A Historian's Perspective

It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context. E.H. Carr, What Is History?

Like sculpture, history does not have one right view, and never should. Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

I

I have been trying to write a review of Inventing the Renaissance for a while and I think part of what’s difficult is that I loved this book. It is, quite probably, the likely winning candidate for my top book of this year. And I read a lot of great books this year such as The Anatomy of Fascism, Siddhartha, The War with the Newts, and all four books of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet (which, taken as a whole, could beat it out, but not on their own). This is a problem because my preferred method is to pick an argument with the parts of a book that most annoyed me as a way of clarifying my own thoughts. It’s a method which simply doesn’t work on a book one admires and enjoyed from start to finish.

Inventing the Renaissance as its name implies is as much a work of historiography as of history. The name of ‘Renaissance’ as applied to a period of European history starts with French historian Jules Michelet in the 1800s. Excitement about the Renaissance as a period of major historical change comes in the mid-1800s, best exemplified by Jacob Burckhardt’s works, the most impactful of which (though not the best-selling at the time) is The Civilization of The Renaissance in Italy.

When was this period and what were these changes? This turns out to be where the difficulties start. Some English literature departments consider Shakespeare (1564-1616) to have been living in the Renaissance while Chaucer (1340s-1400) – contemporaneous with Petrarch – is considered unambiguously medieval. Italian literature scholars sometimes consider Dante (1265-1321) – who died before Chaucer was born – as a definitely Renaissance figure. Machiavelli meanwhile who died before Shakespeare’s parents were born is seen as the birth of the modern.

The point, Palmer informs us, is that in order to decide on when the Renaissance was, we have to decide on what it was, or rather what the defining feature of the Renaissance was. Unfortunately, there turn out to be a lot of good but not totally satisfactory answers. Four such ideas are the rise of individualism (a core part of Burckhardt’s interpretation), Renaissance humanism (not an -ism and in many ways not what modern humanism is about¹), the beginnings of democracy (Hans Baron’s thesis of civic humanism), and the beginnings of modern capitalism. All four ideas capture interesting features but leave much out. Many Princely courts were centres of the new arts and learning, many guilds were anti-competitive or simply not very powerful, or not even anywhere near the supposed centre of the Renaissance.

Part of what makes Palmer such a wonderful guide through these previous histories is her generosity to them and the aims of their authors. Indeed, having outlined some of the flaws in Hans Baron’s account of civic humanism, she defends its use in political science because of the different goals of the discipline: where historians seek to build progressively more accurate accounts of the past, political scientists seek to build progressively more accurate accounts of politics and political behaviour. A theory inspired by incorrect history can still in this light be a good one, even if the ‘facts’ which inspired it are no longer considered true.

II

This sense of generosity to previous scholars is only one of the many scholarly values which Palmer either exhibits or explicitly argues for in the book. These values form for me a core part of the appeal of the book, as although specifically addressing historical scholarship, they are to my mind applicable much more widely. Foremost among these values is her advocacy of a fallibilism about historical (read: scholarly) knowledge. We are continuously provided with the ways in which particular historical accounts were constructed, often convincingly, and often either wrong or simply strongly dependent on a particular perspective.

An early example of the former in the book is the way in which the stubborn use of European farming practices in an inappropriate environment instead of fishing led to the Viking settlements in Greenland dying out. The evidence was clear: no fishing equipment has been found in the archeological sites. The story appealed both to then (and still) popular anti-colonial and environmentalist sentiments. Failure to understand the land by colonists! The basic problem is this narrative though compelling was completely wrong: the vikings were fishing. We now know this through by examining the bones found in the site for carbon isotope ratios which are higher in fish bones.

