
Inventing the Renaissance
The Myth of a Golden Age
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Narrated by:
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Candida Gubbins
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By:
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Ada Palmer
About this listen
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.
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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'
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Learn about others and yourself
- By C. FREEMAN on 12-25-20
By: Fenton Johnson
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The Mesopotamian Riddle
- An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing
- By: Joshua Hammer
- Narrated by: Matthew Lloyd Davies
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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From the ruins of Persepolis to lawless outposts of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, The Mesopotamian Riddle whisks you on a wild adventure through the golden age of archaeology in an epic quest to understand our past.
By: Joshua Hammer
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King of the North
- Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South
- By: Jeanne Theoharis
- Narrated by: Jasmin Walker
- Length: 12 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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The Martin Luther King Jr. of popular memory vanquished Jim Crow in the South. But in this myth-shattering book, award-winning and New York Times bestselling historian Jeanne Theoharis argues that King's time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—outside Dixie—was at the heart of his campaign for racial justice. King of the North follows King as he crisscrosses the country from the Northeast to the West Coast, challenging school segregation, police brutality, housing segregation, and job discrimination.
By: Jeanne Theoharis
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The Library of Ancient Wisdom
- Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World
- By: Selena Wisnom
- Narrated by: Catherine Bailey
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
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The library of Ashurbanipal, Assyria’s last great king, held an astonishing collection at the forefront of knowledge in its day, from ancient traditions in religion and literature to the latest developments in magic and medicine. When the Assyrian empire fell, the library burned to the ground, and its contents, clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform writing, lay buried for thousands of years until a team of Victorian archaeologists discovered the remnants in modern-day Iraq. The clay had baked and hardened; the very fire that consumed the library had helped its texts to survive for millennia.
By: Selena Wisnom
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Virtue Politics
- Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy
- By: James Hankins
- Narrated by: Paul Brion
- Length: 23 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Convulsed by a civilizational crisis, the great thinkers of the Renaissance set out to reconceive the nature of society. Corrupt and reckless tyrants sowing discord and ruling through fear; elites who prized wealth and status over the common good; military leaders waging endless wars. Their solution was simple and radical. They would rebuild their city, and their civilization, by transforming the moral character of its citizens. Soulcraft, they believed, was a precondition of successful statecraft.
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A very Good Book
- By John R Gaither on 02-16-23
By: James Hankins
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The Cherokees
- In War and at Peace, 1670–1840
- By: David Narrett
- Narrated by: DeLanna Studi
- Length: 22 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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For more than 150 years between their first encounters with the English in the 1670s and forced removal along the Trail of Tears, the Cherokees negotiated mounting pressures. As their world was convulsed by the spread of European diseases, competition for guns, furs, and deerskins, and imperial powers’ unrelenting pursuit of “savage” allies, Cherokee communities responded by creating new solidarities.
By: David Narrett
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Finish What We Started
- The MAGA Movement's Ground War to End Democracy
- By: Isaac Arnsdorf
- Narrated by: Will Damron
- Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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In the immediate aftermath of the attack on the Capitol of January 6, 2021, a growing movement of grassroots activists began plotting around the country to pick up where the insurrection left off, laying the groundwork to succeed next time where Donald Trump had failed to keep himself in power. Inspired by Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, this nationwide groundswell quickly moved beyond rhetoric and into action. Election deniers began capturing local party committees, elevating like-minded insurgents, and developing a new way forward.
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Mass Mental Illness
- By philip on 04-24-24
By: Isaac Arnsdorf
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1217
- The Battles that Saved England
- By: Dr Catherine Hanley, Tina Ross - cartographer
- Narrated by: Veronika Hyks
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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1217 charts the nascent sense of national identity that began to swell. Three key battles would determine England’s destiny. The fortress of Dover was besieged, the city of Lincoln was attacked, and a great invasion force set sail and, unusually for the time, was intercepted at sea. Catherine Hanley expertly navigates medieval siege warfare, royal politics, and fighting at sea to bring this remarkable period of English history to life.
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Slightly interesting
- By Big World on 02-05-25
By: Dr Catherine Hanley, and others
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Vertigo
- The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany
- By: Harald Jähner
- Narrated by: Sam Peter Jackson
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Out of the ashes of the First World War, Germany launched an unprecedented political project: its first democratic government. The Weimar Republic, named for the city where it was established, endured for only fifteen years before it was toppled by the insurgent Nazi Party in 1933. In Vertigo, prizewinning historian Harald Jähner tells the Republic’s full story, capturing a nation caught in a whirlwind of uncertainty and struggling toward a better future.
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How. Did It Happen?
- By Bettyb on 10-19-24
By: Harald Jähner
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First Class Comrades
- The Stasi in the Cold War, 1945-1961
- By: J. Boulter
- Narrated by: Graham Mack
- Length: 36 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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No country in history has been more deeply penetrated by spies than divided Germany after the Second World War. Fighting for the eastern corner were the 'first class comrades' of the Stasi—the East German Ministry for State Security. Rising from the ruins of a defeated country, and guided by its KGB masters, the early Cold War saw the Stasi establish itself as one of the world's most notorious spy and secret police agencies.
By: J. Boulter
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America, América
- A New History of the New World
- By: Greg Grandin
- Narrated by: Holter Graham
- Length: 25 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, the first comprehensive history of the Western Hemisphere, a sweeping five-century narrative of North and South America that redefines our understanding of both.
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I loved this book, first with alota info
- By Phil , Too long for delivery. on 05-30-25
By: Greg Grandin
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Magna Carta: The Making and Legacy of the Great Charter
- By: Dan Jones
- Narrated by: Dan Jones
- Length: 3 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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On a summer's day in 1215 a beleaguered English monarch met a group of disgruntled barons in a meadow by the river Thames named Runnymede. Beset by foreign crisis and domestic rebellion, King John was fast running out of options. On 15 June he reluctantly agreed to fix his regal seal to a document that would change the world.
By: Dan Jones
Completely changed my perspective of Machiavelli
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