#132 Inventing the Renaissance: A Conversation with Ada Palmer

Saturday, November 21th Live on Zoom

10am Los Angeles / 1pm New York / 6pm London / 7pm Florence

Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age, a New Yorker Best Book of 2025, is award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer’s witty and irreverent challenge to one of history’s most enduring myths: that a dark Middle Ages suddenly gave way to a glorious Renaissance. Through vivid portraits of Renaissance men and women, Palmer reveals a far more complicated, diverse, fragile—and fascinating—age.

From Machiavelli and the Medici to Europe’s enduring fascination with ancient Rome, Palmer explores how the idea of a Renaissance was created, reshaped, and repeatedly put to political and cultural use. The result is not only a fresh look at a period we thought we knew, but a provocative exploration of how—and why—we invent “golden ages” in the first place.

Ada Palmer is a cultural and intellectual historian & novelist focusing on radical thought and the recovery of the classics in the Italian Renaissance. She works on the history of science, religion, heresy, freethought, atheism, censorship, books, printing, and on patronage and the networks of power and money that enabled cultural creation in early modern Europe. She teaches in the History Department at the University of Chicago, her first book is Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (2014), her second is Inventing the Renaissance: the Myth of a Golden Age (2025).

To RSVP: Paola50122@gmail.com

Minimum suggested donation: $28

This talk is free for Friends of Paola's Studiolo!

Look forward to seeing you on Zoom!