Palmer’s view is that all historical work is mistaken, but that over time we will always improve the accuracy of what we believe to be true by refining our methods and building on the mistakes of previous work. Indeed, her explicitly stated goal is precisely to encourage we readers to be fallibilists about historical knowledge too:

my goal is not to show you my Renaissance, it’s to teach you to question everybody’s version of the Renaissance, this so-called golden age that is so complicated, neither perfect nor an empty lie […] every time I go to a conference, or hear online what people are discovering, it feels dynamic, new, as if we’re only just finding the right methods and questions to begin. We Historians know how much we don’t know.

Happily for the reader, despite this she does in fact tell us her view of the Renaissance as a period and its core feature, which is virtue politics. Petrarch, in response to the violence and turbulence of his time (the Renaissance was a golden age for art and learning, less so for living: the death rate actually got higher) called for a transformation or rebirth (rinascita, not Renaissance) focused on Italy’s strongest days in Ancient Rome. He argued that if only the ancients and their ways were studied, if only we were to take their texts from the shelves and re-learn what was lost, then we can be as great as they were.

Hence the classicising movement and its efforts to uncover and interpret ancient texts, hence the move away from the formal logic of scholasticism to the role of rhetoric in inspiring virtue, hence desperate measures for desperate times. In Palmer’s interpretation, the Renaissance was a specifically political project whose goal was to heal Italian and European politics by instilling virtue in the Princes and other elites of their day through education.

I am simplifying somewhat and you really ought to read the book to get the argument, but it’s compelling, not least in that it really tries to incorporate all the stronger aspects of previous theories but also reacts to many of their weaknesses. Of course, Palmer had already warned us not to trust her, and emphasises than in time so too will the virtue politics interpretation of the Renaissance be found to possess flaws, to fail to include things it should, to struggle when new evidence comes to light.

III

In talking up the core scholarly values Palmer advocates, I risk making the book seem dry and over-technical. It isn’t: it’s a joy to read. Palmer is an experienced blogger and sci-fi author and knows how to write an entertaining book.² On one level, she’s just very funny. She explains that the ‘Dark Ages’ is much like ‘Renaissance’ a projection of later periods on the past. Unlike ‘Renaissance’ however, ‘Dark Ages’ is deeply misleading as to the amount of both economic and scholarly activity that went on. The Renaissance, after all, was built out of the medieval. Due to this she tells us that it really ought to be listed in the index as ‘Dark Ages, Don’t Call Them the’. Flick to the index and there it is: ‘Dark Ages, Don’t Call Them the’.

This isn’t the only moment in the book where Palmer displays her penchant for nicknames. Rome, reflecting its perennial role in stoking conflict in Italy in this ‘golden age’, is the Eternal Problem City. Pope Sixtus IV is ‘Battle Pope’ (guess why), Pope Julius II is ‘Battle Pope 2’ (same family + guess why). Most significantly, the relationship of the Renaissance to the medieval is ‘ever much more so’, in that it built on and extended on the various social trends of the time.

The book is tremendous fun in many other ways, too. One of these ways is Palmer’s willingness to make use of a range of literary formats and techniques. The third section of the book is a series of mini-biographies of ‘friends’, each of whose lives gives an alternative window on the Renaissance. Some are famous, such as Michelangelo, who illustrates Renaissance same-sex attraction and would really rather be sculpting. There are less famous ones too, such as Filelfo, an early advocate of something like freedom of speech (i.e. that it is the duty of philosophers to criticise rulers – which Filelfo frequently did, and frequently got into trouble for).

Then there is the biography of Lucrezia Borgia, traditionally a villain in many Renaissance histories. It is written in the second person to encourage our empathy and to directly demonstrate how easily the same events can be validly seen from many perspectives. It is an incredibly striking chapter in a thoroughly enjoyable section of the book.

And then there is the sheer range of facts one learns by reading the book. Did you know, for instance, that patronage was core to the Renaissance? That the legal punishments on the books such as the death penalty were rarely administered, because a degree of mercy was expected as part of the sentencing process, thus mirroring the divine justice of God? That with enough patronage you could get away with murder?

