Gone Medieval - Is the Renaissance a Myth?

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

Dr. Eleanor Janega reveals the darker side of the Renaissance with Dr. Ada Palmer, challenging the notion that it was a golden age, exposing it as a period of political instability, medical decline, and relentless power struggles. From the propaganda of the era to the destructive reign of Renaissance popes, Eleanor and Ada hugely enjoy dissecting the complexities and darker realities that belie the glorified stories of the Renaissance while contrasting it with the misconceived 'dark' Middle Ages.Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. Edited by Amy Haddow, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianaga and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades.

We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here. Before we start today's episode, a word of warning, we are talking about the Renaissance, and that means that we also make some references to sex acts that people may or may not have been indulging in at the time. You may want to have a listen and decide whether it's appropriate for the little listeners in your life before you launch in.

It's historical gossip, you see. We couldn't help it. In 1350, Francesco Petrarch wrote a letter to his former confessor, Diony Di Borgos Saint-Sipocro, telling him that he and his brother Gerardo had recently ascended Montvanteau in Provence. At the top, Petrach sat down and opened a copy of Augustine's confessions,

which he had hiked up the mountain with for some reason, to very conveniently stumble across the phrase, and men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains and the mighty waves of the sea and the wide sweep of rivers. and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not. This prompted Petrarch upon descent to consider the majesty of human thought,

the nobility of the human spirit, and to dash off a letter in which he claimed to have been the first person since antiquity to have climbed a mountain just to see the view. And with that, so the old story goes, the Renaissance began. I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga, and today on Gone Medieval from History hit, I'm speaking with Dr. Ada Palmer, a historian of the Renaissance at the University of Chicago, and the author of the amazing new book, Inventing the Renaissance, Myths of a Golden Age. We're talking about how stories like this belie a period of instability, medical decline,

and fracturous religious intrigue. We'll examine why we tell these stories. Who benefited from them? And how our desire to tell an easy story about a triumphant golden age accludes the amazing innovations of the early modern period, which unfurls slowly over a period of centuries. Ada, welcome to Gone Medieval. I've been looking forwards for so long. This is a treat. I am delighted because in very many ways, I think, you know, I'm not going to take credit for your amazing book, but I definitely at least egged you on. She was very shaped by the teamwork, especially the teamwork I saw you and David Perry and other

medievalists doing during COVID when we all got this flurry of questions from journalists about the Black Death suddenly. And you guys were doing such a great job on the medieval end. But I was like, where are my people doing the second half of this about the Renaissance app? So it took a while to see the book out there. But I really think of this as the other half of the project you guys were doing. And I want to join the team. I mean, I think that this is the way forward. And you have very perfectly set up one of the big problems that we have as historians, especially when, you know, you and I, I'm a historian, especially of the later medieval period and you of the Renaissance. But this kind of implies what I would say is kind of a false dichotomy, right? And it's really fostered by these

super outmoded narratives we have that place the Renaissance as a sort of foil of the medieval period. And, you know, there's this really easy narrative that's, oh, the medieval period is very bad and dark. And that's when the black death happened. And then the Renaissance happens. And which was the thing that was happening all the time during COVID, where everyone's like, well, don't worry, everyone. Because after the Black Death, there's the Renaissance. And I was like, So that means if we sit back and do nothing, COVID will cause an economic boom, right? That's when these things work. Yes. Yeah, right. Right. So, I mean, so, I mean, so. So, I mean, you and I are both laughing, but I think that this is the easy assumption, right?

It's like the medieval period is separated from the Renaissance. The Renaissance is this period of golden humanity in contrast to the darkness of the Middle Ages. But I think you and I can both agree that that is not true. And when people ask me what the Renaissance is, I begin by saying the Renaissance is propaganda. It's propaganda claiming that a particular bunch of stuff is somehow categorical. different from a bunch of other stuff. And one of the ways you can really tell its propaganda is if I go to campus

and wander around my University of Chicago and knock on different people's doors in different departments and ask them, when is Renaissance? Their answers differ by more than 200 years. Because if I knock on my friends in the English department, they're like, Renaissance is Shakespeare. The Renaissance gets going in 1500.

And, you know, the really great stuff is coming to its peak in the latter of 1500. And if I go down the hall to where the Italianist's are knock on their door and ask, when is the Renaissance? It's like, oh, the Renaissance is, you know, Dante, and it's mostly dwindling down by 1400 already. And you're, you're practically modern by the time you get to 1500. There's no difference between 1500 and 19. And you don't get answers that contradictory unless you're talking about something that's very vague and very deliberately vague and very carefully not a real thing. You know, often when we're talking about where early modern

gives way to modern, most people will say, the French Revolution was a big line in European history. It changed a whole lot of things from fashion to diplomacy. Everybody can kind of agree, the French Revolution definitely happened. There was a French Revolution. It's a thing.

It had a date. You know, we can put a line there. When you ask people like, what began the Renaissance? Oh, the spirit of humanity emerged from a slumbering something, something that occurred. And then we had Shakespeare. And you're like, hmm, and what date did the slumbering spirit of humanity emerge from under this shadow of superstition, right?

Which is what gets you at how amorphous this construction is. And is why, as you saw, only part of the book in Benning the Renaissance is about the Renaissance. A big part of it is about the 18th century, the 19th century, in the 20th century, and all of the reasons that this propaganda remains useful to everybody. Yeah, oh, absolutely. So, I mean, and this is the thing, right? Oftentimes, I will say when people say what the Renaissance is, I say that it's an infomercial to sell art, which I think works really well.

And I think, okay, we've got the easy story, right? And the easy story is like, oh, one day in Italy, everybody woke up. They're like, wow, guys, I'm a humanist now. Part of what has happened is that, you know, there are all these varying city states on the Italian peninsula, and they all hate each other, and they are... Low-move each other.

