we're looking at the Renaissance, it's getting really, really unstable. And you know, the 30 Years' War is really destabilizing and and and shakes the French monarchy, the Holy Roman Empire is getting really unstable. I mean, I I work a lot on the 1490s, and in the 1490s, it's genuinely the case that if you just took every king in Europe and rotated them one clockwise, they would all be on a throne they have a better claim to than the one they're on. Because the king of England has a claim to the throne of France, the king of France has the claim to the throne of Naples, the king of Naples has a claim to the throne of Aragon, the king of Aragon has a claim to the throne of Castile, the king, queen of Castile has a claim to the throne of Portugal, the queen, the king of Portugal has a better claim to the throne of England than the King of England does. Um, and then there's a whole separate mess going on over in the Holy Roman Empire, although I will point out that Maximilian Habsburg has a decent claim to both England and Portugal as well. So uh every king is in a weird upstart position practically. There are very few monarchs who aren't anxious that there is someone out there who actually has a better blood claim to their throne than them. What do you do when someone else has a better blood claim? You come up with other ways to seem kingly. Uh, and if your palace is awesome and your portrait looks like Caesar, and you're bringing impressive books and libraries, you've turned antiquity into a language of power, a language of power that projects strength and intimidation. There's a reason that all of these big historic libraries have incredibly imposing entrances and intimidating architecture, right? Venice builds its great library directly across the doe from the Doge's Palace in front of San Marco. Uh, because what are the three things that intimidate and scare somebody? The seat of justice where people are executed, the church where the bones of St. Mark are gonna zap you from heaven if you piss off this uh saint, and the library full of secret knowledge and esoteric rare capacities, right? Library building is a power projection tool. Building neoclassical facades, building archways, all of this is a power projection tool. And you get rapid adoption of power to projection tools from monarchs who feel weak on their thrones. And you tend to get more stable. We're just gonna keep doing what we've always done, uh, just bigger and more expensive when you have monarchs who are stable on their thrones.

C. Derick Varn: 53:22

Um I guess one thing that came to mind reading uh uh particularly so much of the conditions of Italy is how much is war fatigue playing into this?

Ada Palmer: 53:32

Yeah, uh tons. I mean, it it's a it's a period when um oh a friend of mine and I were just looking at a a prayer letter that a man wrote for his 60th birthday, in which he was thanking God for all of the blessings that he had had in his life, that he was wealthy, that he had sons, uh, that his business was thriving, that he had his wife had survived more than 10 years after their marriage, and that he had himself seen 10 summers without war in his 60-year lifetime. And that he considered that an amazing and exceptional blessing from God, that he had seen 10 years of actual peace, not consecutively, but spread around in the course of 60 years. Uh, this is a period of constant warfare. Gruto Ruggiero very cleverly refers to the Guelph Ghibelline faction fights as Italy's 300 years' war. Uh, and it doesn't really stop at the time it's said to stop. It's really more like a 500-year ongoing faction war. And there are periods that people call peace. Um, there's the famous Peace of Lodi, which for a while political scientists were very excited about, which is a big peace signed between the major Italian powers of Rome, uh, Venice, Milan, Florence, and Naples, uh, from basically the 1430s up until it's broken in the 1490s, 60 years of peace, TM, during which there are no fewer than 11 other wars between these powers and their small neighboring powers. The Ottomans invade. Uh, there are, you know, the Pazzi wars happen in this period. Um, the uh what's it called? The war of the conspiracy of the barons happens in that period. Uh, a whole lot of border wars between Venice and Milan happen in this period. So the quote-unquote peace of Lodi actually saw war every summer. It's just that these were the small-scale wars and not the big-scale wars in which powers are picking on their smaller neighbors or fighting each other through proxy border wars and not full-scale war. But that's not peace. The only period of extended peace Italy has ever known was that period in the Pax Romana under the good gay emperors, right? Trajan, Adrian, Marcus Aurelius. Italy was in actual peace for a few decades. Then there's no other patch in the entire historical record in which Italy sees extended, stable peace. Because it's such a good place to have a war. It's so agriculturally rich. You can just feed off the land. Um, so everyone wants to always have war there, plus, all the cities hate each other. Um, so for that reason, the instability was constant through the Middle Ages as well. And this is again why we don't want to draw a line and pretend that it's a flat line and then up somehow. It's a constant building wedge as the population increases, the centralization of power increases, the size of military increases, and therefore the scales of the same thing get larger. Um, that a lot of things are just building steadily throughout the whole Middle Ages. And they seem to come to a peak in the Renaissance just because they're reaching high saturation. But it's, you know, it's boiling a frog in a pot. Uh, it's not that it was always cold and then suddenly boiling the water what temperature was rising constantly.

