Inventing the Renaissance

The Myth of a Golden Age

By: Ada Palmer

Narrated by: Candida Gubbins

This is an audiobook version of this book.

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 them 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.

©2025 Ada Palmer (P)2025 University of Chicago Press

Critic reviews

“Generous, brilliant, and inviting, Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance is a triumph. This is a work of deep erudition worn lightly but excitingly that offers a history of the Renaissance with a unique and personal imprint. If you are a scholar of the period, you will find new insights and interpretations, and if you are coming to the Renaissance for the first time, you will find an engaging and eloquent companion in Palmer."—Christopher S. Celenza, author of 'Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer'

“Inventing the Renaissance does something magical: it manages to take a tightly held conviction (that there was a thing in European history called ‘the Renaissance’), dismantle it with humor and intelligence, then put it back together as something different and more true to the past itself. But maybe more importantly, Palmer’s expertise and storytelling help us better understand how golden ages are imagined, and why rejecting those invented constructions of the past provides us with hope as we confront our own contemporary world. As she says herself: ‘We can do better than the Renaissance.’”—Matthew Gabriele, coauthor of 'The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe'

Great book. I’m going to look for more of Ada Palmer’s work

I’m definitely going to recommend this book to my daughter who spent a semester in Florence a few years ago.

When we went to visit her and traveled to Rome, Venice and Milan, I listen to a lot of books on Renaissance Italy. I wish I had listened to this one.

Simply breath-taking

This is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time, one of the best history texts I’ve read ever (and I have read a lot of them), and I know it’s going to stick with me. The exploration of an age, its self-mythologizing, and centuries’ worth of subsequent politicization is magnificent and detailed, rendering so many people of that age so vividly that it never for a moment feels dull or dry. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny in many places (or at least it is if you have my admittedly dry sense of humor) — and it is beautifully earnest in others, a clarion call for humanity to keep looking toward our best selves and trying to be better. I got quite emotional in a few places! I will be loudly recommending this to as many people as will listen to me.

History perfectly accessible

Such an engaging book! I’ve never genuinely ever heard a better explanation of the patron and client system, and also such successful mapping it out. Palmer does this very helpful thing you know when going over a plethora of Italian names where every time she mentioned Beatrice it’s always “twice queen of Hungary”. Whenever she mentions Julius, she says “Battle Pope 2” whenever she mentions one guy who I don’t remember his name, but I do know that he’s the “Goldsmith necromancer assassin” and so as soon as she says that I know right away who he is and where he fits in the overall of Renaissance Italy

It is perfect for people who struggle with reading history, so engaging and colorful and speak right to the reader

Never before have I felt sympathy for Machiavelli!

This book taught me so much about how we might investigate Renaissances in the "History Lab," and what it means to engage in said history. I've been quoting this book all month, talking with my partner about "Battle Popes."

I also just want to note, never before did I actually understand the historical context of when Machiavelli was writing. Amazing work, the whole book, but that will particularly stick with me.

This Girl Gives Us the Good Chisme

Schemes, screams and dreams. It’s like getting the juiciest bits of gossip from your best gossipy girlfriend. Those who don’t know history are doomed to wear bell bottoms.