Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age - Softcover

Palmer, Ada

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226852598 ISBN 13: 9780226852591

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2026

Synopsis

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025

An irreverent new take on the Renaissance, which reveals it as anything but Europe’s golden age.

From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we’re told) heralds the dawning of a new world—a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we’ve told ourselves about Europe’s not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity.

Palmer’s Renaissance is altogether desperate. Troubled by centuries of conflict, she argues, Europe looked to a long-lost Roman Empire (even its education practices) to save it from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similarly nostalgic vision, only now they looked to the Renaissance and told a partial story. To right this wrong, Palmer offers fifteen provocative portraits of Renaissance men and women (some famous, some obscure) whose lives reveal a far more diverse, fragile, and wild Renaissance than its glowing reputation suggests.

About this title

About the Author

Ada Palmer is associate professor of early modern European history and the college at the University of Chicago. She is the author of many books, including Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance and the award-winning Terra Ignota series of novels.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226852598
• ISBN 13: 9780226852591
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 767