The idea of a golden Renaissance isn’t based on historical evidence, but was invented to serve different agendas, says historian Ada Palmer

The Renaissance was like the Wizard of Oz: great and terrible, and desperate for us not to look behind the curtain.

1506, Machiavelli received a letter from a friend, who had recently read the first part of his history of the decade they’d just lived through. The friend urged Machiavelli to write more. Why? Because, he said, without a good history of these days, future generations would never believe how bad it was, and would never forgive their generation for losing so much so quickly. This was the same decade in which Michelangelo carved the David and Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa, yet living through the years that laid these golden eggs felt like an apocalypse.

But isn’t the Renaissance supposed to be a golden age? And the origin of so much modernity is proud of? Individualism? The rational exploration of nature and our world? The glittering masterpieces we admire in museums? Yet, for those living through it, this famous era felt so desperate one could barely hope the future might forgive its failures—how can both be true at once?

The simplest answer is that there’s a well-kept secret about so-called golden ages: a time that left us golden treasures was not necessarily a golden time to be alive. A deep dive into Machiavelli’s life, and the lives of his friends, acquaintances, bosses, and enemies, will show us how the same circumstances nurtured both matchless art and deep despair, in an era well characterized by the old saying desperate times call for desperate measures. And the same deep dive will show, in the coming pages, how the golden and grim extremes of the Renaissance, and the later mythmaking of inventing the renaissance those extremes, in turn birthed larger myths which shape how we imagine history in general.

Today, ideas of dark ages and golden ages, of declines and falls, and of patterns and cycles of history saturate not only our textbooks and historical fiction, but the assumptions of op-eds, the boasts of politicians, the décor of theme parks, and the theories of economists. Yet the entire concept of a golden age is an invention, and not one made by historians based on historical evidence. The golden Renaissance, and its rhetorical partner, the supposed Dark Ages, are an invention—invented in a particular moment to serve a particular agenda, and recycled and retold in later moments to serve different agendas.

Over time they have become entrenched in our thinking, to the degree that even novelists inventing fantasy or science fiction worlds fill their imagined histories with cycles of golden ages and dark ages, rises and falls. And yet historians all agree, such imagined cycles have little connection with what evidence shows us about real history.

Claims about the specific achievements of the Renaissance are often contested. One book or thinker will celebrate the Renaissance as the birth of scientific thought, of the modern individual, of the humanist celebration of humanity, or of skepticism and the rational rejection of superstition.

But a different book from the same shelf will say: No! Scientific thought began with Roger Bacon in 1267, or didn’t flourish until Newton in the 1680s! The humanist celebration of humanity started with Socrates’ Know thyself, or didn’t start until Spinoza, Diderot, or Auguste Compte! True rejection of superstition goes back to the medieval scholasticism of William of Ockham, or had to wait for Nietzsche or Darwin!

For every claim about some unique achievement of the Renaissance, a bookshop will offer rival dates identifying the phenomenon centuries earlier, or claiming it did not truly manifest until centuries later.

Arguments over which era or individual deserves credit for an innovation are history’s version of another question: What is the beginning of a river? Is it the very first few drops of water entering the soil? The first spot where the water forms a tiny finger-wide channel? The first rivulet large enough for a leaf to float on it? The first part wide enough for a canoe? Or for a ferry boat?

Any of these definitions can make sense. Just so, the major features of the way we think usually have several dates that could be celebrated as beginnings: the first few mentions brief as water drops, the first ongoing dialog enough to flow, the first point that whole groups or movements start to talk about them, or the first point they became powerful enough to sweep the world on into major social change.

The Renaissance is associated with many powerful ideas—secularization, rational science, humanism, civic participation, innovation and open-mindedness—and, for most of them, the Renaissance was not the beginning but the broadening of a stream, whose first drops fell in antiquity, collecting into trickles in the Middle Ages, which swelled enough in the Renaissance to catch our eye with their glimmer and motion, yet still needed centuries more to become major currents guiding the barque of history. That is how the answer to ‘Didn’t X begin in the Renaissance?’ can so often be both yes and no.

This is an extract from Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer, published by Head of Zeus – out now. Buy a copy here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

Ada Palmer will be giving her perspective on the Renaissance on this week’s “A Drink with the Idler“, Thursday 6 March, 6-7pm. Free to subscribers – otherwise £7.50.

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