Oh, they do. They really do. And they are all dying to prove that they are better than each other. And a big way that they do that is by patronizing artists, which is great. Like, more of that. Can we bring that back as like a formal competition? I would love that, right?

And at the same time, we have some changes in the way that banking is done. So things like lending money at interest to become more acceptable. And then this allows private individuals who are neither noble nor members of the church to become wealthier. So they therefore patronize more artists

than bada bada boom. Everyone wakes up and is Roman again. Somehow, right? But, okay, you've already mentioned. You've already touched on the fact that people will say, well, Shakespeare is the Renaissance in England. I'm a huge fan of artists of the so-called Flemish Renaissance, right?

Like I love Van Eyk and people like that. And again, this is happening at a completely different time, you know, in the lowland. So when we're talking about the Renaissance, which you've described as both like a well-kept secret and a myth, which both things work, are we just talking about Italy here? I know. And definitely not because we're not even talking about all of Italy if we're talking about Italy. Because a lot of this patronage of art is by definition very elite and it's very competitive. And when we say patronage of art, we're also including music and architecture and library building and scholarship. And it's very expensive to have a giant stone statue. It's also very expensive to have a guy copy out the works of Plato in beautiful calligraphy on leather.

Which means that where the culture transmits is from wealth capital to wealth capital or court to court. And if something is a fashion in Florence, you're going to see it in Barcelona before you're going to see it in the smaller, more impoverished. towns that are four days ride from Florence. And it spreads very rapidly via the capitals of Europe that have reason to want to compete with each other. And there's a way I enjoy describing this. You know, we're almost going out of order because we're not doing the why they start doing this stuff. But once they start doing this stuff, you have the experience where you're on a horse and you're on your way to Rome. Let's say you're an envoy and you're on the way to the new pope has been elected and you have to go from France or Portugal and deliver the speech that always has to be

delivered that is a long-winded way of saying, I come from a mighty king of a powerful country. And he's so glad you're the Pope. Congratulations about being the Pope, except you do this for an hour. And you're on the way and you're stopping off in Florence because it's on the road. And you're sort of scornful of this city because it doesn't have any nobility because they cut all their heads off and put them on pikes. And so there's no actual people worthy of speaking to you in this city because if you're an envoy or at least the son of a count. And there's actually no one in this city of rank to speak with you. They're all merchant scum and they are equal and right with your servants. And also, they're all perverts because Florence has this reputation as Europe

sodomy capital. And the verb for anal sex in five different European languages is Florentine. And in several countries, you can be indicted for sodomy on the grounds of ever having visited Florence, right? So you're on your way to this Star Wars level pit of Skaman village. And And you don't even know who you're going to stay with because there's no families of worthy right to host you, but you're going to stay with your dad's banker because you know his name, right? And you go into the city. And then the city is full of these things that don't exist or can't exist, but here they are. And here are these giant mega, larger than life size bronze statues of a quality that looks

like they're just about to burst into life. And these things don't exist except as fragments that you've seen, you know, that was dug up in the background of your father's castle where there's Roman ruins. And so you have like a hand. But here is the whole thing and it's obviously brand new. What is this? This is so neat. You get as far as the house where you're staying and the banker greets you humbly at the door

and apologizes that his house is unworthy to host your excellency, right? And then he brings you in and then you go inside and you're suddenly surrounded by this luminous light as a different shape of architecture from anything you've ever seen, allows this brilliance in the courtyard and there are beautiful bronze statues. in the middle of it, some of which are clearly ancient, some of which are brand new and naked and extremely sexy and distracting. And around the edges of the courtyard are busts of all the Roman emperors in order. Above them are portraits of this dude and his family. And over in the corner are some guys in Robs speaking a language you've never heard before. And you're like, what language is

that? And he's like, oh, they're platinists. They're speaking in ancient Greek. And you're like, we don't have ancient Greek. We lost ancient Greek centuries ago. Only the Ottomans have ancient Greek. Oh, we have lots of ancient Greek here. Here's my grandson, Loren's. He's just composed a poem about the three parts of the soul in ancient Greek. Would you like to hear him recite it to you? And now there's a six-year-old boy reciting a poem to you in ancient Greek. And you're like, where am I? Did I walk through a time portal?

What is happening? None of this stuff can exist, which is the moment that your host, Cosimo de Medici turns to you and says, would your country like to make an alliance? And this is the one that you can say nut. You can say, actually, our country. has a population to orders of magnitude larger than yours. And we're planning to invade Italy, which is an extremely sackable area,

full of wealthy city-states with no friends and large piles of banker's gold, literally piled in the basements. And we're going to burn it down, and we're going to take your gold, and then we're going to go home. And all of these things will be gone. Or you can say, yes, let's make an alliance. Send my king, an architect, and a bronze smith, and a blatant, and a Greek tutor. And we're going to redo the royal court like this.

And then when the ambassador from England comes, he's going to feel like a barbarian, just like I feel right now. Right. And so there's instant adoption of this tool of competition via culture. If we talk about war as politics by other means or politics as war by other means, this is a substitute for war. We're competing with each other showing off. I can make a big bronze statue. I can probably also make a big bronze cannon. you don't want to fight me.

I have secret arts for Blato that can project your toll out of your body. You don't know what they can do because they can do impossible things. So it's rapidly adopted in every royal court and a major city that is anxious about power. And the rapid adoption is in places that are really in turmoil, like Hungary, which is the first place outside of Italy who started building these neoclassical buildings. They do it right away because they're at the middle of a five-way war with war, Lord's rampaging around. You know, so what do you want to do that?

