Inventing the Renaissance was my “big book” of the year, [Note: Some other Big Books I enjoyed: “The Power Broker” (2015, before I was regularly writing about them), The Three Body Problem series (2017), The Dawn of Everything (2021, closest to “Inventing the Renaissance” in message and style), Goedel, Escher, Bach (2022), and Ada Palmer’s own Terra Ignota series (2024-25). ] and I could not have picked a worse time to start it: changing jobs, moving accross country, an infant at home. It is a testatemnt to how good it was that I finished it. More than that: I am eager to read it again.
Re-reading is necessary to make more sense of the whirlwind of names, dates and events that are just too darn similar, even with Palmer’s attempts to give them cute and memorable nicknames. I know there was a Battle Pope, and a Battle Pope 2, and a very very very (…) bad Pope, but would I be able to tell you their actual names and origin stories?
Fortunately, the thickest, middle part of the book — a bit of a slog, going through biographies of 15 people, some of whom I was already familiar with, most of them new — was there mostly to make the ending more understandable, even if you weren’t on a first-name basis with the protagonists. And the ending is a breezy 200 pages that could have been a book of its own, about virtue, politics, virtue politics, great forces, great people, progress, “progress”, and plagues ancient and modern.
Less fortunately for me, this is the kind of book that makes you want to read many more. The recommended reading list looks absolutely delicious, never mind that I am now watching out for a good translation of Machiavelli’s “The Prince”. Ars longa…