Ada Palmer on "Inventing the Renaissance" and what we can learn from the time-period

This is Theory of Change. I'm Matthew Sheffield. Thanks for joining me for another episode.

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All right, so with that little plug out of the way, let's get into today's program. 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 Adah Palmer. She is a Renaissance 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 gives in-depth profiles of all of the most significant figures of the time period. She's also a science fiction novelist as well, which we get into at the very end of our conversation. I hope you'll enjoy. And joining me now is Aydah Palmer. Hey, Ada. Welcome to Theory of Change. This is a treat. Yeah, it's good to have you.

Um, all right. Well, so your book is called Inventing the Renaissance. Let's maybe before we get into the the stories that you tell in the book, um, just get into the the larger question of the myth of the golden age and, um, uh, because I think a lot of especially a lot of Americans, uh, may not be aware that a lot of this was kind of concocted by, uh, Protestant fundamentalists, which was then ironically picked up by atheists. Um, there's a bit of an irony there.

Yeah, I mean, it's a it's a myth that begins and has its earliest roots in the Renaissance itself and the invention in 1412, 1415, basically of dividing history into three parts with ancient, middle, and then modern, which begins in the Renaissance itself, but gets reinvented very heavily in the 18th century and the 19th century and then many times 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. And particularly 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 in the pre-modern world suddenly gets changed by the arrival of something that changes it and makes the world start moving toward modern. And the world begins to become more modern somewhere in the 1400s or 1300s or 1500s, depending on when you center the Renaissance, and eventually gets to us. And 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 modernity is on, which leads to the utility 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 are, are continuing it. So that the true spirit of Renaissance Florence and and Renaissance Venice and so on used to be in Italy, but is now in Berlin, or is now in London, or is now in Boston, or whoever the speaker is, who can claim in some way that the ideology which shaped the Renaissance has its true continuation in wherever they are, usually not Italy. Um, 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 by X. And now X resides with us in London, or with us in Germany, or with us in America. Uh, and we are the true continuation of the ideology that brought us these geniuses and this beginning of progress toward modernity." So the Renaissance keeps getting reinvented, and whatever its cause is keeps changing based on what lets people claim it.

So it's like, uh, using the the past as a narrative to justify your present. One of the easiest ones to summarize, which is a 20th century mid mid 20th century one, there's the hypothesis that the Renaissance is enabled by advances in banking and finance. And that new methods of lending money at interest and international currency exchange and insurance and investment would develop over the course of the 1300s and and create these banking fortunes, meaning that commerce and therefore exchange of materials and therefore innovation in materials are starting to flow in this period in a way they didn't. Things become more interconnected. Populations mix. The stagnant Middle Ages turn into the dynamic, mobile, internationally commercial world of the Renaissance, and that 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. And so that particular theory, which competes with dozens of other theories of why the Renaissance happens, has a vogue when it's politically useful. And other theories have their vogues either decades earlier or decades later, whenever they prove 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 doing is the trajectory of the backwards, pre-modern, bad world."

Yeah. Well, and in fact, the the the term, uh, as as you were saying earlier, you know, the, um, the narrative about the Renaissance as a, uh, refounding, if you will, away from the a dark ages. I mean, that was a narrative that started in the Renaissance itself, um, through one of the key figures who you talk about quite a bit in the book.

Yeah, well, through through a pair of figures in a lot of ways, through Petrarch and then Bruni. Uh, so these are figures living respectively just before and during, class just after the year 1400. Bruni being of the student generation relative to Petrarch's teacher generation. Uh, and Petrarch first articulates the idea that antiquity was this wonderful golden age, and now we are in a fallen age of ash and shadow. Uh, and that the world has become wretched and broken, uh, with the absence of the stability of Rome, and that something must be done about this. 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, uh, 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. Uh, but it's an aspirational 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."

Yeah. Yeah. Um, well, and, you know, the the thing about all of this is that, uh, you know, the, the study of history, it is about multiple causes happening to things. And, and I think ultimately that's unsatisfying to a lot of people who want to say, "No, it was this one thing, uh, that of why all this stuff happened. It was this one thing, and everything else." Yeah, maybe it was there a little bit, but it was just this one thing, my favorite thing. Uh, as as it happens, always. Um, but, you know, at the same time, there were, as you know, as as there were specific people who were involved with this, and they made specific choices. Um, and, uh, one of them, you know, was, as as you talk about at length, is, you know, trying to trying to unify Italy, or at least, you know, maybe not unify, galvanize a sense of solidarity and and get a movement of action going among a bunch of different countries, right, the different city-states or different nations, but to get them to ally with each other. It's not, you know, the European Union, but it's one of the bits of earliest rhetoric that the European Union can look upon as a, "We should have solidarity amongst 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.

