#inventingtherenaissance — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #inventingtherenaissance, aggregated by home.social.
-
I am reading and loving @adapalmer #InventingTheRenaissance and it is - within my mind - in (mostly gentle) discourse with #JoWalton’s #Lent and #GuyGavrielKay’s #ABrightnessLongAgo, both of which I read years ago, and which I now want to re-read. #bookstodon
-
You know it's a good book when it has a footnote clarifying that someone was not the first pirate cardinal. #InventingTheRenaissance
-
So, Ada Palmer's "Inventing the Renaissance". A very readable and funny, if dense, book for general audiences. It kind of sets out to answer two questions: "was the Renaissance a Golden Age™?" and "were the Renaissance Men™ thinking like we moderns do?". The answer is a resounding "it's complicated, but no", backed up by evidence that gives fascinating insights into how historians work.
(1/n)
-
Maybe there are no Golden Ages, but there are fruitful beginnings, and the book ends on that hopeful note: we can influence the course of history for the better.
(So, *did* a singularity happen then? Sort of yes! There was new information technology, and the world afterwards looks *very* different from the world before. But singularities are unevenly distributed if you live through them, so it may not have felt like it.)
(4/n, n=4)
-
We also see genuinely new things happening then, and Renaissance people being conscious of that, and actively trying to legitimize their power by claiming they were working towards a Golden Age. We see that the Renaissance was both similar to and different from the Middle Ages, and from our own times.
We see that and how it started things that led to modernity; to colonialism and nationalism, and to ideas of equality and freedom of religion.
(3/n)
-
By reviewing both events that happened during the Renaissance and their later reception, but mostly by following the interconnected lives of (mostly) famous people who lived through it, we get to see how to arrive at this conclusion.
We get to see the Renaissance as a mess of political chaos, war, and diseases; and Renaissance people being religious and spiritual hardliners.
(2/n)
-
Another thought: yes, the author acknowledges that she's writing about Italy because that's where we have the most sources, but - she centers some people we don't have much material on, too.
So why not include Jews and Muslims, their thoughts and perspectives? There must be *some* sources!
-
Still thinking about this "that the hero who shaped us must have been like us", apparently a common wish.
It's a thought only the maximally privileged could entertain, I think. Everyone else knows they wouldn't have been allowed to shape the world of ideas because of their gender, class, race; wouldn't have been able to because of their disability; and so on.
The past is not only a foreign country, but hostile territory for many of us.
-
"The printing press also spread exponentially, so—like anything exponential—growth was slow at first."
Exponential spread, both of tech and knowledge and a new information distribution network, you say?
I told you there a was a Renaissance singularity!!!
-
"While Luther developed new methods for reading the Bible very different from anything practiced in the studia humanitatis, his project of retranslating and correcting Scripture used new translation methods, and new tools for understanding Greek, developed when Ficino had translated Plato, Poliziano Homer, Valla Aristotle and so on."
This seems obvious, but I've never thought about it this way. Neat.
-
"We keep asking if Machiavelli was an atheist because we want to believe that big historical changes are caused by people who intend to cause those changes, that the hero who shaped us must have been like us."
I really hate this "we". Speak for yourself; *I* don't give a fuck because I know that people in different times were radically different from me and had different outlooks, goals, and beliefs. *I* don't believe in heroes and "great men".
-
"We see this too in the medieval popularity of what is either the best or worst board game ever invented, rithmomachia, “The Philosophers’ Game,” an asymmetric chess-like game except that each side’s pieces have a unique set of numbers on them (so one side has 2, 4, 6, 8, 36, 64, 153, 289, etc. while the other has 3, 5, 7, 9, 18, 49, 120, 361, etc.) ..."
(1/2)
-
"...and the goal is to get the combination of your numbers and your opponent’s numbers into an arrangement so the ratios between the numbers and the distances between them harmonize with the proportions of the celestial spheres."
😍😍😍
(2/2)
-
@amalia12 I'm reading "Inventing the Renaissance" by Ada Palmer, a nonfiction book about, well, the Renaissance and how it's a complicated hot mess, not simply a rebirth of art and philosophy after a Dark Age.
I mostly like it so far; it's interesting but a bit dense, with lots of people and feuds and schemes.
It also makes me want to visit Florence, and Rome, again.
