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'

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.

Brilliant and hilarious.

This is a remarkable intellectual history that works wonderfully as an audiobook. The narration is very good too.

Entertaining and informative

An entertaining book about historiography sounds like an oxymoron but she mostly makes it work. It lags in places and the preachy ending chapters are better skipped, and some of her cutesy labels, intended to assist memory, get a little annoying after the tenth repetition. But two-thirds of this very long book is first-rate and most of the rest is pretty good. Narration is superb, exactly suited.

Enjoyable and instructive

PRO: This is a good listen - well read. The presentation is entertaining. It is one of those books which results in a framing (or reframing) of the way the reader thinks about the historical period covered. It easily maps on to any historical period.

CON: It is perhaps a little too long and occasionally a bit preachy. The author clearly has leftist views but they don’t infect the book. So those, who like I, have conservative views will be a little annoyed here and there, but don’t let that prevent you from buying this book. I will be recommending it to my friends,left and right.

Unique voice on the renaissance

The tone was surprising fun, and frank. Though would have loved a little more analysis of the actually philosophy. But all in all fun