Yeah. Well, and they definitely and they didn't, and nobody achieved that until many hundreds of years later in terms of unifying Italy. Um, and so, you know, I mean, ultimately, probably the political, uh, the politics probably were the main, the main thing that, I mean, I I think it's useful to talk about, I think it's useful to talk about the difference between unity and solidarity, right? Because not no, Petrarch does not imagine Italy unifying to one country. And his peers, if ever they do discuss the possibility of Italy unifying, you know, Dante discusses it in his day, Monarchia, they agree the only way this would happen would be if a foreign conqueror came over the Alps and conquered all of us. Other than that, unity is just not happening. But solidarity is. It's it's hoped could the solidarity in which city-states that are 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 these gorgeous Italian city-states of central and northern Italy are so sackable, right? They're so sackable. They're really, 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. You know, this is also the center of cloth production. Fabric is very huge armies and easy. Yeah. And they have tiny armies because they only have very tiny countrysides. They can't press the thousands of troops. And where are they going to get them from? Yeah, 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 a rival. Uh, and so if you want to sack anything, right, if you're a young king and you want to come home covered with glory and bring loot and make your people like you, uh, do you want to go anywhere else in Europe, or do you want to go into Italy where these tiny, tiny countries with few defenses and more treasure than anyone else? Um, 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. They're multiple cities over 100,000, which for the period is enormous. Milan, Florence, the edges of Venice and and Padua combined. Uh, Naples, which is humongous, right? Um, so there is a very strong incentive for any outside power. Is it the Holy Roman Empire? Is it France? Is it Spain? You know, Castile, Aragon, anybody. Uh, Portugal. You want to come seize 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. 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 Aragonese when the Aragonese come, then we could defend ourselves. But instead, what happens is they arrive. Here 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 Capulets, 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, uh, 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, uh, the values of ancient Rome, uh, of service to the state, of valuing the good of the people above other things, values of the Roman Republic could somehow be dredged out of, uh, the libraries of antiquity.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and the other thing about that, I think, I mean, so I guess I think a lot of people have this idea that nothing from ancient Rome and Greece was known, uh, to people who lived during the medieval times, and needless to say, that's not true at all. Um, but nonetheless, a lot was, uh, kind of buried. Um, and so, so can you talk about that?

Yeah, I mean, yes and no. You know, the the backbone of medieval education is the bits of Cicero. They have Virgil and Ovid. They're all reading it. They're all studying it. These are the the books you use to learn Latin grammar to then move on to theologians. Uh, medieval kings are constantly comparing themselves to ancient ones. You know, the the coins have portraits on them which are copied from 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, you know, medieval barbaric things have been using antiquity wrong, and they've been using Latin wrong, and they've been using Aristotle wrong, and now we're going to use all these things, right? Uh, and the other half of it, though, is 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, you know, Indiana Jones prying open a tomb, and there is the the tome, uh, next to the ancient knight in his sarcophagus. Uh, or somehow finding them in lost places. And the answer is, they're on library shelves. Um, they're around, uh, in 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 and these studies never cease there. Uh, they only cease further west where there isn't the wealth necessary to sustain large libraries. It's always useful for us to remember that the further east you go, the richer people are. Um, and that Western Europe, even parts of Italy, are, uh, struggling in the Middle Ages to have enough wealth to support libraries due to the economic contractions after the end of the empire.

So when Petrarch and Bruni and their peers say, "Italy is in this chaos of fractious disunity, uh, 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 Capulets into, uh, 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 Tybalts and young Juliets on the books that produced the Roman Brutus and the Roman Porcia and the Roman 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." And so this is a new use for the same books. So these books were being read in the Middle Ages for different ends. Uh, and just as a new cultural movement comes about and is like, "Now we're going to do linguistics, now we're going to do game theory, now we're going to do this," uh, the same books, you know, Virgil, Ovid, that were already being used, are being used to a new end. Let's revolutionize the educational system we used to raise our elites and make it focus more on ethics than on sort of theology and other-worldly ethics. Make, uh, instead, make it work on political theory and practical ethics, perhaps, is a good way to put it. Uh, and so they're, they're going to libraries and saying, "Hey, those old books that you don't use very often, uh, that were written by people who are peers of of at Invert, 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, you know, any every n 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, uh, 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 abstruse, uh, 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 there's suddenly people interested in them, but there 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 moment of perceived political crisis.