You want to build the shiniest castle you can possibly build. So the people will look at it and be like, that guy seems like a king. He has a way shinier castle than my castle. I should not fight that guy. I should submit to that guy. He seems like an emperor. And so when we say Italian Renaissance, it's because they're exporting all of this stuff everywhere and exchanging all of this stuff and indeed importing it.

And the musicians and some artists are coming from north down into Italy, but being seen at places like Rome, where every ambassador has to go every time there's a boat and pokes are old, so they die once a decade. So once a decade, you have this giant showcase in Rome of, here's all the art and culture. Everyone sees it. Everyone exchanges it. And this is how things are spreading to the major capitals, even if they're on the other side of Europe, faster than they are to the medium-sized town that might be a few days journey away, but doesn't have somebody who has reason to invest in Plato because he's not trying to impress the English ambassador. I mean, I think that this is such an incredibly important point because two things can be true.

It can be true that incredibly wealthy and influential people get some cool art, which they absolutely do. But it can also be true. And what both you and I insist upon talking about is that this isn't like a trickle-down thing. You know, the average person in Italy, maybe they're going to see some of the statues that the Medici put up. Right? But it's not like they have their own bunch of frescoes. It's not like they get to learn ancient Greek. As printing gets going, they'll have like a woodblock print that's a copy of the famous painting. And this is going to get going in the late 1400s into the 1500s, woodblock printing being slightly before the real dissemination of Gutenberg's movable type press. But at least in Florence, which is the city I know best, a good way to describe it is the people,

who are making the art and literature are the exciting Hollywood celebrities of the day. And people are not reading the Neoplatonic treatise on soul projection, but they sure know that it was written and they're proud of it and they're excited about it. And they want to hear about these things. Right. As early as Petrarch and Boccaccio, both of them are constantly complaining that whenever they send anybody a letter, every town the letter travels through on the way there, people stop, open it, read it aloud to everybody in the entire town. and copy it and send it all over the place and that they'll both experience

this thing where they get replies to their letter to each other from third parties well before the letter reaches the other one because it takes like weeks for it to travel because everybody oh my God there's a letter from Petraarch to Boccacha we got to read it. We got to all read it aloud in the pub and they're literally

reading them aloud in the pub and these are the mega celebrities of the day and like there was a time that Brunelles and Donatello of course were a couple and there was a point that Donatello agreed to do a job for Brunelleschi's Arkhani Kiberti. And so, like, they almost broke up. And all Florence is just exploding with, oh my God, Donatello and Brutelowski might break up. This is the biggest celebrity gossip of the decade. You know, that they all care. Even if they

never see the thing that's being made or never hear the poem, this is the celebrity culture. And that kind of buy-in, the fact that there can be an announcement of somebody has discovered an extremely esoteric Greek texts that nobody in this entire city will ever look at. But we're very proud that it happened. In the same way that every year when the Nobel Prizes are announced, and they're like, some astrophysicist has discovered a thing about dark matter that you don't know how to understand because none of the vocabulary describing it is something that you've ever heard before.

But we're very proud of humanity having achieved this thing. And, you know, a place can be really proud if they're hometowns. boy, you know, gets that Nobel Prize for figuring out something about dark matter, whether it exists or doesn't. And so similarly, if someone says, you know, I have discovered an ancient text and I have translated it, the whole town is proud, right? In fact, the whole town is still proud, and you can still go to little towns in Italy and they're like, we had a guy once who knew Raphael, and he translated three pages of Greek, and here is his portrait, and it's the postcard that you get for are small Italian town still.

And no, none of us actually cares or understands the significance of the particular bit of Greek that he translated. But we're very proud of him. Far hundred years later. Okay. Yeah, you've touched on several things here, right? Because oftentimes when I talk about the Renaissance and it being this kind of, you know, myth or, you know, commercial or, you know, propaganda campaign as well, you know, a really

great person to shovel a lot of blame at is. of course, Francisco Petrarch, who have you bet on. And this is the guy that everyone says, oh, he's the father of humanism, and he's a poet. And he's also the one that kind of came up with this idea of like the dark age of the medieval period versus the golden age. It's Petrarch and then it's Leonardo Bruney, and these are my guys.

And I apologize on their behalf to the Middle Ages and all, medievalists. They all deserve an apology. These guys totally messed up everything. It is entirely their fault. And it's like, it's, oh, and it's very frustrating, right? Because Patriarch was in correspondence with my boy, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. Ah.

You know, in a regular, regular responses back and forth. And I always think that it's incredibly funny that you could say, oh, we're having the Renaissance down here in Italy. And I'm like, oh, yeah, like, as opposed to Prague where things sucked, right? Everyone looks around a 14th century Prague and they're like, man, this is really awful. Like one of the reasons why you have Petrarch kind of really advocating for this idea that there is some kind of very specific Italianate spirit of living. And Romaness, I would argue, is kind of driven by the fact that like, yo, I'm sorry, you probably want to be in Prague at the time and not on the Italian peninsula. You don't want to be on the Italian peninsula.

not during the, as Guido Ruggiero aptly puts it, the Italian 300 years more plus 200 years more war. Italy is so wealthy and so fragmented that except for the one bit of ancient Rome under the good gay emperors, Italy has never had extended peace in entire recorded history. It's just a constant war fest. And it's because the agriculture is so good that individual towns, can be so wealthy that they don't have to depend on larger cities next to them. And so you can have enormously granular countries, which therefore are capable of having more granular and constant war. Also, Italy is extremely sackable. You can land just about anywhere. It has this wonderful

approachable coastline. None of the cities will defend their neighbors because they all loathe each other. You can just land, sack something, and leave. This is the best place. If you're a young King and you want to make your name and like go have a small war and then come home with a bunch of trophies so that your people will like you. Italy is your basket for having a nice, convenient, you know, small war against somebody who has no allies. So no, you would never want to be in Italy, especially because being the trade and transit hub, right, and having all the ships and things moving in it also means the diseases are way worse and move faster and the life expectancy is lower. And the more what we're calling the beginnings of the Renaissance get going, meaning

banking is increasing, trade is increasing, prosperity is increasing, the economy is moving. People are moving more. The diseases are moving more also. Life expectancy falls rather than rises from what we can call medieval to what we can call Renaissance. And the numbers are all over the place. But, you know, a commonly medieval average life expectancy for Tuscany is about 35 in what we would call the Middle Ages. And by the time we're into the 1400s of fully on Renaissance, it's gone down to 18 as one of the lowest average life expectancies we've ever calculated, right? That is not good.