C. Derick Varn: 57:15

I think about this in terms of uh of France a lot when you go back and try to find internal peace between the various uh regions of France during, like, I don't know, the Capacians. Uh and you like there isn't really. Um, so you just like, oh, so the Normans are fighting these guys and they're invading the southern France to find heretics. It may or may not even have actually existed, it may have been just propaganda. I can't tell.

Ada Palmer: 57:41

Um, they they talk about it as summer is the war season, and then winter is the break, and you prepare for the next war season, and everyone is just discussing all winter what the new summer's war will be. Will it be a continuation of last year's war or will it be a different war? Have we successfully bribed the people we were fighting against to switch sides and fight alongside us against somebody else yet? Or are we still negotiating that? Well, now I'd have to wait another year. Um, so that there were constant war seasons. And these are genuinely smaller wars than the big wars, right? Um, but a smaller war than the big war isn't peace. Uh a smaller war than the big war is still war, and there are still armies moving around and there are still fields being you know trampled. When Machiavelli was a tween, when he was, you know, just hitting his teens, um, there during the Peace of Lodi, the uh Potsi war, which didn't happen, the Potzi War was successfully staved off. The armies moved together, there were a few skirmishes. Uh, people celebrate this in history books as a war that didn't happen. The peacemaking worked. Uh, the war sure happened enough for Machiavelli's family's property to get completely trampled by enemy soldiers, so they lost their money. And his family had to pull him out of the good school he was in and send him to the bad school with the bad tutor under whom Machiavelli was serially sexually assaulted as a youth, um, because of the war, uh, which we refer to as peace. Uh, so this wasn't peace. Uh, this was the large-scale powers weren't having massive border battles because they didn't like to, because they were very destructive. So they were having small-scale ones. But everyday lives were still being trampled and ruined. Uh, and people were like Machiavelli coming through terrible situations, having to rebuild their lives. And I I love celebrating Machiavelli as as one of our great uh role model assault survivors, uh, who grew into strength out of uh out of abuse and managed to make himself into a powerful leader and protector of his country, uh, who served his country through the all of his life he could until his exile and genuinely helped save it from destruction more than once. Pretty awesome guy.

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:04

Machiavelli is fascinating. Um and I was not surprised he comes up in like, I don't know, he has like three separate chapters in your book, maybe four, I'm trying to remember.

Ada Palmer: 1:00:14

Um, but a breath. Time for a Machiavelli chapter, and then he goes on to do his Dolphiny business and comes back again for another Machiavelli chapter.

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:25

Um another thing that you your book actually did kind of help me see. I I mentioned that I'm kind of obsessed with the 400-year window between when capitalism started, uh capitalism has started in quotation marks. Um the other thing that that your book helps me. Clarify is how this competition between relatively unstable states leads to the possibility of coherent nationalisms. Because one of the accidental side effects of this is you're in trying to regionally mimic Roman culture, but do it in specific areas and specific dialects, you're also maybe even unintentionally setting up an infrastructure where this newly invented printing press thing could also come about and you can start unifying language this way. Yeah. Um, thus creating the conditions for actual national cultures, which did not exist in Europe really, but kind of, but not really, for the prior five, six hundred years.

