Krugman interviews history professor and SF author Ada Palmer

Cafe Society
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Palmer has a new book out Inventing the Renaissance, about how the Renaissance is not a well-defined era so much as a PR effort by various historians and powers that want to associate themselves with awesome art, sculpture, technology, what have you.

If I go out of my office and turn right and get to the English department and say, when is the Renaissance? They’ll say, “oh, the Renaissance is getting going by 1550. And you know, Shakespeare is the core of the Renaissance. So when Hamlet debuts in 1600, that’s the Renaissance.”

But if I turn left down the same hallway and end up where my colleagues in romance languages are and ask the Italianists, when is the Renaissance? They’ll say, “oh, you know, the Renaissance is 1250 and Dante. And it’s really getting going and at its peak by 1400 and it’s really starting to end by 1450, so that 1500 is the tail end of it, you know, when Shakespeare’s grandparents haven’t been born yet.”

So that’s your cue that the Renaissance isn’t a specific set of events or an era in time. Instead, it’s the idea that there is this transitional phase between a fully pre-modern world and our world in which some change or set of changes started that somehow propel modernity and define the difference between our non-modern predecessors and us.

But everybody’s idea about what those things are and when they happen and why they happen and which things define modernity are different because what this really is about is modernity itself and very little to do with the reality of the time period we project this onto.

European history is full of regimes with lots of legitimacy but also regimes with very little legitimacy. It’s the latter that attach themselves to the Renaissance. That happened during the Renaissance itself, when Florence’s architecture and sculpture protected the city from its ravenous neighbors, to friends of democracy tracing that tradition to the Renaissance (ha!), to WWII when Florence wasn’t bombed because destroying that art would be an act of barbarism.

Link to a fun interview.

Ada Palmer is an SF author. Could anyone comment on her work? I’m thinking I might enjoy it.

She also has a blog:

Also, Ada Palmer is not Amanda Palmer. Those are 2 different people.

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All breaking of history into periods is somewhat arbitrary:

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Even periods with exact nomenclature are faulty. The Sixties, for example.

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Maybe recognition of this well-worn phenomenon is why we often hear expressions that break down “the Renaissance” into regional or national eras, like the Italian Renaissance or the Northern Renaissance. Maybe more thoughtful professors than these imaginary ones might say, when asked “when was the Renaissance?” that “it depends.”

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I think that the introduction of Gutenberg’s printing press is indelibly associated with the Renaissance, so I would place it almost exactly in-between the two quoted periods.