Yeah. Well, and, and one of those applications was reading these accounts of ancient battles and whatnot, uh, not as moral lessons or, you know, grammatical, uh, instruction, but as, "Well, what if we can get ideas for how they conducted themselves and why they won this battle?" U, and that wasn't a, that was one of the new interpretations that that ended up emerging.

Right. Yeah. Although there, you've jumped a hundred years ahead of I know. Yeah, I am. Yeah, I am. Of jumping around in time in the way that people sort of always do with the Renaissance, which is, as you know, 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. Yeah, the roaring 20s are radically different from the Great Depression, which is radically different from World War II, which is radically different from World War I, uh, which is radically different from the 50s, and those from the 60s, as if, uh, 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. Uh, and when we're jumping from Petrarch to what you were 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 Petrarch and Machiavelli. The two works people are talking about when they say that were written as far apart as Napoleon's childhood and Yuri Gagarin's spaceflight. And we would never claim that Napoleon's childhood and Yuri Gagarin's spaceflight are the same era. We have 15 eras in between those two. And yet we tend to think about the Renaissance as if this difference of a hundred years doesn't mean anything because these eras somehow were longer and moved more slowly. Uh, but if you zoom in, as you know, the book does, uh, you see all of these fine-grain differences so that somebody in the, uh, in the 1520s remembering the 1490s feels like it was a different world, as much as we in the 2020s feel about the 1990s. Uh, yeah, granted, yes. Um, you know, but I I guess still though, I I, you know, the idea of reading them just to read them. I think that was a a thing that Petrarch was was trying to to put out there to say, well, Petro, you know, let's let's just read this history. This is something we to learn from.

He didn't he didn't necessarily know what was in it because a lot of these books he had never read any of that. His assumption is these books which we don't have, and which I I can't read, and which I hope to be able to read if we get Greek back, uh, if 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. Uh, 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, and 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 caused the Pax Romana and caused the rise of Roman, caused the unification of Italy under the Romans. Uh, having faith that whatever these books are, they did that, therefore, if we have them, we will use them. And 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, who then says, "Actually, I think we also need to read these books in a new way," as you referenced, uh, thinking 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? Are there patterns to what made somebody win the battle? Uh, can we put these side by side? What policies did these different city-states have? Uh, what kinds of tyrannies ended up ending these city-states? Are there patterns between their policies and the way they ended? Those 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 with them." And getting the books takes more than half a century. They did. Yeah. Because it was so painstaking and expensive to to have a book in those days. Um, yeah.

And, and, uh, I mean, just the the osmotic view of of of libraries, it didn't really work though, um, to to facilitate Italian, um, solidarity. And so he did, you know, take, uh, so, so I guess we'll fast forward then to Machiavelli here for a second, that, you know, not just was he was advocating new readings of these ancient books, but also, um, he elevated one of the, um, Roman concepts which they borrowed from the Greeks, the Roman concept of, uh, or virtue, as, uh, we, English people say. Um, and, but, uh, it was not at all what, uh, people nowadays who are English-speaking think of, uh, when they when they hear the word virtue. That's not at all what these guys meant. Um, and I think that's worth talking about.