Ada Palmer: 1:01:28

It takes it's it's a long gradual process, right? And a lot of people ask, oh, didn't the printing press cause the Renaissance? Wasn't the invention invented, and then as a result, there were books, and then people did all the things. And the actual answer is the printing press is invented as a response to an increased demand for books. An inventor sits down to invent a thing, not carte blanche, but he's like, hey, a lot more people want books now. Can I invent a book machine? Um, and so the printing press is a symptom of the fact that there was this giant library building boom because libraries were ways of protecting power. The printing press then exponentially speeds the library building boom and is an even better invention to make this possible than anyone could have imagined. But Gutenberg didn't sit in the middle of a stagnant, unchanging world and be like, hey, printing press, and then things begin. Um, there was already a library building boom. People were shelling out the hundreds of millions of dollars that it took to build a big library when each book costs $300,000. Uh, but when Gutenberg comes in, the printing press reduced reduces the cost of a book so much that by $14,000, sorry, by $1,500, a book costs a school teacher's salary for one month. Right? Which is not cheap like today's books, but it's sure a lot less than a house. And that means that a school teacher can afford to save up and buy a few books and own them. And even a mid-sized town has at least one patrician rich enough to have a library in 1560. But in 1460, you had to be super mega rich capital for anybody to have a library. So the number of libraries can therefore increase exponentially as a result of the printing press. And it's no coincidence that the 1560s, when any town can have one rich person with a library, is also when we start having masses of new discoveries made in the scientific revolution. Uh tricky name, but we'll use it as a shorthand happens. And you know, Galileo, Bacon, the scientific method all boom out of a world in which learning is suddenly a hundred times more accessible because a library costs one one-hundredth what it used to. Um, if one book costs five to ten thousand dollars instead of three hundred thousand dollars. So the printing press is a transformative technology, but it comes in because there's a demand for that formative technology.

C. Derick Varn: 1:04:11

I mean, I again this answers like a uh a question that that I used to really puzzle about. Um, I remember very young realizing that okay, there's uh printing presses in Asia as late as the ninth century. Why does it take so long for us to come up with what is frankly slightly not even that hard of a technology if you think about it? Like, yeah, movable metal type is a little bit advanced, but like people had figured up wood block printing presses as early as the like seventh century, um, and other places because of um patronage competition and religious change, and and and I mean, if you look at ancient Korea, there's like stuff going on with the different with trying to consolidate the peninsula. Um, there's a new religion that's got a bunch of texts coming in from Central Asia, um, and then all of a sudden you gotta and also you have a script uh that's and it's pretty complicated, but you do have a script, so you can start turning these things out, and they do. Um, and then it's like, okay, well, why did your Europeans wait so long to do that? I remember that when I was a kid, they're like, Oh, it's probably because somebody encountered one on a trip trading to with the Chinese, and I'm like, You got hard evidence? You think you think you'd find hard evidence of that? You you'd you're just speculating here. And if you think about, oh, it's just it is a demand problem. Like, yeah.