Great quotes and random thoughts -> #InventingTheRenaissance
-
TIL: "[The] use of queen for a female monarch, as opposed to a king’s wife, was new at the time, appearing only toward the end of the reign of England’s Prince Elizabeth I; when Machiavelli wrote The Prince the term included women"
-
"Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola—nephew of our Pico—witnessed some of Camilla’s prophecies, and wrote later that she had divine foreknowledge of Savonarola’s sermons and their messages"
Given that "I had a vision" was a relatively safe way for a woman to do theology, and preaching was out of the question, we can theorize that maybe she knew his sermons beforehand because she (co-)wrote the things.
-
"In 2011, even as your operas continue to be performed, two different television series will depict different Lucrezias, one anachronistically shocked at the prospect of an arranged marriage at age fourteen"
Hah, I snarked about that scene in the Borgia TV show too!
(And no, I have no idea why the author chose to write this section in second person singular)
-
"Even when Erasmus’s efforts to reconcile Luther with the papacy made both sides feel obliged to formally condemn him, both sides still loved this frenemy, and the Inquisition still let Catholics teach and read his works, all you had to do was ritually cross out his name on the title page."
I love this 😂😂😂
-
"[...Τ]he important History Lab maxim that, when you zoom in on a moment in the past, it’s always (A) messier than you thought, and (B) includes more women."
Well, they *are* almost 50 % of the population.
-
"The Latin gratias, often rendered as grace, also meant political influence, so, in fact, a perfectly valid translation of the Archangel Gabriel’s words at the Annunciation, Ave Maria gratia plena, is “Hail Mary full of political influence.”
Okay, that made me laugh out loud, as it's also the start of a really common prayer - which sounds *very* different rendered like that 😂
(Very feminist, actually, which is pretty fitting.)
-
"[T]he most common sentence in a heresy conviction, or even a witchcraft conviction, was being compelled to sit through a serious [sic] of tedious lectures from Dominican Thomists using Aristotle to explain the best route to Heaven."
I imagine it was quite tedious for the Dominican Thomists too 😝
-
"Florence’s tax system, for example, was more a wealth tax than an income tax, and for many years was based on officials interviewing your neighbors each year to ask them how rich they thought you were"
I can *so* see a near-future science fiction story were it's done like this, but by a LLM reviewing data from a ubiquitous social media app.
-
"Do you remember, in geometry class, when you had to write out a tedious thirty-two-step proof that the angles of a triangle had the ratio that you already knew from the start they had, so why bother?"
No.
Well, yes, I remember the proofs.
I also remember the awe I felt because I was able to prove how this was *always* true, for *any* triangle in flat space; the beauty of that reasoning. *That's* why we bother.
-
"The plan called for a larger dome than had ever been built, [...] but without a plan for how actually to do it: they just knew it would take a century to build the foundation and walls and figured that, by the time it was Dome O’Clock, some clever Florentine would figure out this hitherto impossible engineering miracle."
Now *this* reminds me of how we "deal" with climate change.
-
"Ever since banning nobles, all Florentines have been extremely wary of any princely behavior [...],so Cosimo must be very careful to always dress and act like a simple merchant [...].This is essential to prevent suspicion and attacks from within Florence,but at the same time it’s super inconvenient beyond Florence,because in this world you have to be a nobleman [...] to be taken seriously on the world political stage [...]."
Now what does this remind me of.
-
"Each lab brews different things to make our world better: Chem Lab, new meds; Physics Lab, new particles; History and Philosophy Labs, new proofs that Nazis are wrong.)"
Lovely view of academia. Wrong, of course, but this is as it should be.
-
"To defend yourself against such lies, it’s invaluable to know not just the history, but the historiography, so you can recognize common distortions and erasures, and know how historians use and evaluate evidence, so you can double-check claims you hear. Historiography is a great example of the kind of knowledge that is power—the defensive power to guard ourselves from lies."
-
"Every day of our lives we’re targeted by at least one lie about history, made in a newspaper column, a political ad, a speech, a movie poster, a tweet, etc. Some are deliberate lies, others lies of ignorance, but all draw on history (often outdated history) to advance claims about the real America, the real Britain, the real Europe, the real Russia, the real liberalism, the real conservatism, the real democracy."
-
"This is why there are Renaissance courses that go from 1300 to 1550 and others that go from 1520 to 1700, and back in the History Lab—where we brew up new timelines as colleagues down the street in molecular engineering brew RNA—we often see English literature students amazed that our Renaissance people look as early as Dante, while Italian lit students are amazed we look at someone as late as Thomas Hobbes."
The Renaissance was unevenly distributed!