Or did you know that the use of ‘Queen’ to mean ‘female monarch’ only came into widespread use towards the end of Prince Elizabeth I’s life? That Queen Christina of Sweden’s coronation name was in fact King Kristina? Perhaps you might have known that modern punctuation was invented by Pietro Bembo, and that before him readers often had to read aloud as they tried to work out where one word stopped and the next started?

And then there is the willingness to share some of the thoughts-in-progress on the Renaissance, some of the backdoor conversations among historians which don’t otherwise make it to a popular history such as this. Most compelling of these are two definitions of Renaissance humanism which work well but won’t/can’t be used in scholarship, proposed by other historians at a party. One is that A Humanist is someone with the ability to activate antiquity. The second is that A humanist is someone who receives a letter from Erasmus [or someone of similar status]. The second is a particularly nice introduction to the role of letter-sending in the Renaissance, including the fact that letters from famous humanists were often read out loud in every town on their way to their destination.

IV

In all of this a second value Palmer advocates or at least embodies is the need to avoid reducing time period to a single spirit. The classicising movement was only one thing going on, and was compatible with a range of other things happening at the same time. The Renaissance, like our own modern era, was defined by a plurality of beliefs, worldviews, ideas, ways of living. It is a real problem in today’s political discourse that commentators often try to speak of a liberal middle class or a socially conservative working class as though these large groupings were monolithic in their beliefs. At most we can speak of differences in averages: to then over-generalise is either ignorance or an abuse of language.

So Palmer advocates for a view of the Renaissance wherein it is impossible to pick a single X with which to finish the sentence “Renaissance people believed X”. We find, in her view, a

Renaissance which defies efforts to claim there was one spirit, one anything, which defined this time and place, or any time and place.

And the plural Renaissance she brings into view is I think much messier, much stranger, much more interesting than the relatively stale view of an artistic golden age suddenly and inexplicably breaking with the past. Consider Julia the Sybil from the biographies of friends (alive 1689, born maybe 1665? We don’t know). King Kristina referred to Julia her Sybil, meaning prophetess. She accurately predicted that Kristina would be buried in a particular dress, and that Cardinal Decio Azzolino and Pope Innocent XI would die shortly afterwards.

What’s strange for us in learning about Julia is that she ill-fits with our existing conception of the seventeenth century (about as late as ‘Renaissance’ can refer to), often better known as the Age of Reason in which science in its modern form was born. Palmer argues that we might better know it as the Try Everything Age, because in the spirit of ever much more so they really did try everything. We like to look back in time and separate the ‘real’ sciences such as chemistry (chymistry) or optics from those we now recognise as pseudosciences such as alchemy, astrology, divining rods, or prophecy.

But this is largely a projection from our contemporary science onto the past. In the Try Everything Age they really were trying everything: dropping things from towers, horoscopes, or conjuring demons. The characteristic attitude of this age insofar as there was one was an attitude that these things are sometimes real, sometimes work, and so one had to be open-minded and experiment with them. And this spirit of trying really was important: they were frequently trying things believed by authoritative knowledge to be rubbish, such as having doctors touch patient’s bodies to diagnose their illnesses. So the late Renaissance/Try Everything Age was characterised by a spirit of curiosity and discovery, leading to the profusion of many practices we regard as medieval (prophecy) alongside those we regard as modern (chemistry, which back then was not distinct from alchemy).

The strangeness of the past is no less present in earlier periods of the Renaissance. We find Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, whose 900 theses advocate for religious syncretism strongly butts against some of our preconceived notions of a monolithic Christianity as characterising Europe before the reformation. We find Marsilio Ficino, who sought secret readings of Plato to learn ancient Mediterranean magic. We find that different to today’s assumption of heterosexuality, ‘dual attraction’ was expected in men, whether condemned or otherwise: it was the norm for men to be as attracted to younger, more feminine men as they were to women. And they were just as plural as we are: when men felt exclusive attraction to other men (they would not have called this homosexuality in their day), this was seen as odd: but it certainly happened.