Ada Palmer: 1:05:39

Um well, and indeed, when Gutenberg develops the printing press, he goes bankrupt because you know, he makes the press, he prints 300 Bibles. Uh, each of them costs way less than uh a normal Bible, so that the cost of all of them is still only the cost of one manuscript Bible. Uh, he sells you know three of them to the three people in his tiny landlocked German town who are authorized to read the Bible because almost nobody does. And congratulations, Mr. Gutenberg, you have 297 Bibles and no market for them in your small landlocked German town. What are you gonna do? He goes bankrupt. The press is seized by his creditors, they print stuff, they can't sell it, they go bankrupt. Uh his apprentices try setting up pretty presses, they make stuff. They can sell, like, you know, homework sheets with the alphabet for kids, they can sell prayer cards. Uh, even before the Gutenberg Movable type press, there was woodblock printing in Europe, which made money printing what people really want with printing, which is porn, sermon, sermon books with pictures of saints uh in booklets, and playing cards so they can gamble. These are the three things that Europe prints when printing first comes: porn, sermons, and playing cards for gambling purposes. Europe is content with this for quite a while. Um, when Gutenberg and his apprentices print stuff, they can sell the playing cards, but there's just not a distribution mechanism for 300 copies of a mass-produced commodity. This isn't a mass production market, right? Goods are bespoke goods in this world. And in the same way that the first ebook existed, technically, the first time anyone typed a book on a computer, but there was no market for the e-book until there were e-readers and e-sales platforms to make the e-book a commodity. So similarly, Gutenberg can't sell 300 Bibles in his landmark German town. There needed to be a distribution mechanism, and that took decades to develop. So Gutenberg's apprentices, in order to run away from their debts and not get arrested and thrown in prison, run away to Venice, marry Venetian girls, good step, uh, and use their dowry money to start printing houses in Venice, which Venice is the O'Hare airport of the Mediterranean. You change planes there, everybody changes planes there. Um, you change ships there, everybody changes boats in Venice. If you print 300 copies of a book in Venice, you can sell three copies to each of a hundred ships captains going to a hundred different cities where they can sell three copies of a book. Now you have a distribution mechanism. So distribution began in Venice, then uh book fairs developed, the Frankfurt Book Fair, which still exists today, which is a thousand printers all print books, they all come together in a town, they trade books. And so you went to the book fair with 1,000 copies of one book, you go home with five copies each of several hundred books and you sell them at home. But that takes decades to work out. It's a complicated and messy process. But again, the whole reason you can go home to a town with five copies of every book and sell them is that there are five people who are trying to build libraries. And if there are five people who are trying to build libraries, it's because this library building boom is happening at a speed that the printing press is necessary to meet. While in the Ottoman world, the people who are building libraries are so rich they can afford to do it with just manuscripts. And they look at manuscripts and they look at printing and they say, you know, manuscripts are just more beautiful. We like them better. We're just going to keep commissioning manuscripts. And they aren't big uptakers of the print world because they're so rich that they can afford to pay $300,000 a book because they're just that wealthy. And they're stable enough that they don't have a lot of anxious upstart rulers who are trying to make themselves powerful by doing library building. Library building is something that people are doing who are fairly stably in power. And so it isn't a giant competitive rush the way it is in Europe. Um, one of these fun rules of thumb where the answer to many questions about pre-modern Europe is because they were impoverished, unstable, backward, and desperate. Uh, and that answers a huge number of questions about why they did X. Why did they build libraries? That's why they built libraries.

C. Derick Varn: 1:10:01

It's developing goods in a place with very little goods that it's also kind of seen as the dangly bits off of larger empires uh around North Africa and Asia. I mean, it it is uh it is kind of amazing. I've always I'm always fascinated by this. It's just like um like why don't you look at the Islamicate world more? Is because also then you have to deal with the fact that they were pretty rich and you can't like come up with these gesso stories about Western dominance being being what it is off of our the wealth from our entrepreneurial nature when you're like, well, they're richer than us for like I don't know, like 700 years. Like and us, even us is funny, but go ahead. Say in North America.