Because there's so much disease. And most of that increased mortality is kids between the age of three and 12 who have made it through the dangerous infancy, but are then dying of diseases in juvenile phase. Wow. And, you know, this is the thing, right, is that it's all well and good if you've got a really nice statue. But if like all of your children have just died, like I don't know, like, what would you rather have? And Petrarch agrees, right? But I think a really moving bit of Petrarch. Petrarch doesn't say it's a golden age now. Petrarch says it's terrible right now. We need a golden age to

save us. He doesn't say the Renaissance is great. He says, actually right now is the worst. It's terrible. We live in an age of dust and ashes. we need a giant transformative project to try to make the world better. And it's really interesting to me to look at how he thinks the arena that we have some power over is war, that the arena we have some power over is politics, that if people coordinate and learn, and especially if people imitate the ancient Romans, because he's looking at an Italy that is stabbing itself in the face

and saying, when wasn't Italy stabbing itself in the face? Ancient Rome. Well, if we do the things they did, maybe we will stop stabbing ourselves in the face. We think about the imitations of the art and the technology, but the focus is for him and for a lot of his immediate successors, the books. He wants to reconstruct the library that raised Cicero and the library that raised Seneca, because here are people who were patriots and who were willing to give their lives for the good of their country and their fellow citizens, instead of the Montague's and Capulets and Romeo and Juliet, who do not care how destructive to Verona all this nonsense is. They just want to bite their thumbs at each other and then stab each other in the street. Right. And the Prince of Verona is powerless to do anything about this bloodshed as it depopulates Verona, and that's Petrarch's world. But he thinks if we can raise the next generation, right, if the education

young Romeo and young Juliet had was this, maybe instead of dueling Tivolt, they would act like Cicero and think about the good of the state and put it first. And that's what he wants, right? And then he says, go find the books. Go, go assemble these libraries, go raise the next generations on this. And maybe they will rule better and therefore we will have less war. He doesn't think we can do anything about plague. He just addresses plague as the we are powerless in the face of it. I was rereading recently a bit from his Deeromedes Contra Fortuna, this book of remedies against fortune fair and foul. That is moral advice on how to console yourself and keep a calm soul. You know, are you grieving for your friend? Your friend is beyond the touch of pain now. You know,

you have your happy memories of your friend. Are you sick and in pain? Well, remember that the important part of yourself is your soul and the inside and not your body and that nothing that is truly valuable is being harmed by the illness. And he also has remedies against good fortune. You know, oh, are you proud that your book is being published? People are going to criticize it far away where you're not there to defend yourself but it's going to suck wow okay yeah it was like it was cut right to my soul later fine yeah petrarch there's a good modern edition of this called this four dialogues for scholars and that's on why you shouldn't be proud of having a graduate degree why you shouldn't be proud of your book being published why your book being translated into other

languages is bad and also why you shouldn't be proud of owning a lot of books because you're never going to finish reading all of them. And also, they're full of errors. And if you have countless books, they're full of countless errors and you're going to spend your whole life trying to fix that. I love Petroar. Okay, well, he's personally attacked me. So, yeah. He talks about the plague. And he's had all these consolations of everything. Is your country being conquered by tyrants? Here is how to cheer yourself. But when it's plague and he says, do you fear the plague? Good. You should. If what you feel is pity for the human condition, that is appropriate and there's little more we can do. And if you want consolation, he adds the only thing I can say is

why should you fear more to die in much company than you would fear to die alone? That is all he has. Wow. He has no hope on this front. But in fact, the libraries that end up being built, are the libraries that over the next centuries stimulate a bunch of questions, bring new texts in, cause revolutions in scientific thought and medical thought, and the challenging of the way medicine has been getting worse and worse in the Renaissance Perin, Renaissance medicine worse than medieval medicine. Yeah. And eventually leads to the germ theory of disease.

Farco Staro getting ideas from Lucretius, who was picked up by Paul Gio, who was a student taught by one of the friends. a petrarch, right? And this eventually doesn't have the peacemaking effect Petrarch expects, but it does eventually conquer the horseman of the apocalypse he thought couldn't be, right? And if we have vaccines now, this helped. And it's one of the steps along a long transformation. So I find it very moving to look at, he thought war was the easier one to solve. Right? We would say he was raw. We've made much bigger strides in disease than we have in war. But We had made strides in government that have less tyranny than it did in some ways.

And boy, have we made strides in the other arenas. And wouldn't have if there hadn't been a big push toward preserving, transforming, and especially multiplying knowledge so that we could have more people participating in science. And that is something that grows substantially and that Petrarch genuinely did influence. Well, so now you've hit on something here that I think is really important. Right. Because obviously there's the art thing that we talk about all the time with the Renaissance. But there is also this, you know, idea that we see this great flowering of an improvement very specifically in the world of science. But you've already, yeah, thank you. But no. I mean, my favorite synthesis of this is the biggest step forward in Renaissance medicine. Throughout the Middle Ages, one thing doctors would do is look at the color of your Europe. And this is diet. And this is diet. agnostically meaningful.

