Books Seeds of Story Infernal Gravity and the Logic of Death Scenes: Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance A fascinating look at how societies manufacture the myth of a Golden Age By Ruthanna Emrys | Published on December 2, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there. This week, I cover Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age. It’s a book about why societies invent Golden Ages, what they get out of them, and the real changes that grow from these myths. It’s also full of really juicy gossip about the Medici family, explanations of what the hell Machiavelli was thinking, and descriptions of how badly it sucks to get your arts funding from oligarchs. What It’s About At the start of the COVID pandemic, people kept asking Ada Palmer—history scholar and science fiction author—whether this new plague would lead to a new Renaissance, just as the Black Death led to the original Renaissance. This book is her answer, and her explanation of all the levels on which that question is not even wrong. It starts with the fuzziness of what we mean by “the Renaissance.” Different historians list time periods that barely overlap, depending on what region they study and, more importantly, what development they consider the key shift toward modernity. Artistic flourishing? Modern-ish banking? The birth of nationalism? Each of these changes is its own myth, used to claim legitimacy for later powers in later ages: if the “X-factor” is banking and trade, then the capitalist side of the Cold War can claim the Renaissance and progress, and consign communism to the (imaginary) Dark Age that clouded men’s minds between antiquity and rebirth. This kind of story starts in Renaissance Italy itself, with Petrarch’s proposal that reclaiming and teaching the wisdom of antiquity could pull society out of its war-torn dystopian morass, and create a new golden age echoing Rome’s old security and unity. This had real impacts—we can read Homer again—but did not precisely achieve its goals: In 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. Machiavelli then goes on to create a theory of scientific realpolitik, of picking political strategies based on what appears to work rather than what sounds good in Cicero—strongly influenced by following Cesare Borgia as he commits what we’d now consider to be war crimes. But his goal was still the preservation and improvement of (Florentine) civilization. Per Palmer—biased herself, as she points out, like any other historian—the Renaissance X-factor is this kind of societal self-examination, and this ability to imagine that if we try new things we will get new, maybe even better, results. It’s doing this desperate experimentation in the middle of apocalypse. And it’s fuzzy at the edges: everything that happens in the Renaissance can be found during preceding centuries, but in this pressure cooker becomes “ever so much moreso.” I have a choice here between focusing on the book’s overarching thesis and the delightful details, and have mostly done the former. But in the course of Palmer’s cohesive argument, we get rich bios of thirteen “friends” who provide very different views of the Renaissance, ranging from mercenary Montesecco to composer Josquin des Prez to charismatic religious martyr Savonarola. We get an explanation of different types of ethics so that we understand what was so innovative about Machiavelli, and also so we understand why Shakespeare’s death scenes are so drawn-out. (Whether you go to heaven or hell depends on your final thoughts! You can’t know how to feel about someone’s death if you don’t get that monologue!) We get the history of how Florence convinced everyone that they were an irreplaceable center of art and culture, such that damaging the city would be a crime against all of humanity. (It worked—not only did it discourage invasions at the time, but they still have all their Renaissance architecture because no one bombed them during the world wars!) These are all intrinsic to the book’s overarching argument. They’re also necessary to understanding that argument, because they illustrate just how much of another country the past really is. History isn’t divided into the period before and after people took up recognizable modern beliefs. Ultimately, the great project of trying to make a better world can be effective. It won’t, however, always be effective in the way you’re aiming for. Petrarch wanted to end war, and that hasn’t happened. But the movements he started eventually led to vaccines and antibiotics, and the Black Death is now easily treatable. We can all hope that, in 500 years, someone will write about us as historical friends, and trace the unexpected changes resulting from our efforts. Buy the Book Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age Ada Palmer Buy Book Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age Ada Palmer Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Ada is a friend, and I got to read a partial draft of this book three years early as prep for an instance of the LARP described in Chapter 65. One usually worries about reviewers being biased by real-life friendship, but I suspect I am much more biased by having spent a few days playing Cardinal Giovanni Colonna. (Cesare Borgia’s not that bad! He convinced his father to give me partial control of Milan, allowing me to restore my family fortunes! I’ve just arranged a marriage alliance with Cardinal della Rovere, what do you mean he’ll be Battle Pope II?) Anyway, this book is very much like the delightful experience of hanging out with Ada at a con, talking