Ada Palmer: 1:10:47

There's a great there's a great book by Roger uh Robert Laune called Savages, Romans, and Despots, which is a history of the 17th and 18th century process of Europe coming up with ways to justify and claim that it is superior to the rest of the world. It's a history of Europe's actual intellectual development of its arguments for its superiority out of the world before the 17th century, when Europe knew perfectly well that it was an impoverished backwater. Uh, and you look at wonderful things like the prologue to Sonori Sturlson's prose eta. This is this really important text of Norse mythology, so Viking culture, right? And he he describes the geography of the world. If you go north, it gets colder and colder and colder until the world is ice forever. And if you go south, it gets hotter and hotter and hotter until the world is fire forever. And if you go west, there's just water. And if you go east, the world gets richer and richer and richer until it's made of gold. Uh, that's what the East is from Europe's perspective, until it gets into its age of empires and its military strength lets it dominate things, and then needs to come up with cultural justifications. And so that book is really useful for realizing and reminding ourselves that Europe did not have this superiority idea throughout most of its history. It very much had an awareness that it had, you know, Christianity going for it, which it thought it did. And basically that was it. And that it was poorer, that it was less sophisticated technologically, that it had less learning, it had less mathematics, it had less economic stuff, it had less good cloth, it had less good everything. Uh, it could take pride in its religion, in its own opinion, but other than that, it had nothing basically until the age of imperialism begins. And then Europe has to come up with this justification towards imperialism. Oh, well, our culture is better than everyone else's in these ways. And it's really neat to read Savages, Romans, and Despots and see Europe working on coming up with these arguments. Sadly, for my own period, one of the things it does is say, well, you know, only being like Rome is real culture. Uh, and we are like Rome, we we therefore have real culture, and everyone else doesn't. And so there's this weird thing where Europe imperialized itself first uh by claiming and persuading itself that having Roman-esque culture and architecture, et cetera, is the only thing that makes you civilized. And then that unintentionally becomes a tool for imperialism elsewhere. There's that great Eddie Izzard bit about imperialism where the conquistador shows up and is like, do you have a flag? No flag, no country. And I I like to paraphrase that with, you know, no columns, no culture. Uh, that if if it doesn't look like Roman stuff, you don't have a culture. We will impose our culture on you and make it look like Roman stuff, because Europe had itself convinced itself that the bits of Europe that didn't have columns weren't culture. And it had done so as a propagandistic tool in one of its moments of extra chaos and extra uncertainty, what we now call the Renaissance. Uh, but it then unintentionally, once you've made that into a language of power inside Europe, Europe exports it elsewhere. And this is why we have Capitol buildings with pediments and columns on them in Africa and East Asia, because columns means culture, flag means country, uh, Europe's imperialist victims adopt Roman culture because it's the only language of power Europe will listen to. Uh, there are uh uh an academic sibling of mine, meaning same dissertation advisor, Stuart McManus. He works on Ciceronian orations in Latin, written by Aztec Nobility in Spanish-ruled Mesoamerica, where when you're trying to articulate the importance and power of your family and argue for your rights against your conquerors, writing it up as an oration in Ciceronian Latin, extolling the virtues of your ancestors and comparing your Aztec ancestors and their empire to the Roman Empire, is more persuasive to the Spanish than any argument you could make using indigenous signs of strength and legitimacy. So they use the language of power of the conquerors, and we have these amazing orations in Aztec Latin.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:24

As a person who'd lived in Mexico for several years, I'm now embarrassed that I did not know that. That's great.

Ada Palmer: 1:15:30

It's incredibly obscure, but uh yeah. There's two books about it now. There's uh Stuart McManus's Empires of Eloquence, and then also Andrew Laird's Aztec Latin.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:43

Um I mean this this does sort of make the case for me about one of the problems is like trying to find these great historiographic dividers and singular time periods or singular events, because uh, like I discovered in my Greek conquest to figure out when capitalism started, that often you're looking at actually developments over, I don't know, a time period almost as long as the full instantiation of the thing.

Ada Palmer: 1:16:13

Um well, and I there's that simile I use where uh what is the beginning of a river? Is it the first point at which there's enough water that you can see water trickling across the ground? Is it the first point through which it's wide enough for a leaf to float? Is it the first point at which it's wide enough for a canoe? Is it the first point at which it's wide enough for a person um to drown in it? Like what is the beginning? And there could be arguments for any of those as the beginning of a river, because the beginning of a river is really gradual, right? Uh because it's a little bit of water joining with more water, joining with more water. And so, in the same way, what is the beginning of the scientific revolution, or what is the beginning of the Renaissance, or what is the beginning of capitalism, or what is the beginning of democracy? There are lots of persuasive books out there that will say X is the beginning of Y. But for every one of them, they've picked the point at which the river is wide enough for the canoe. And somebody else will have a book that pitched the picked the point at which the river is wide enough for an otter. And someone else will have picked the point at which the book the river is wide enough for a leaf. And someone else will have picked the later point when the river is wide enough for a big boat. And all of them are saying this is the beginning of why. And all of them are right in the same sense, there's an argument for the beginning river beginning meaningfully at each of those points, because each of those widenings transforms what the river is and how strong it is, and how many things are affected by it. And yet it's also still true that all of those are the river, all the way back to the first trickle. And this is why it's so hard to say what is the beginning of capitalism, or what is the beginning of banking, or what is the beginning of democracy, or what is the beginning of the Renaissance. Because there are gonna be a dozen answers to what is the beginning, all of which are partly right, all of which are moments at which the river got wider.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:17

I guess then it kind of is useful to my two big takeaways from your book is one is crises create new things, but it probably would have been better now to have a crisis or crises of yes.