Yeah. I mean, there are, I have two entire shelves of books about what Machiavelli means by virtù. Uh, it's such a, uh, it's such a discussed 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 because they'll always talk about it, right? It's the thing to bring up with Machiavelli. What I think is very interesting is the way he is pushing against the fascination with virtue that 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, because as you know, it's not just about the Renaissance being invented in the 1400s and the 1700s and the and the 1800s, but also in the 1900s and in the 2000s and in my own education, and what it means to be a historian now, continuing to invent and reinvent this virtue politics, referring to the idea that if They created this new virtue-focused mode of education in which one would read these classics and from them absorb justice, prudence, temperance, fortitude, uh, caution, generosity, courage, the other virtues that are discussed at such length by the ancients. Uh, you know, 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. Uh, and that these are the the books that teach how to hone a soul toward excellence in the Platonic sense, right? Uh, that theory is saturated in the works of all of the peers of Machiavelli and the authors he is reading when he is young and aspiring to join, when he is writing his first works. Uh, and their focus is, "Let's instill these virtues, uh, justice, prudence, etcetera, 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 and beyond, the Italian Wars as as it's called in French and English, or the Calamità d'Italia as it's called in Italian, right, the calamity of Italy, these wars that are infamous, the Borgias are the most infamous part, but not the bloodiest, um, 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. And virtue politics was the theory that not only would these virtues make rulers, you know, good or wise, they would also make them successful, and 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. Machiavelli, 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 because if you say virtue, it's being weird. Virtù, which is focusing on a sense of courage and grasping the moment and, um, fortitude to some extent, but certainly not justice or mercy or, uh, temperance or those portions of it. Uh, but a kind of a calculated prudence, or what the next generation will call reason of state, or rationalist, or what we might call utilitarian political calculation. That is to him what makes, yeah, what makes people really successful is the opportunistic, prudent grasping of the moment. Uh, the the moment when Cesare Borgia realizes, "Wait, if 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, uh, Seneca, fail and lose their stuff. And Machiavelli wants to describe this and say, "It 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, etcetera. They include a kind of a what we would call utilitarian, uh, opportunistic prudence." And that 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.

Well, and related to that, I think, you know, as you know, moving, uh, to a more kind of, uh, statecraft-oriented viewpoint of of politics, or when people read Machiavelli, that a lot of modern-day people, you know, modern people look at his writing and they, and, as you talk about in the book, that, you know, this is a, that they want to think, "Oh, this guy was just like us." Yeah. And that he was a modern person, even though, and he was an atheist, and we, and we know this.

So what you're talking about is, you know, as I discuss in the book, Machiavelli is one example, Leonardo is another, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola is a third, that people in the modern day often really like to claim and and look at and 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 advance a kind of claim that in the Renaissance, there There was a radical underground that was rationalist and anti-superstition and anti-organized 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, uh, was what would shepherd in modernity, and that somehow this semi-organized sort of present groundbreaking underground 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 kickstarting a process of change that moves us away from the supposedly stagnant Middle Ages toward the present. And that these are the agents who shaped the Renaissance. Machiavelli gets pointed at as as an exemplar of them. So does Leonardo. And I say depicted because these depictions range from, you know, 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, you know, here's a video game or a second-tier fantasy movie like, uh, Legend 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, uh, rationalist proto-scientists who carry on the tradition of reason from our commit and are going to shape modernity. Right? That that we we tell this both in non-fiction and in fiction because it's very narratively satisfying. And it's narratively satisfying because it makes the claim that the world came to be our world and have us in it thanks to the intentional efforts of people like us, and that people who shared our values, uh, 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 resembles our values, just as we resemble the values that we imagined this underground 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." Super eager to talk to me about their favorite Renaissance person, uh, and 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 Leonardo a secret atheist?" Um, 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 will be a wide variety of what people are hoping that I, as an expert, will be able to say, "Yes, uh, the shapers of the Renaissance would have agreed with you about this thing." Uh, but when you actually read what they are doing in the Renaissance, the answer is, A, they wouldn't have agreed with us about just about anything. And B, the people we want to point to as being in this underground aren't the biggest shapers of it. They're there. Uh, but when we want to 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, right? And, and to some degree, his history. Nobody's reading The Prince. Not for not for decades after his death, well into when the Renaissance is, you know, mostly over. He's not a shaper. He's a commentator on. Uh, and when we look at who are the really influential people that a lot of people are reading, they're doing wacky, 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 Van Winkle-style medical stasis so that your body can sleep in perpetual youth for a decade, uh, while you fly around the cosmos and spy on your neighbors and cast love spells, right? Uh, and that's being read by two orders of magnitude more people than ever read Machiavelli in the period. Uh, it's a, 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, you know, in the, the, the fine grain, nobody likes plural, uh, 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 conquered, as cities are being conquered from the inside through coups, from the outside through wars, uh, or from mercenary captains saying, "Hmm, it's about retirement time. Let me look through my menu of nearby cities and decide which one I want to conquer, make myself the Duke of, uh, as I hit retirement age." It's a desperate time, and therefore time for desperate measures. And the desperate measures are incredibly plural, and they try a million jillion things. And in the 19th century, 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. And then 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 study, the more we're like, "No, actually, most of their ideas weren't popular until the 19th century. Uh, 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. But more importantly, is the pluralism. This is throwing spaghetti at a wall, and 15 strands stick, and the other other hundred fall, and only one of those 15 strands is Machiavelli. The others are just as influential, and they braid, and they counter each other, and they disagree, and they shape an enormously enormously complex transition, uh, in which people we disagree with were just as influential as those we agree with. Uh, 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, we have to get to the state of people looking at their current science and saying, "Wow, this doesn't describe what we see." You know, this for humor's theory, this Galen stuff, uh, this old Ptolemaic geometry, all of it appears, your geography, all of it appears to be wrong. To 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 rival theories, and you have to have the question, "Right, should, let's, is, is what we know correct?" Right? And to get to the, "Is what we know correct?" What you need is plural rival theories that are making people say, "Well, wait a minute. We don't, you know, 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. So I talk about 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, uh, and we get antiquity back, right? There's not one, there's not one antiquity, there are many, many antiquities. They were expecting a lot more agreement. You know, when Petrarch said, "Go find the ancients," he was imagining they would all agree with Cicero, and he would have been very surprised to learn how much they didn't. And then there's also the multiplication of medieval authorities becoming more available because these 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, others 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 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. And 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 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, and the scientific method.

