[Host]: Today I'm chatting with Ada Palmer, who's a Renaissance historian, novelist, and composer based at the University of Chicago. Today we're discussing your book, Inventing the Renaissance. Ada, thanks for coming on the podcast. You've got in this period—late 15th century, early 16th century—in Italy all these different republics: Venice, Florence, Genoa. That seems unusual both for the time period and for the place.

Ada Palmer: One of the big reasons that the Italian city republics are clustered in Italy is that when the Roman Empire dissolved in the West, individual cities then needed to self-govern. This is true all across Europe. Those individual cities could no longer get the centralized Roman government to oversee supply routes or keep the roads free of bandits. Larger, wealthier towns surrounded by good agricultural land were more successful at converting over. Okay, let’s have a senate like the old Roman Senate. Let's have our top families form a council. A weaker town is much more prone to one wealthy family realizing that they can get goons and take over. Or people move next to a noble villa for protection. Italy had great agriculture and great agricultural land, so more of Italy's cities were able to sustain themselves as towns and be republics.

[Host]: I feel like the big take of your book is they were trying to resuscitate Roman virtues. What were the virtues that the Roman emperors had which allowed this safety, good government, et cetera, to work? And I don't understand the connection between reading Cicero and contemplating the virtues of a great emperor to… science and technology. What exactly is that connection?

Ada Palmer: The answer is that there are multiple steps. Petrarch, who lived through the Black Death, says, "This is an age of ash and shadow. What we need is to imitate the arts of the ancients." Specifically, the problem is our leaders are selfish. Think of Lord Montague and Lord Capulet in Romeo and Juliet; they don't care about the good of the city. Petrarch reads about the ancient Roman Brutus, who executed his own sons for treason against the state. He suggests: Can we recreate the educational environment that produced them? Can we make libraries filled with what young Cicero and Brutus read—Plato and Homer? This is based on an assumption that education is very much like osmosis, that if you're exposed to something, you'll imitate it.

Ada Palmer: The uptake of this is strong because Italy is also full of upstart rulers who have no legitimacy. But they can dress up like a Roman emperor and invest in an impressive palace. In the case of Florence with the Medici, "We are merchant scum." But if they can have Latin and Greek and quote Cicero, people will take them seriously. Imagine a French ambassador; he approaches the city and sees these statues that look as if they're about to breathe. He enters the courtyard and it's like the Roman ruins, but new. Suddenly, the condescending nobleman is in awe of the merchant scum. That's what the art and the culture does as a propagandistic tool.

Ada Palmer: The first generations raised by this are supposed to be philosopher princes, and instead we get Cesare Borgia, who sets fire to half the world. Machiavelli observes this. He says, "Clearly Petrarch was wrong that just reading Cicero would make successful rulers." So he proposes what we would think of as political science. We use history as a casebook of examples of what worked and what didn't. Instead of feeling that reading about good men will make us good, we read about wise choices, and we imitate those choices.

Ada Palmer: This process is long. From Petrarch to Machiavelli is as long as from Yuri Gagarin back to Napoleon. A hundred years later, there are micro technologies of book production like footnotes and glossaries. Any med student can read Lucretius' discussions of atoms. They're the generation that discovers that the heart is a pump. So when we get to 1600, it's the generation of Francis Bacon and Galileo who say, "Hey, let's use the information differently. Let's use nature as a casebook of examples the way Machiavelli said we should use history."

[Host]: The chain of causation here: resuscitate virtues → build libraries → literacy → analyze information → Scientific Revolution. But there are so many stories. Why this story over the other ones?

Ada Palmer: For new ideas to flourish, you need a fertile environment, like topsoil. You need to have developed this ecosystem of knowledge. It's funny and interesting that historically nobody has a good track record of being able to say, "I will do this thing so that this huge change will go my way." Petrarch wanted a world with these values, but he created a world that is capable of curing a disease he never imagined would be curable. If you showed him this future, he would be horrified by democracy. But he would see that we can treat the Black Death, and he would weep for joy. He did not create a world that went as he wanted, but he created a world that went well.

Ada Palmer: Florence set up a commoner republic. They decided to get rid of the nobility of Florence—massacred most of them and had a party on their graves. The senate consisted of members of merchant guilds, the owners of the means of production. From the perspective of every other polity, the rulers of Florence are the rank of their valet. They have a power sharing that is designed to be tyrant-proof: nine guys chosen at random rule for two months. It's not even a majority vote, it's consensus. Even as the Medici take over, they have to respect those institutions. They are cosplaying the Roman Republic.

Ada Palmer: A huge amount rests on whether you have a cheap writing surface. Europe, and only Europe, was writing on a leather jacket (parchment). A handwritten book costs as much as a house. Gutenberg figured out how to produce 300 copies, but he goes bankrupt because he can't sell them in one location. The first economically sustainable circulation of print is enabled by the hub system in Venice. It's best to think of the print revolution and the digital revolution in parallel, as one ongoing information revolution having multiple successive revolutionary applications.

[Host]: It's interesting to see people in 1506 being nostalgic for 1490.

Ada Palmer: History has always moved fast. It's the lies we tell ourselves in history books that confuse us. Civ tells you that in antiquity, a turn is fifty years, and in modernity, a turn is just one year. That's a lie. Any time you zoom in, it always feels like it's moving as fast as our present. Bacon uses the simile of the three insects: the ant (encyclopedist), the spider (theorist), and the honeybee (the scientist who produces something useful). In 1630, they realize there is anthropogenic progress. Really, we would say there always was and that it's accelerating.