Color of someone's urine can tell you if there's blood in the urine. Urine is actually something that is one of few things that tells you genuine medical information that doctors would really look at. But in the Renaissance, they realize it's so much more sophisticated. Instead of looking at the color of the patient's urine, to take their horoscope at the time that they pee. And that will tell you lots more than actually looking at something that is in some way connected with the body.

The body sucks. So why would we pay attention to the body? The body doesn't mean anything. It's the position of Jupiter relative to Mars that is going to tell us what's wrong with a patient, right? So Redisos medicine just gets worse because they think they're getting smarter. And like, yes, this is in fact much more technical and much more sophisticated. It takes more know-how to take a man's horoscope to the same-y-ed-eat-eat-eat-eat-heed-eat-heat-heat-heat-heat-heat-heat-heat-heat-heat-heat-heat-heat-heat-a-pid-heat.

But it's not actually going to heal anybody. It's just going to make things worse. You know, and so here they are grinding up amethysts and feeding them to people with the effect of having ground glass go through your body. Like, no, it's more sophisticated and therefore deadly are even more like we'd kill you. Well, because that's the thing is, like sophistication in and of itself doesn't do anything, right? You know, it's like having, you know, a lot of the medicine that's, it's available, especially to the average person in the middle ages,

is just kind of like tried and tested stuff. Where they're like, I don't know, man, like when we boil willow bark and he got a headache and you drink that, your headache goes away. Yep. Don't know what to tell you. You know, that kind of a thing. And certainly, I mean, I guess the Renaissance guys are like, instead of that, feed the willow bark to a bird, take the bird's poop, do auspices by looking at the bird's intestines,

and then boil the bird poop and add lead. And then he's there. This is much more specific. And then somehow medieval people get blamed and call those stupid ones. And I'm like, come on, man, right? And also, I don't know, for me, I guess personal acts to grind here. I think this also, you know, it obscures the real scientific thinkers that existed in the medieval period as well. Like, I mean, like our boy, Roger Bacon, right?

Who is like a 13th century English guy and, you know, a Franciscan. And he's, making these huge leaps. Yeah. And, like, he's like, in very many ways responsible for kind of like the championing the scientific method in the first place. He's, you know, a mathematician. He's an alchemist, like, you know, brackets, obviously. Alchemist, by this, I mean, like, protochemist, not like I'm going to make gold, right? And he puts all of this intellectual groundwork into science and things like that.

And then everyone goes, oh, well, medieval people. they're really stupid. These bird end-trial guys, they were on to something. Well, and so often, and this is how the blurry, when is the Renaissance again, act of clear dates, a lot of the time people will just take events that happen at the same time and say, was this event good and modern feeling, then this is Renaissance. Was this event bad and medieval feeling? Then this was medieval.

That is, oh, that's my number one critique, right? is that we have this huge problem where if people like something, then it's Renaissance. And if they don't, then it's... Then it's not. Right? You know, you get this all the time with art, right? And I used to do this when I would teach the Renaissance,

I would bring in a bunch of like 13th century and 14th century art and a bunch of, you know, 16th century art. And I'd show it to my students and say, oh, can you explain to me why this is Renaissance? And I'd show them a bunch of medieval things. And they would be picking it all out. And they'd say, oh, look, and the Romanesque arches and, oh, like, and these bright colors and all of these things. And then you tell them that it's medieval.

Right. And they kind of can't, they can't even handle it, right? Because the way that we work, oh, you know, Boccaccio, even though he's working in the 14th century, he's Renaissance. You know, I have heard Dante Alighieri, a man so medieval that he was working in the 13th century. They're like, oh, no, that guy. Oh, my Italianist friends will definitely tell you he's the beginning of modern. Dante is the transition to mock. No, that man is medieval.

God damn it. He's very medieval. All these guys are medieval. So there's a fun thing that I do in the middle of, you know, inventing the Renaissance is a brick. I couldn't believe how long the editors let me make it. I kept suggesting, like, we could remove this part and put it somewhere else. This book is really long.

And they're like, yeah, but all of it is really great. Of course it is. And we don't want to cut anything. So it's a brick. But it's a fun brick, I promise. But there's a segment in it. the middle of it where I have these 15 mini biographies of different people who are Renaissance people. And a lot of them actually live through the same events. And so we witnessed the same

events multiple times, almost in a time loop from different points of view. And so here we are in the points of view of, you know, a secretary under the Borges in Roe, who's terrified of them, and then under the point of view of someone who's their enemy. And then from the point of view, Lucrezia Borgian, suddenly everyone who was bad in the last chapter is good. And everyone who was good in the last chapter is bad. But two of the women that I do biographies of are Alessandra Scala and Camilla Ruchelai. And these are women who are both Florentine and they're from the same kinds of very wealthy merchant families and they're exact contemporaries with each other. And Alessandra Scala gets celebrated as like Renaissance woman. She's the only woman we know composed poetry

in ancient Greek in the Renaissance. And she studied Greek and Latin with a heroic Renaissance of people like Poliziano and Giovanni Piccadela Mirandula, and she had this epic, or they make an epic romance in which she finally maruels. Kayla Marulo, who is a Greek refugee from Constantinople, who was also a crusader guide and also translated Greek and worked on Lucretius and so on. And so she's made into this, there are you piece after piece about her as the sort of ideal reticence woman and the representation of what women were like in the Renaissance. And what you point at to get to absurd sentences like when Burkhard in his foundational work on the Renaissance says,

quote, there was nothing like feminism in the Renaissance because the position of men and men was so equal that there was no need for each. Get out of town. I do not. And she's who gets pointed at. And so she gets to be a Renaissance one. But Camilla Ruchelai, who is her exact contemporary, and starts out the same kind of family. She makes a very good merchant marriage.

