I LOVE THIS BOOK. It is wildly expensive but worth every penny for its 757 pages. It is nonfiction that is humorous yet erudite. Believe it or not, there are truly some laugh-out-loud moments. Having lived in Italy, I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of Florence, Milan, and Rome and learned plenty that I’d never known before. Palmer essentially deconstructs the Renaissance and talks about why it had to be invented and how, rather than being a set timeframe, bits and pieces of it occurred over hundreds of years and the influence the Black Death and the Roman Empire had on the people, politics, and art of the time. The book is covers mainly the Italian Renaissance with detours into England, Switzerland, France, Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire.
Palmer looks at the lives of fifteen different Renaissance women and men and their roles in the making of the era. Some famous, some not-so-famous, these folks range from Alessandra Strozzi, Manetto Amanatini, Francesco Filelfo, Montesecco, Ippolita Maria Visconti Sforza, Josquin des Prez, Angelo Poliziano, Savonarola (of the Bonfire of the Vanities fame), Alessandra Scala, Raffaello Maffei il Volterrano, Lucrezia Borgia, Camilla Bartolini Rucellai, Michelangelo, Julia the Sibyl, Machiavelli (three parts on him), and finally, Pope Julius II.
This is fun reading on an absorbing topic.
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Inventing the Renaissance—The Myth of a Golden Age (University of Chicago Press, First Edition, March 28, 2025) is available through:
Your local independent book dealer | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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