There’s no such thing as a ‘golden age,’ says Renaissance scholar

During the pandemic, Assoc. Prof. Ada Palmer kept hearing one question: If the Black Plague caused the Renaissance, will COVID cause a golden age?

It was “such a bad question,” she said, that the answer required a full blog post and then a 700+ page book. 

“Fundamentally, there are several problems with the question,” said Palmer, an associate professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Chicago. “One is the belief that the Renaissance was a golden age. One is the belief that the Middle Ages is a dark age. Another is the belief that dark ages and golden ages exist at all.”

Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance: The Myths of a Golden Age, released this month from the University of Chicago Press, takes a wry look at the mythmaking of an era with intentionally fuzzy boundaries through jokes, imagined text messages and in-depth historical analysis.

Palmer argues that many things we associate with the Renaissance—innovations in art, science, philosophy and politics—actually began gradually during the Middle Ages. Also, this myth of a golden age was carefully crafted by historians and has been used repeatedly throughout history to legitimize authority and political agendas. 

In the following edited Q&A, Palmer discusses why the Renaissance wasn’t such a great time to live in and how humans shape history to justify their own means. 

What about this question—whether COVID could cause a golden age—inspired you to write this book?

One of the funny things about working on the Renaissance is that it's an incredibly over-studied period. But the fact that it's so overstudied also means that it has so many errors and so much residue of when history was saturated with nationalism. 

A lot of the claims people make about history invoke the idea that there are dark ages and golden ages, and that there are falls and rises. Even if you're making that claim about America, you're basing that claim on Renaissance claims about the “Golden Age of Rome,” the “Dark Age of the Middle Ages.” So, we really need to re-examine the Renaissance and have a big public conversation about it to help people realize that there are no golden ages. There are no dark ages. And the idea that there are these cycles of history is itself fully propagandistic.

Where did this myth that the Renaissance is a golden age originally come from? 

It's something that the Renaissance is at fault for, at least in the beginning. This is right after the Black Death—around the 1380s or 1390s. These Renaissance guys, writers like Petrarch and Machiavelli, invented this idea that they were living in an age of ash and shadow. That if they worked hard, they could make a better world by imitating the golden age they knew about, which is ancient Rome.

At first, it's aspirational. Can we make a golden age by imitating the golden age we know about? The Renaissance doesn't think that it is a golden age; it thinks that it needs to try to make a golden age, or everyone will be doomed.

What are misconceptions people have about the Renaissance? 

We have the idea that there was the bad, dark, stagnant Middle Ages, where for 1000 years, everyone just read the Bible and sat in the mud. Then this magical excellent thing happened that started history and progress going again.

People say the golden age was caused by the arrival of some Factor X, that X arrived in the Renaissance to bring us out of darkness and superstition, X is therefore the defining factor of modernity. And you can then make any claim. For example, some studies suggested that one of the major factors that stimulated the Renaissance was the rise of modern banking. This is a really popular theory during the Cold War where you can compare communism to the bad, no good, communal Middle Ages, and argue that the birth of proto-capitalism caused the Renaissance.

Somebody else can come along and say: No, it wasn't banking. It was individualism; it was these philosophical leaps in moving God, religion and superstition out of the center of society. Therefore, our secularizing modern democratic society is the correct trajectory forward. And all the cultures that are unenlightened and superstitious are like the bad Middle Ages, therefore we get to colonize and destroy them.

So different articulations of what you say caused the Renaissance can be used to justify all sorts of things in the modern day.

Speaking of which, President Trump recently claimed that his economic plans would bring about a “Golden Age” in the U.S. How would you respond to that?

Knowing how to build a better world is hard; it’s easier to smash things. Trump and people around him love the myth of creative destruction—that you smash everything and wait for a brief dark age to pass, and then a golden age will grow on its own, like a forest regrowing after a fire. They don’t realize destruction doesn’t cause growth, it just sets it back; growth only comes from people working hard over a long time. Medieval and Renaissance people worked hard to improve their world, and nothing feels easy or inevitable about the good things that followed.

Sometimes we think about history as objective truth that appears in textbooks. But in the book, you mention specific figures who are writing histories for very specific reasons. How can we think differently about how history is written and taught? 

We have this idea that somehow objectivity is vital—that something is not a serious discipline unless it's presented with the erasure of the first-person narrator. But erasing the points of view has been one of the big things that has allowed the perpetuation of errors in history as a discipline. 

There are elements of Inventing the Renaissance that verge on memoir. It talks about the influence of my teachers on me; it talks about my relationships with my students. And it puts these alongside Petrarch’s influence on Machiavelli, because the process of inventing the Renaissance is something that begins in the 1380s and is still going on now. 

Why is it important for students, and the broader public, to learn about the Renaissance?

Every spring I do this papal election simulation. All the students go into Rockefeller Chapel in costume. Some of them are very mighty kings and cardinals and power brokers. Some of them are humble secretaries or the master of the kitchens or the papal choir director, who don't have very much power, but are in the room where it happens. They negotiate and make factions and treaties; they try to make peace and fail to make peace.

That's what understanding how history works can do. It can make us feel that the small amounts of power we have are real power, because everybody has small amounts of real power, and nobody has control. The Renaissance is a tool for teaching us what power we have right now.