There are two ways to think about every Hugo finalist, of course: how good of a book is it, and how good of a finalist is it. In many cases these are pretty much the same thing, but in some cases they are very different. Inventing the Renaissance is a good example of a finalist where they are very different. In this post I'll talk about the the book qua book, and when I do my ranking post, I'll tackle my thoughts about it as a Hugo finalist.
Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age |
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Originally published: 2025 Acquired: May 2026 Read: June 2026 |
Inventing the Renaissance is the work of Ada Palmer, a history professor best known around these parts as the author of the Terra Ignota tetralogy, whose first installment was a finalist for Best Novel back in 2017. Inventing the Renaissance is sort of two or three things at once: it's kind of a history of the Renaissance. But it would be more accurate to say that it's also a history of the history of the Renaissance. Palmer is less interested in giving the reader an overview of the Renaissance and more interested in giving the reader an overview of the idea of the Renaissance. As indicated by the subtitle, she's really focusing on the idea of the Renaissance as a "golden age": did the people from the actual Renaissance think they were living in a golden age? were they trying to make one? what did they see as a golden age? but then also: when did later people start seeing the Renaissance as a golden age? what made them do this? how has our understanding of the Renaissance changed over time?
To me, these are interesting questions, and the closer the book stuck to them, the more interesting I found it. It's huge—not counting backmatter, my Head of Zeus paperback edition is 650 pages long—and divided into six parts. The first goes back and forth between the actual Renaissance and our later understandings of it, trying to tease out what was actually happening and what later people thought about it; the second delves more into the actual intellectual project of the era. The third, and longest, provides fifteen mini-biographies of various people from the era. The fourth tries to figure out if there is such a thing a "Renaissance humanism," the fifth focuses on what distinguished the Renaissance from the eras that came after, and the sixth ends with contemplating if there are any lessons in the Renaissance for the present day.
It's a sprawling book, and different readers will take away different things. I found most interesting Palmer's claim that historians look back into the Renaissance seeking an "X-Factor": there's something that makes modernity* different from the medieval period, and whatever you think that is drives what you see as the distinct feature of the Renaissance, and thus determines the histories you write about the period. Is it investment banking? Atheism? Nationalism?
Having set this up, Palmer does end by telling you what she sees at the X-Factor—she's just given you enough background and context to make it clear that this is her interpretation of the period, and not necessarily the interpretation of the period. Her argument is that the Renaissance is the period where we move from seeing authority as a source of truth to seeing observation as a source of truth. The scholars of the period were interested in what they saw as the golden age because they wanted to reconstruct what those authorities believed. But thanks to a whole number of changes in society, this dependence on authority became untenable, and things started to shift to the way we see truth now. And then beyond that, this is the era where we started to think the world could be changed by people. More than any other figure, Palmer focuses on Machiavelli, providing a lot of context for who he is and why he wrote The Prince and what makes him a distinct figure. Machiavelli, as Palmer tells it, becomes a key example of this shift—what makes The Prince noteworthy is that he looks at the past not for examples of what is morally right, but what is effective... which is what modern academic disciplines do all the time! But Machiavelli doesn't go as far as a "modern" would in seeing that what humans do can change in fundamental ways.
The part of the book I did not get a lot out of was the third: I see why she wanted to include these diverse portraits, showing how the "Renaissance" was by no means a singular thing, and there are some good nuggets in them... but there are a lot of details in them, and this was really the only part of the book I got lost in all of the details. I feel like this needed more breathing room to be effective, like it was really a totally separate book from Inventing the Renaissance.
Palmer is clearly writing for a learned-but-popular audience; the book is not academic in tone, and I very much appreciated that. That said, I did find at times that the jokes grew wearying: I get why she gives lots of historical figures nicknames, to make them more memorable, but at the fifteenth reiteration of the "Battle Pope II" joke it's like, "yes I got it." Whenever there was a pretend dialogue, I skipped over it. And I did not care for at all the "History Lab" metaphor, which she doesn't really explain, and seems to me to subordinate the humanities to the sciences. (And this isn't a criticism per se, but man, her experience of academia is pretty different to mine. It must be nice to go to Harvard and teach at the University of Chicago and hang out at miniconferences in French villas! There's a lot of privilege here.)
But overall, this is a very interesting, very readable book on a very important topic. I don't know if everyone will think those things are true (I care a lot about history and forms of truth and academic fields of study), but I think those things are true.
* Probably my favorite joke in the whole thing is the chart of when "modern" starts according to academics in different disciplines.