She's the matron of a very wealthy merchant family, but she gets excited by mysticism and by Savonarola, who is a very charismatic, intelligent intellectual critic of the church, reminiscent of Luther but earlier in a number of ways. And she persuades her husband that they should separate and become a monk and a nun, and she becomes a nun, and she's a visionary, and she's reporting her visions to others, and people are to take them seriously.

make decisions based on them. And even after Savonarola's burnt at stake, she's one of the preservers of his legacy and one of the people who continues to relay Savonarola visions to people. And every Renaissance historian loathes Camilla Ruchel all the appearances she has in books are like, she's a crazy woman, she's, you know, reactionary.

But she exerted more real political power in Renaissance foreigns than any woman who didn't have last name, Medici, because here are the leaders of the state actually listening to her guidance and advice and being influenced by the nuns that she leads to the degree that after Savonarola, when there's been another three changes over of government, and he's been burnt to the state long ago, but people who remember him are still around, and we get to the last Republic. The last republic is this brief moment in the 1530s when Florence had been ferociously conquered by some of the late Medici, but then has this moment of liberty.

We get to restore the Republic and have a last brief flowering of it during which we decide to, are we doing a nice modern Renaissance thing? Are we following the advice of Machiavelli? No, what we're doing is having another theocracy in which the senioria is being told to do, not by Savonarola, but by nuns who are hallucinating the ghost of Savonarola, telling them to do stuff. And they're like, you know, what we're going to do? We're going to have an election.

We're going to elect Jesus Christ King of Florence. That was, that was, they held a vote in the seat of government and the vote was 493 to seven. And I want to meet those seven dudes. They're the coolest dudes in the whole Renaissance. The seven dudes we voted against making Jesus be king. Like, shut out.

And this is way more medieval feeling, right, than all of the rest of it. And this is like, no Renaissance historians of Florence like want to acknowledge. that the last Republic ever existed. Like Nicholas Scott Baker, yes, he will acknowledge that this thing happened. People who work on Savonarola

remind us that it happened. That every history of the Renaissance is like, the Medici took over in 1512 and nothing happened in 1530. That was no Last Republic. Because nobody wants to admit that, you know, the bastion of Renaissance rationalism and art and humanism decided

to listen to the ghost of Savonarola telling nuns what to do in the last race king of Florence, a devote of 400. and maybe three to seven. This is medieval, right? It's against our ideas of progress, but it's also what's happening in the Renaissance. And so it's the cherry-picking that creates the Renaissance.

We're going to talk about Alessandro Scala. We're not going to talk about Camilla Ruchelai. That's what makes the Renaissance feel different from the Middle Ages, is that everything that we don't want in our Renaissance gets cherry-picked up. Well, and I think that one of the big things that's quite interesting as well, you know, when we do begin to talk about the Renaissance, you know, which then kind of like bleeds into the Reformation when you get to like the German lens and stuff as well, right?

Is that there's this dichotomy presented as well where the Middle Ages is like under the yoke of the church. Oh, and the papacy was also evil. And then, you know, now we're in this like great Protestant future. But actually, I would argue, for example, that one of the reasons you have this big break and you have the Reformation happen is because of the Renaissance,

because all of the Renaissance popes were such... They were so much worse than medieval poets. And they blew all the money on making a fancy new Renaissance Vatican, bank corrupted themselves, and that's when the selling of indulgence

has happened. It never happens in the medieval period, right? But in the Renaissance, whenever it was like, oh, I don't know, they might have some cash hanging around. Maybe you could just sell it and, like, in order to make this new Vatican

for some reason. And that just goes completely under the covers, you know? Yeah. Yeah. The popes get way worse. I sometimes talk about 6thus, the 4th, the man who broke Europe. Because it starts when, you know, popes are like, oh, I can be this bad.

Oh, wait, I can be slightly worse than that. Oh, wait. My predecessor did a bad thing. Now I could do that bad thing and I could do another bad thing. And there's just a very rapid transformation over the course of the last 30 years of the 1400s into the first decades of the first decades. the 1500s, where it goes from like moments when people thought Paul the second was the worst pope ever, right? And Paul the second was not a great pope. He was a Venetian pope. He'd been

elected because they were, you know, fractiously deadlocked and here he is. And he campaigned on the grounds of if you will vote for me, I will buy everybody who voted for me a palace in the helps. That's a pretty good campaign. What can I say? And then he becomes pope. And he's like, Yeah, but I don't want to live in the Vatican Palace because I'm from Venice and I'm going to build a giant Venetian palace in the middle of Rome and live there, even though it's stupidly expensive. And he spent the equivalent of $10 million on a giant diamond covered hat, which he wore around the house all the time. And also refused to see anybody who was never seen by daylight after he was elected. My students always conclude this man was a vampire. And he was supposed to have died either while sodomizing a page boy, eating a melon, or daringly attempting to eat a melon while sodomizing a page boy.

And everyone was like, this pope was a bad pope. We need to not have this bad pope. Let's do better than this. We're going to elect a better pope. We're going to pick the head of the Franciscans because the Franciscans are very biased. And they're into, you know, modesty and they're into poverty. and this guy has come from an unimportant family, you know, Francesco Delo Rovere,

and he's famous for traveling around Italy, giving learned lectures and not receiving any pay for them because he refuses to receive money because he's a Franciscan and he's not supposed to touch it. So we're going to vote for this guy. And also he's from Genoa, which is the enemy of Venice, and screw Venice because we hated the Venetian Pope, so we're going to elect his enemy on purpose.

And so they elect Sixthus the Fourth. And Sixthus the Fourth is like, I am the chosen battle pope. I will renew the Roman Empire by fire and blood. And I'm going to invade things. And everyone's like, what the heck happened? And the primary sources are like, he was possessed by a devil. He owned an ancient Roman demon ring.