Ada Palmer: 1:18:32

Yeah, and and and and you know, I one of the longer chapters, right, you know, is the biography of Michelangelo. Um, because people always have this idea of the passionate suffering artist who will create more beautiful work as a result of his suffering. And and then you look at the actual lives of the artist and you're like, no, if it had been more peaceful, we would have way more Michelangelos than we do. Um, and he would have just produced and produced and produced instead of being interrupted and miserable. And there's that wonderful letter, terrible, right, in which he talks about looking back over the years, I think it's 1521 to 1522. It's the papacy of Pope Adrian IV, Pope Adrian the No Fun, who fired Michelangelo. Uh, and Michelangelo says, I looked back over this two-year period and I hadn't picked up a chisel even once because I was so stressed out and miserable and traumatized, and I couldn't, and I was in the middle of war and lawsuits and unemployment, and I realized at the end I didn't touch a chisel for two years. And that's Michelangelo. So, firstly, if you were stressed out during COVID and didn't do anything useful, that's normal. Uh, people get overwhelmed, and it does not make us produce brilliant work, it makes us stressed out and too stressed out to pick up a chisel. And it did that for him too. And the more you zoom in, the clearer it is that they grow and build more in the patches of peace that they had. And if they had more patches of peace, they would have made more. Uh, you don't get growth because of burning it down. Yes, that's how certain specific forests in particular areas work. It's not how any other ecosystem works, just those forests. And it's not how human beings work. We grow and produce more when we have prosperity. And desperation makes us try desperate things. But does it produce more and better artwork? No. Uh, and however much people are like, oh, but Mozart suffered, and Mozart stuffed is so great. You know who did it? Bach. Bach was fine, and his work is also great, and there's way more of it because he was fine. Uh, and if if Mozart had been fine, we would have had way more of his work, too. Um, so the more you zoom in. The more you see, yes, desperation makes people try stuff. When they aren't desperate, they have the opportunity to try even more stuff. And desperation shapes but does not improve. If you want the ecosystem to keep thriving, don't burn it down. Unless you're absolutely sure that it's one of those very specific forests that benefit from burning the vast majority of other ecosystems. If you burn it down, all you're doing is wrecking stuff and setting it back centuries. And all the acceleration is sort of like, yeah, creative destruction. It works in the business world. Crash the sector of the economy and then things will grow back. No, you crash this sector of the economy, and there's mass unemployment, misery. Uh, people who don't get to produce stuff in their lives who would rather be producing stuff in their lives. And overall, you get shrinkage, not growth. Um, you know, so don't crash the system. Uh that's not what gets the renaissance. The renaissance was shaped by chaos, but not shrinkage of the economy, not the Black Death sets everything back. It would have been better without it and would have developed faster and sooner. It's not because of the Black Death, it's despite the Black Death. Uh and we have Petrarch and he's famous. Great. I would much rather have also had the dozen friends who died, who, if they had been alive there to write their beautiful books about why we needed the Renaissance, we would have had even more Renaissance even sooner. But they died in the Black Death.

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:14

It there is something, you know, you do a good job in the first third of your book with the with the why do people look for metaphors? And you brought it up at the beginning of this. Oh, we found the Cold War metaphors. It's really convenient to look at banking when you're trying to make an argument against the Soviets. Um, but there's other examples. Um, it's really interesting to look at democracy when you're arguing with fascists. Um, it's really uh et cetera, et cetera. And it's the same way with science fiction and fantasy, it's all like, well, but you're what you're really doing is talking about right now.

Ada Palmer: 1:22:50

Like I'm talking about the present much more than we're talking about the past when we talk about the Renaissance.

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:57

Right.

Ada Palmer: 1:22:57

Because it's a claim about what makes what is the good and correct trajectory of modernity, and whatever it is that you claim made the Renaissance, therefore set us on the right path, and therefore we should continue doing whatever it is. And it's about now, it's not about then. Unless we set aside now and we're like, actually, we're just gonna describe all the cool stuff that happened then, and then you zoom in and you're like, wow, then is really cool. Lorenzo de Medici had a pet giraffe and used to wander around the city of Florence sticking its head in people's windows and eating their window boxes, and people loved it, and it was a giraffe. And they're like, that's really cool. And all of the Renaissance paintings would have a gratuitous giraffe in the background, it's because of Florence, and everyone went and saw the giraffe and were like, now I want to have a giraffe in the background of all of my art because I can. Um, that's the sort of random detail that you you come to know the past on its own terms, and aren't going to it to ask what made it become us? Uh you're going to ask, what made them be them?

