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'

Completely changed my perspective of Machiavelli

Palmer has a talent for pedagogical fillips that help make her case clear. Excellent narration. Irreverent but incisive prose.

Excellent writing with wonderful narration

I found this via the Foreign Exchanges podcast interview Ada Palmer did and despite having no prior interest or knowledge of the subject I'm finding it immensely enjoyable and insightful. It's so well written and engaging, with a narrator that just nails the reading.