And it possessed him in the asylum the explanation about this man happened. He's like, I'm going to make all of my kinsman cardinals, even the ones that are not really my kinsmen. And now I'm going to forcibly annex things all over Italy. And then excommunicate and invade stuff when they, say no. And you're like, what happened? And then the next pope is like, hey, pop's get to do that. I'm going to do all those things. And all the popes keep doing all the things that the last pope did, only worse. And this just rapidly turns from, hey, I can spend $10 million on a hat to we just had 30 years

of war. Let's have a bigger war. You know, it wasn't enough to invade Naples and Florence at the same time. I'm also going to attack Ferrara and try to deliberately trigger an Ottoman invasion, because I think it'll be badass to fight the Ottomans. And you're like, what are you doing? You're the Pope, man. Chill out. And this happens very rapidly just with these families are richer than they've been before. Banking is making things richer. You know, capitalism makes everything high stakes because it concentrates more power and movement in a few families. The cities are richer, the families were richer, but they loathe each other just as much as they loathed each

other before. And pretty soon people are waxing nostalgia for the Pope who merely wanted to wear rouge and eat melons, right? Because at least he didn't invade things. I mean, well, right, it's like, do you want Borja Popes? Because this is

how you get Borja Popes, right? This is exactly how you get Borja Popes. And, you know, of course there's all these stories that may or may not be apocry from this time in the papacy, but you know, there is like the very famous Feast of the Chestnuts rumor about the Borgia popes, which is that they're having incredible orgies, like, in the papal palace. And now you can come down on two sides of that. You can say, oh, well, people are just, you know, trying to slag a Borgia Pope off. Or you can come

down on the side of, which I do, which is like, yeah, but if you're making up these stories, it's because they're saying there is stuff going on in there. Yeah. That is completely untoward. And this is not a product. of the medieval period. These are conditions that are inherently modern that lead to this. And I mean, even when you get the good stuff, right,

because, you know, the big papal thing that everybody likes from the Renaissance, right, is the Sistine Chapel. And we all say, yay, Michelangelo, great job, love the Sistine Chapel. Well, that's commissioned by Julius II, like, the warrior pope. Right?

And he pays for that by essentially, like, invading all the territory around him, try to expand the papal states. And it's like these things don't come for free. Like Michelangelo laying on his back for two years. Yeah. A cheap, right? Well, and specifically with that one,

he also gets him by kidnapping Michelangelo and sending goons to drag him back to Rome when he tries to flee because the Pope is being so abusive. And then when Michelangelo actually makes it as far as Florence, threatening to besiege Florence to make Echolangelo go home. We have these letters between Michelangelo the senioria and he's like, please don't make me go to Rome and paint the folk the folk ceiling. And they're like, I'm sorry, Michelangelo.

I'm not going to have a war against Battle Pope, too, Electric Muglu just for one dude. You have to go back to Rome and do whatever this man says. And Michelangelo's like, you know, who's the worst stalker in the world when your stalker is the Pope? Because you really can't get away. And one of the reasons Julius made him fresco the ceiling, because Julia's knew perfectly well that Michelangelo, Lothed painted. He hated painting with a burning passion. He was a sculptor. He was fluent in rocks. He loves rocks. Michelangelo has a bumper sticker that says, I'd rather be sculpting. He does not want to do anything that is not having a chisel and hand going at a hunk of stone, right? And so since he tried to run away, Julius is like, you must paint. Two years of painting for you. That's your punishment. Trying to escape my uncontrollable ratful hand. Yeah. The popes were so bad. I mean, it's fun for us, right?

You know, the more colorful stories the popes give us, the more we enjoy them as historians from a great, great distance. But spiritual leader to reign of terror comes within one lifetime of just watching with horror as these things yet this bad, this fast. And they're like, wait a minute. In my grandfather's day, I think the worst things popes ever did was corruptly give church appointments to all of their nephews and embezzle a large amount of money to build a house. I don't think they sent professional assassins to go massacre the members of all the ruling families of every town in central Romania. That seemed to be a new sort of phase of papal action here. Well, I mean, okay, exactly, right? This is the point, right? And I think that there is this tendency.

It's not as out. It's private. They're inventing new things. It's brand new. This is a new mansion. Great progress. I mean, I guess that this is one of the things that we certainly battle with as historians is there is this way of thinking about history, which is that it is a story of progress, that things are constantly getting better all the time. And one of the big things that we use in order to tell this story is this idea of the Renaissance. If you study the period at all, you see that things become more politically unstable. medicine becomes worse. There are all of these things that are just inherently bad.

And for me, I don't really care if a couple of rich people have better art. That doesn't really make my life better. I would argue that conditions for women become worse. It's not really the thing that people want. And also, like, the art is great, but also because of the propaganda

about the Renaissance, more of the art survives than of medieval, because medieval wasn't fashionable in the 18th century in the 19th century, so people didn't protect it as much. So when we go to museums and we see, oh, there's all this shiny Renaissance art and like two medieval things. It's not because there were only two medieval things. It's because the other medieval things got destroyed or painted over while the Renaissance things got protected because of the propaganda.

Well, and I think that this too is an important point about the propaganda around art because there is also a tendency where anytime someone sees a piece of art that they think of as being bad, you know, in square quotes. They will call it medieval. The number of times I see people say, oh, like, look at this ugly medieval cat, and I'm like, that's clearly 17th century. Right? Like, that's clearly oil on... But what happens is that any time you get a weird picture, it stops being Renaissance and becomes medieval.