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:00

Uh yeah. Um so uh it's always kind of a curse to ask a writer or a scholar what they're working on now. But is there anything working on now you're excited about and coming out anytime near uh soon-ish?

Ada Palmer: 1:24:19

Yes. Um, so three different things. I have an essay collection co-written with Joe Walton on the history of science fiction and fantasy as a genre. Uh the title is Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy. And that comes out, I think, in March. Uh, we've got essays about how the genres crystallized into their present shape over the course of the pulp magazines and their formation in the 20s. Uh, lots of essays on how the genre works, how mainstream SF works differently from the imprint SF, which is printed in science fiction uh presses as opposed to what's sort of printed in mainstream uh presses or put out by Hollywood. Uh, lots of fun essays about science fiction authors. So anyone who really enjoys craft of writing or history of uh science fiction and fantasy as genres, uh Trace Elements will be out in March. Um my new novel series is a duology about Norse mythology. The first book is Fire in the Dark, and it is in final revisions now and will be coming out in summer of 2027. Sorry for the long wait, but uh they really want to polish the sky up, and the typesetting of the old Norse is gonna take a while. So uh it's coming out in summer 2027, Fire in the Dark. I've been working on it for a long time, and it's I'm really proud of it. It's great. If you like Norse mythology, you'll just love it. If you don't know Norse mythology, you'll know Norse mythology by the time you're done. Um, and then my historical research right now is on censorship. I'm looking at the Inquisition, uh, but also putting on my science fiction writer hat. I'm uh in touch with the modern publishing world, so I work a lot on censorship of science fiction, censorship of manga, censorship of video games. And the project is looking widely over history and time and space. What are the patterns in how real censoring bodies really work? Because one problem we have in our vigilance against censorship is that Orwell's 1984 paints an incredibly vivid portrait of how censorship works. And we are extremely vigilant against any form of censorship that resembles what's depicted in 1984. But the vast majority of real censorship doesn't resemble what's depicted in 1984 and is usually very different from it. It's usually grassroots and bottom-up fomented and then harvested by political structures in the middle. It's usually reactive to a perceived crisis rather than proactively trying to reshape the future. So the book is about how does censorship really work? Trying to help us understand the motives of censors and the actual goals of censorious regimes, which are usually very dissimilar from what we imagine. We tend, for example, to think of Winston Smith going into the office and destroying or falsifying documents. Whereas censorious bodies almost never focus on destroying what already exists. Their focus is on causing a culture of fear to prevent the writing of future texts. And they're much more interested in cultivating fear than they are in destroying or altering anything that already exists. Um, so it's a book about why people censor and what censoring bodies really do to try to help us be better in our vigilance, in understanding that we need to be prepared not only for Orwellian censorship, but a wide variety of other types of much more common real censorship. So those are the three current projects, and they're very different history of science fiction, Norse mythology Vikings, and censorship. Always keep yourself in different spaces.

C. Derick Varn: 1:28:06

Yeah. Um, I appreciate someone who is both a specialist and a generalist. Um they're rare these days. Um, and I'd like to thank you for coming on. Uh funnily enough, uh, you you are a writer whose scholarship and writing I've discovered separately multiple times because of niche interest. I'm also interested in the history of science fiction. I have an MFA, although in poetry, so it's different. Um, you know, and I'm uh I've accidentally become an Ursatz historian because of uh fascination with trying to uncover why we think certain things politically.

Ada Palmer: 1:28:47

Um, but it it's hard to figure out politics without becoming a historian.

C. Derick Varn: 1:28:52

Yes. Um so thank you so much. Uh thank you for telling us about your work. And I will link to your author's page so people can find it.

Ada Palmer: 1:29:01

Awesome. This has been a real treat. Thank you. A wonderful conversation.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:05

Thank you.

Ada Palmer: 1:29:05

Bye bye.