about theories of societal change, or getting her personalized tour of the Uffizi, or, presumably, sitting in her classroom. It’s chatty, deep, thought-provoking, and an excellent illustration of Jo Walton’s assertion that history is the secret weapon of speculative fiction writers. It feels like a friend coming up to you at recess, hands cupped around some secret treat, going GUESS WHAT I FOUND IN THE WOODS??? Palmer has a mycologist’s enthusiasm for the brightly-colored fungus of the Renaissance, and it’s infectious. As someone who studies present-day interactions between story and society and technology, the history of these mythmaking processes fascinates me. It’s good to have a reminder of how long-lasting the effects can be, but also how far they evolve and adapt over time. There’s continuity between the people thinking it doesn’t have to be like this in 1500s Italy and 2000s America—but also vast differences in our understanding of how and why change can happen. The gap is both daunting and reassuring. The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories Patrons and Saints. One thing that gives Palmer’s students trouble, when trying to play realistic characters from 1492, is the patronage system. Renaissance European society is built around the idea that you have someone richer and more powerful than you who can call on your loyalty, and who provides you with financial and social support. They, in turn, have a patron, who has a patron, on up to emperors and popes. This is mirrored in the sacred Court of Heaven, where saints advocate for the groups of which they’re patrons, and beg favors of their own deific protectors. Your patron can speak for you in a court of law, and ask for mercy when you break the rules. The entire justice system is set up to allow and account for this, and to provide an earthly lesson about heavenly justice. The natural/official punishments are severe and terrible; you are meant to depend on patron intervention and mercy from the top in order to avoid them. If you aren’t embedded in this protective hierarchy, it’s only natural that you fall prey to the worst consequences. This is (1) the complete inverse of the logic by which modern democratic, secular justice systems are designed, and (2) clearly the model that some people have in mind when they demand harsh punishments in written law, but expect that police, judges, and juries will show mercy when there are mitigating circumstances, or mitigating in-group memberships. Or when they bribe officials, using methods that would have been perfectly legitimate and legal five centuries ago. It’s easy to take for granted assumptions that are very modern and local, and assume that they’ll apply in Middle-earth or on Alderaan. But many possible attitudes toward hierarchy and justice are dreamt of in our philosophy—and this diversity should show up in our worldbuilding as well. Faith as Physics, Physics as Faith. Renaissance Europe, and Italy in particular, is extremely Christian. However, breaking with modern assumptions, there’s no sense of conflict between Christianity and scholarship. Rather the reverse: it’s taken for granted that the Platonic Truth is out there, and that study will eventually produce common insights from all sources of truth. This assumption is extremely important, not because scholars expect to eventually come up with vaccines, but because correctly understanding the truth is necessary for eternal salvation. And the truth is expected to be physics. Heaven and Hell and Purgatory are specific places, the soul has mass based on its sin and virtue; you get where you’re going after death due to gravity. Thus those Shakespearian death scenes; the groundlings have to know which direction your soul is pointing at the moment of departure. This confidence in one cohesive truth, reconcilable across multiple types of inquiry, gave scholars confidence and occasionally surprising leeway, but also made certain types of truth harder to notice. If confident 20th-century scholars could measure non-existent differences in skull volume across ethnicities, imagine how long it took to admit that Aristotle wasn’t completely compatible with Plato—or that individual observations could be more accurate than Aristotle. As I mentioned in our last column, it’s hard to get more science fictional than imagining the implications of different physics—or of different assumptions about how those physics should be studied. New Growth: What Else to Read Palmer’s Terra Ignota series is science fiction that mines the big philosophical-physical questions of the Renaissance. It also has flying cars. Dante was a science fiction author by Renaissance standards, writing about Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory based on the best physics of the time. Other excellent readings of the (broadly-defined) era include Petrarch’s letters, and Machiavelli’s. Annalee Newitz’s Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind is a very different take on how societies produce, and change in response to, national mythologies. Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry’s The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe does an excellent job of deconstructing the myth of the Dark Ages, a necessary precursor for deconstructing the myth of the Renaissance. What are your favorite “the past is another country” historical facts? Are there old friends you’d like to introduce everyone to? Share in the comments.[end-mark] The post Infernal Gravity and the Logic of Death Scenes: Ada Palmer’s <i>Inventing the Renaissance</i> appeared first on Reactor.