Will I love Inventing the Renaissance?

We can’t all be lucky enough to take Ada Palmer’s history course in which the students restage the papal election of 1492, but we can all read her thought-provoking, witty, and thoroughly entertaining book. Filtered through the lens of Machiavelli and carefully chosen figures, famous and not, she explores the world in which they lived vs. the one imagined by future generations. Any book that features papal nicknames such as “Battle Pope One”, “Battle Pope Two”, and “King Log” is a winner to me.

This book is a triumph, not just as an accessible history of the Renaissance but a look at how our understanding of history is constructed. It interweaves learnings from multiple disciplines—political science, history, art, economics, archaeology, and so on, and also LARP and fishtank maintenance—to paint a brilliant and multifaceted portrait of the people, ideologies, and movements that built the Renaissance, and explains why the beginning, end, and significance of the era is so difficult to pin down.

It's also really emotional in a way that deserves celebration. Rarely does any nonfiction work make me openly weep and this did… show more.