The Renaissance is an idea, not a thing, and has changed over time and will probably change again. So too will the idea of a bad ‘dark’ Middle Ages, at that not even a true idea. Petrarch, suffering through the Black Plague in 1348, believed he was marooned in an age of darkness and ashes. Looking back at the lost glories of ancient Rome he proposed that if we could only recover the books that had educated the Roman elite we could bring about a new golden age and escape the darkness. Historian Leonardo Bruni, a century later, took the idea one step further inventing the tripartite division of history we still mostly accept. So the ‘invention’ started with people who lived back then! To our surprise: the golden age was what they hoped for in the not-too-distant future, not the era they were living through. Not unlike us, they considered their present virtually intolerable.
Later writers eagerly adopted the conceit of a golden age Renaissance to serve as the foundation or legitimation of their own era: the eighteenth, nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Different periods celebrated different traits they claimed to find there; a new and improved Renaissance issues from each pen with different and frequently opposed impulses. Apart from the striking, fresh style of the writing, Palmer’s most unusual departure from standard history book procedure shows up in her extensive attention to historiography: the history of history writing.
She offers deep dives into two influential ‘classics’: Jacob Burckhardt, who treasured the ‘beginning of individualism and self-fashioning’; and Hans Baron, who identified the first stirrings of modern liberal-democratic governance in the city state republics of Renaissance Italy. These republics were, she points out, extreme oligarchies, more plutocratic than democratic. And those Renaissance individualists were not obviously unlike their predecessors. Neither view is ludicrous but each is partial and limited. As are their successors’ histories; as is, no doubt, Palmer’s. All histories are replaceable. Palmer is exceptionally generous in her praise of recent scholars – her mentors, her colleagues near and far, and her ‘brilliant’ students, many of whom are footnoted for having contributed additional viewpoints. History writing is never over, settled, concluded; it moves on as times, tastes, and interests do.
Palmer considers biography writing to have been too long devalued as a singularly feminised undertaking. Female scholars, however wise and worldly, formerly had little access to prestige presses and had to produce ‘stuff that sells’ for the popular press. As if in revenge for past wrongs, her book is structured from many short biographies. The central section is entitled ‘Let’s Meet Some People of this Golden Age’. Fifteen brief lives: princes, learned ladies, popes, poets, an artist, a mercenary, a musician, scholars, a wood carver, a female mystic and a political prophet. Biographies ballast the book with their sheer abundance. There is a peculiar, fairly sympathetic chapter on Lucrezia Borgia written in the second person recounting what Lucrezia saw and felt. There is also an excellent chapter on Lorenzo the Magnificent, his progenitors, heirs and mastery of the ever-changing nature of governance in turbulent Florence.
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