And similarly, if you get a good medieval painting, well, that's Renaissance. Or it presages the Renaissance, right? And the bad 17th century painting is that this is a holdover of medievalism still persisting in the thing, because you can always claim that somehow these two things are mingling when the definition of the line between medieval and Renaissance is supposed to be some internal

transformation in people's heads. And so you can always claim, well, that person is being medieval, even while the person that they're sitting at the dinner table with is being Renaissance. I mean, that's exactly it, isn't it? And I suppose it's also interesting because it posits, you know,

as a big part of this campaign to get the Italian art seen as the best. It also posits this idea that you absolutely have to have every painting has to have perspective. And if something doesn't have perspective, that it's bad. And one of the things I really love about some medieval paintings, for example, is that they're almost cubist. You know, when you collapse things and you can see lots of different things at the same time, and it's really, really beautiful. And it doesn't have to have these, you know, Renaissance, you know, a lot of miniatures, which

continue to look medieval longer than panel paintings do are just adorable with their wonderful perspectives. I was looking at a Renaissance era illuminated manuscript picture of Prince Enzo. This was a grandson of the Holyroen Emperor who was captured and kept in a cage in Bologna as the one great victory that Guelphs ever had directly against the emperors. And it's a wonderful illuminated manuscript painting of him sitting there with a little frown on his face in this cage. The perspective is gorgeous If you tried to do it in real proportions, it would never be nearly as delightful. I do think we have to be careful when we're talking about the made-upness of the Renaissance that we aren't giving the impression that there is no such thing as progress.

But that the progress is more long-term, and it's not you suddenly overnight take off your medieval outfit and put on your Renaissance hat, and then suddenly everyone's like, you has gone up by X amount. And people are striding around talking about perspective in the streets. One of the things that I think I try to show in many of the Renaissance, especially at the latter portions, is that there is real progress as a part of this. But it's over multi-centuries and it's longer than the period we think of as Renaissance. And over the course of the Middle Ages, there's a lot of very sophisticated thought about government

and about kingship and where the rights of government come from and about. virtue and how to live well and what makes for good rule, the Renaissance continues to address these questions and brings into those conversations a wider array of older texts because they do go get a bunch of things from Constantinople that weren't circulating in the Middle Ages. And so the number of voices weighing in on how does good government work increases a bit. And we have maybe three times as many different rival hypotheses going on because we're looking at a wider variety of things. As we continue these very medieval live questions. And Petrarch suggests maybe Roman government is the way to make stable government. People try imitating this. It explodes in your face in Borges. Machiavelli

watches it explode in your face in Borges and say, hmm, Petrarch's theory about how Roman morals would make for good government seems not to have worked. We need to examine this deeper. Let's invent political science. Let's re-examine history books in a new way. Let's think in a new mode about how to go about analyzing history as a casebook of examples of what worked and what didn't instead of as moral examples where we're trying to absorb the ethics of people. He proposes that. Everyone says, that's evil and terrible, and religious and atheistic, and you're a devil. And we're going to have Shakespeare depict you as the role model, the Richard III, wants to exceed when he can murder more people than you, you terrible person.

But also the idea of circulate. People agree that his critique makes sense from this. We get Bacon's thought and then John Locke and Thomas Hobbs. And from this, we get new interest in democracy. And from this, we eventually get enlightenment political thought. And we get modern democratic system. But we don't get them overnight or over one lifetime in the Renaissance. We get them over 700 years of teamwork in which medieval people are very aware that politics needs to improve and tyranny needs to be addressed. Renaissance people try something. It fails. The way in which it fails, yields useful data. Analysis of the way in which it fails adds the conversation. New data comes in. We eventually arise at modern democracy, which indeed is good at limiting tyranny in a number of

ways and does result in improvements in substantial ways over earlier stuff. And at the same time as a side effect, we get improvements in medicine and vaccination and science and astronomy and all of the other things. Growing out of the, hey, if we have the libraries of the ancients, can we do this? that if we don't try to look at the Renaissance as this century leapt forward, it's not a leap. It's cathedral thinking. It's we take 500 years to finish something. And we start and we build the foundation and then the next generation is going to build the next layer. And the first generation doesn't know what the top of it is going to look like yet.

But trusts that the next generations will work on it. And we recognize that we've been victorious when, you know, we finished the cathedral of Milan in 19, 96. Congratulations, Bon. They finished their cathedral in 1996. Well done. And congratulations, Petrarch, we found remedies if you fear the plague and are thinking of that, am I going to die in much company, and die alone. Guess what, Petra? We know how that plague worked. We can treat it with antibiotics. We know how later plagues work and when they surge up. We understand them, explain them, rapidly solve the human pain that is not knowing why a thing is happening, which is a major. major source of human pain. And then we address them with treatments and vaccines. And

Tretchen would weep seeing that and seeing that there is a long thread in which it is connected with what he did, tried to do, explosively failed. But the explosive failure itself was useful and informative. And that's natural to learning and natural science, right? All politics is a social science. And just like anything else, experiments that fail are how we get to the ones that succeed. Ada, I could talk to you about this for years, but I don't know how we are possibly going to top this inspirational message about the power of being in communion with our historical ancestors. So thank you so very much for being here. This has been an absolute treat as I do it would be. So thank you for having me. Once again, on behalf of Petrarch, if he were here, he would say he is very

sorry. He might not say it right away. We might not say it right away. We might. might have to yell at him for a while to get him to say it, but he would say it. So I will pass his apologies on. Also, Leonardo Brunies. He would probably even harder to get to apologize, actually, but we would work on it. That means a lot. Thanks, Ada. Thanks so much to Ada once again for joining me and thanking you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you were interested in this topic, you might want to check out my past episode about the Black Death, which Petrarch was no stranger to. Remember, you can can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly

and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com forward slash subscription. There are some fabulous films we've made for you to enjoy there, including my recent celebration of medieval winter alongside Matt Lewis. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcast, and tell all your friends and family that you, You've gone medieval. Otherwise, the wonderful Matt Lewis will be back on Friday for more medieval action, and I'll see you as always next Tuesday.

Until next time.