Yeah, exactly. Um, well, and, and you do, speaking of of of Renaissance atheism, um, you talk at length about just this, uh, you know, in the same vein of trying to define, uh, trying to project our past, sorry, ideas, uh, or trying to, let me say this again. Um, well, and, and you also do talk quite a bit about just how few actual atheists there were, uh, back in those days, and, uh, despite a kind of somewhat recent modern-day, uh, series of books that people have been coming out with, trying to say that, oh, well, you know, these, these ancient figures, actually, they were atheists. Um, but the reality is that even the Epicureans were not atheists. I mean, the, it's, it's a really complicated, it's a really complicated and difficult question to answer because, you know, 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, right? And that atheism is a capital offense, and therefore when we read these texts, we don't expect people to say, 'I'm an atheist.' We instead 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 in the Renaissance period, looking for closet atheists, looking for people who don't overtly express their atheism, but whose other sentiments make it feel like they might be vulnerable over the, but whose other sentiments make it feel like they might be sympathetic to atheism. My own dissertation, which was supposed to be looking for atheists in the Renaissance, took this as a method, uh, that I knew, as many do, that Lucretius's *De Rerum Natura*, on the nature of things, this poem of Epicurean cosmology and physics that denies the afterlife and denies divine action and, uh, 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, uh, my secret hidden atheists will be among them. You know, they'll still be camouflaged, they won't admit that they are atheists, but there they will be, you know, in the margins of Lucretius, underlining their favorite passages, right? And so I set out to look at all the surviving copies of Lucretius left from the Renaissance, and, uh, after looking at 350 of them, determined that everybody underlined the sex scene and the lines that sound like Virgil, and, uh, the bits about moralistic stuff that sound like they're coming out of Cicero and Seneca, and that only two copies underlined any of the atomism and atheism at all. One of 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 atomism 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? And I 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 atheists. I was looking for atheists. And then I was reading their actual statements, and I'm like, "No, atheists would say this. I wish you were an atheist. You are a sweetie pie, but I you sound like a theist." 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 it cared about more than others. Uh, there were, in, you know, if you look at Inquisition records for a particular decade, say the 1510s, there would be a thousand trials for quasi-Lutheranism and four for atheism, right? They really are hunting for A and not B. Uh, and indeed, the sex scene and sex stuff is more dangerous to underline than the atheist stuff. Uh, the Inquisition had its priorities. And so I use, as you know, this simile in the book: If you were worried about government agents raiding your house, would you carefully hide 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. And similarly, if you're afraid of the Renaissance Inquisition, you're not going to carefully, meticulously hide your atheism and then publish a pamphlet talking about how to summon demons or supporting Luther on sola fide. No atheist is going to publish a pamphlet supporting Luther on sola fide. He's going to say, "I don't care," and go home, and the Inquisition is going to leave him alone because they care much more about certain things than they do about other things. And it's that that makes you realize no closet atheist is going to choose to go to the stake for sola fide the way these guys did. Uh, were there some of them who are closet atheists? Yes. Uh, 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. Uh, but that's two out of 35 people that I thought would be atheist at the beginning, and the other 33 I go through the material and I'm like, "No, this is not an atheist. It is 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 an "I'm going to project my soul out of my body" kind of way." They are radical freethinkers who are disrupting the system, but they aren't quasi-modern. That's what people have to remember. Our modern values are shaped by our modern knowledge, right? Our modern science required us to find those findings first.