V

For me, the values Palmer advocates for – fallibilism about scholarly knowledge while recovering a notion of progressive improvement in our knowledge, a defence of the plurality of human existence against mono-narratives, a need to understand people on their own terms and not ours – are the beating heart of what I believe to be the social responsibilities of scholars and intellectuals. Against mono-narratives, against unwarrented claims of infallible authority, in defence of the reality of human variety must the scholar strike. If we fail to do so, we betray both the pursuit of truth and the reality of human existence. These responsibilities apply to all of us who profess to pursue truth, and not merely our historian cousins.

But the historian’s perspective she offers is particularly valuable. She points out that we often ask the wrong questions. Consider the question as to why the Roman Empire fell: the basic fact is that all regimes fall, in the end. The real question is why the Roman Empire was able to last as long as it did, with the Eastern Empire only finally disappearing in 1453. The Republic of Florence too lasted. It took 150 years before Cosimo de Medici was able to construct a patronage system sufficiently strong to circumvent their complicated system of lots. Liberal democracy has not yet lasted so long: perhaps it will not.

Particularly compelling is Palmer’s view on the question of historical forces versus individual agency. Drawing no doubt on her professed enjoyment of board games, she runs every year a simulation of a Papal election with her students taking on the role of historical figures. Every year the particulars of the outcomes are different, often due to the actions of relatively minor figures, but certain features are also always in the end repeated. A war always occurs: but who is at war with whom always changes. The point is that the great forces of history are inescapable, but individuals can still shape the outcomes of those forces.

She recovers too a view of progress despite the chastenings of the 20th century catastrophes and the lessons of value pluralism.³ Overcoming the latter depends on the use of reasonably universal measures of progress, such as infant mortality, or a favourite of Palmer’s: what proportion of the population can be murdered by someone else without consequences? On the assumption that no one wants their children to die, or to be murdered, she argues we can begin to recover a notion of progress.

Her preferred metaphor is that of a fish tank. Fish tanks are complicated, fragile ecosystems. You might see one fish struggling to breath because it wants more alkaline water: put in some powder to adjust the water and all the other fish die. You might see that some of your fish are sick and put in some antibiotics. Congratulations: you killed the symbiotic bacteria in the tank which are now rotting at the bottom, killing your fish.

Progress, for Palmer, is a series of attempts to adjust our own world as we adjust a fish tank. She has accepted the truth of Chesterton’s fence that one often doesn’t know the consequences of the changes we make. We are, fundamentally, making changes in a dynamic system much more complicated than a fish tank. These changes have often gone badly, violently wrong. But they have also in the long run worked to make human life measurably better. Experimentation and change has given us modern medicine, the 8-hour working day and the 5-day working week, the minimum wage. Infant mortality is far lower than the historical norm in many counries. In many countries it is harder to get away with murder than in the past.

Will this view convince conservatives who fear unleashing change due to its often violent consequences? I suspect not. Too many examples of human violence in pursuit of change abound: the French revolution, the Communist experiment(s) of the 20th century. I think Palmer’s argument is a good one. But I would: I am drawn towards scientific experimentation and towards social reform. A conservative might argue that the costs to human life have outweighed the benefits. They might try and distinguish scientific gains from social gains. They might even interpret some of what you or I regard as social progress as social decay. But I don’t thing this argument needs to persuade them: it only needs to persuade those of us who wonder if we can justify our humanist and reformist dispositions.

Inventing the Renaissance is ultimately many things: a history of the Renaissance, a historiography of the Renaissance, an argument for historical fallibilism, a book that emerged from years of scholarship and blogging and fandom. But what makes it truly a great book is that it is also a profoundly humanist book, which seeks to articulate and defend scholarly values which transcend the discipline of history, which insists on the importance of human plurality and variety, which says we should keep trying to improve the world anyway, despite it all.

Footnotes