A lot of none of those things were there. Yeah. So like there was no theory of evolution, there was no uh you know uh documentary hypothesis of the Bible, you know, just all these things that came out in the mid 19th century, they weren't there. So as you said, you know, as as you say in the book that, you know, to be a atheist in those days, in the Renaissance days, it was the equivalent of being a conspiracy theorist, right? Turning your back on all science and you have no science on your side. Science is not on atheism's side yet. We haven't done that science yet. Uh it is instead clinging to an extremely radical position without rather than with scientific 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, you know, I really love these Renaissance people. Were they really atheists like me? What that person is actually asking is if I had lived in the Renaissance, would I still 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 in a different time? The answer is yes and no. If if most modern atheists had lived in the Renaissance, they would be radical freethinkers, but not necessarily atheist radical freethinkers because science isn't on that side. They would be experimenting with Plato and Seneca and soul projection and uh you know medieval stuff. They might be Scotists uh or hermeticists. Yeah. You know, they they would be interested in Zoroastrianism and the Chaldean oracles and all of the new fangled 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 uh with saying that our values are based on science? Our values are based on science and and our critical reasoning thereabout. And so we would come to different conclusions when we had different science and they would still be radical and they would still be freethinking and they would still be bucking a system but they wouldn't arrive at the same conclusions even if they arrived at the same questions. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think probably the best person who exemplifies that or at least off the top of my head is is Isaac Newton. You know, a lot of of of present day people kind of think of, oh, he's the guy that that showed that, you know, God wasn't keeping the planets in line and all that. And he was he was really uh, you know, the founder of science and secularist. But if you actually read Newton and, you know, he was obsessed with alchemy, he was obsessed with, you know, Bible codes. He was like that that that's what he spent half of his time on. Let's congeal sunlight into gold. Yeah. The old the old quest. Uh, yep. Uh, because that's where the cutting edge experimental world was. Uh, you know, and when I talk about Newton's era, which I do in the last section of this book, uh, my personal term for the 17th century is the try everything age. When people say, okay, the Renaissance showed us that there are so many competing competing truth claims that we cannot sort what is true. Uh, there are too many different persuasive authors. Is we read Plato, we read Aristotle, we read Seneca, we read Augustine, we read Thomas Aquinas, we read Scotus, we read Bruno, we read Ficin, 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. Uh, and then the things that work stick and the things that don't. And I love this quotation from a biography of King Christina of Denmark. Sorry, King Christina of Sweden. um King Christina of Sweden who is the complexely transgender-ish uh king of uh Sweden at this time who uh was really interested in science and 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 superstitious arts like chemistry, astrology, and the divining rod, and those three are lumped together because they're equally experimental, right? And and chemistry, astrology, and 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 everything and our modern sciences are descended from the ones that worked, but it was equally vital that they tried all the ones that didn't or we wouldn't know that they didn't work. Uh so the the try everything age tries everything. And of course somebody as uh curious as Newton is observing movement and objects and also trying to decode Bible stuff because if people in your era say this might be true, you try it. You try everything. Yeah.

Um, and you know the and and and the reason why I think this is relevant to today not just because to push back on some of this you know new atheist type uh discourse but it's also that you know ultimately the the main innovation of the Renaissance. It was the pluralism. It was the the governmental reforms. Um, 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. Um, and that because the government has been, you know, cut back so much on public education, cut back on on, you know, secondary education for the public, college education. Uh, 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 will say, "Oh, well, the science shows this. It's obvious. You, you know, anyone would believe this stuff." Well, they've never even seen it. 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 humanitatis. This is the educational system Petrarch 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. The kind of education where the class reads Sophocles 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. Uh 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 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. It stimulates progress but it also stimulates rebellion. 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 Petrarch from the beginning of the Renaissance to the end, he would find himself scared and surrounded by worrying ideas, but also incredible innovations. If you could teleport himself him even further to now, he 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 my value that the examined life makes us more human. And 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, you know, 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 uh those things we cannot as human beings battle. We cannot stop the horsemen plague. We cannot stop the dire horsemen famine. We cannot stop the dire horsemen death. Maybe says Petrarch, we can stop the dire horsemen war. If we can achieve solidarity, prudence, if we can make 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 assailable uh since 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 Horsemen war. Uh, and that we have gotten so successful at it that practically every disease Petrarch was familiar with is either now rare or trivial. Uh, 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. Uh, he would weep to discover that we have bested so aptly so many of the weapons of the dire horsemen plague. Uh, and he would be discouraged but ready to grapple with the fact that the Dire Horseman war turned out to be harder and that creating human policies that are capable of peaceful prudence has been a constant challenge and that we have yet to match the stability of 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 Petrarch dreamed that we could. But if we showed him there is no smallpox, uh, he would say the work was worth it.

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 uh things are 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. And that cathedral isn't finished still. They're still building it. Milan finished its cathedral less than a decade ago, right? Uh, these are big projects. And if you ask Petrarch, on what scale should we judge whether re transforming education in order to help us be more examined and become our best selves will bring about peace in Europe. On what scale should we judge that? If we ask Petrarch, he would say on the scale of a cathedral. I I would love if it were faster, but the scale of a cathedral is a scale on which we need to think. And I know right now we're surrounded by a lot of things that make us feel fear. Uh, the world is very scary right now because it is 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. Uh, our elders remember it more vividly. Uh, 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 his work. Uh, his lifetime felt like an apocalypse. Many, many eras have. But we have come so far through the aftermath of Petrarch's call, let us make liberal education. And it's continuing to bear fruits. And the adversaries of progress and those who want uh the past more than the future are the adversaries of it who are trying to dismantle that educational system because they know perfectly well that it creates change and progress and that it creates a future which would not agree with our current values but would replace them with more examined better. Yeah.

And I think that prospect is also kind of threatening to even more centrist people today. And you see that with the the current discussion that some some more centrist Democrats are trying to say, "Oh, well, you shouldn't stand up for trans people." And that's that isn't how you This is where I always think of Diderot, right? Jumping forward out of out 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 to take the knowledge that is power and place it in the hands of the whole population. Uh, Diderot in his secret private writings writes uh the philosophical dialogue Rameau's 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 is building. He realized that Diderot knew how powerful the power that is knowledge is and that if you unleash it and give it to everyone and empower everyone that way within a generation or two, there 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 assent to that because it will be a better future. That is a kind of courage that we need. We need to trust future generations won't agree with us because they will have gotten somewhere better. And if we don't trust that, then there will never be a dome on the top of the cathedral. Because to finish building 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 to 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 be human. 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.

Um, yeah. Well, this has been a a really great discussion. I think that's a perfect place to leave it, Ada. Um, and uh definitely encourage everybody to check out your book. Um, so if uh for people who want to keep up with you, uh what are your recommendations for that? So if you go to adapalmer.com, it links to everything. You could find me on Blue Sky where I share good news about progress and science every day if you want a break from the doom scroll. Uh, it links to my blog x er xb.com where 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 futurist and science fiction writer. Uh, Terra Ignota 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. Uh, so if you like big meaty big ideas SF like Foundation series uh you should check out Terra Ignota which is also linked uh from adapalmer.com. Uh, and it also links to my podcast where I discuss craft of writing science fiction and ideas with fellow uh bookworm and SF novelist Joe Walton. Uh, what else is it linked to? My music which is about Norse mythology. Uh, and my new fantasy series which will be out in a year or two uh is about Norse mythology and trying to uh dive us into a world I think it's useful for us to visit because the Norse cosmos is one in which the metaphysics focuses on the fragility of the earth that in a vast cosmos of darkness, emptiness, ice and fire uh there is 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 uh unfragility of the world and the unfragility of a cosmos in which everything is according to plan. Uh, 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 because that's closer to the mindset we need right now. So poor Smith in a turn. Yeah, exactly.

All right. Well, cool. Um, all right. Well, thanks for being here and um look forward to having you on future episodes as well. It's been a pleasure. 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 theoryofchange.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. And you get unlimited access to all of the archives. Um, and I am very grateful for that. And if you can't afford to be a paid subscriber, um, let your other podcasts that you listen to know or other people on social media. Uh, tell your friends, your family. Hell, tell your enemies if you want. I'd appreciate that. 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 time. [Music] [Music] Heat. Hey, Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] [Music]