Ada Palmer - "Inventing the Renaissance" - Gary K. Wolfe

Ada Palmer will discuss Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age. She will be joined in conversation by Gary K. Wolfe. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. 

At the Co-op.

RSVP Here (Please note that your RSVP is requested but not required)

About the Book

From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we’re told) heralds the dawning of a new world—a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we’ve told ourselves about Europe’s not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity.

Palmer’s Renaissance is altogether desperate. Troubled by centuries of conflict, she argues, Europe looked to a long-lost Roman Empire (even its education practices) to save them from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similarly nostalgic vision, only now they looked to the Renaissance and told a partial story. To right this wrong, Palmer offers fifteen provocative portraits of Renaissance men and women (some famous, some obscure) whose lives reveal a far more diverse, fragile, and wild Renaissance than its glowing reputation suggests.

About the Author

Ada Palmer is associate professor of early modern European history and the college at the University of Chicago. She is the author of many books, including Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance and the award-winning Terra Ignota series of novels.

About the Interlocutor

Gary K. Wolfe is an American science fiction editor, critic, and biographer. He is an emeritus Professor of Humanities in Roosevelt University's Evelyn T. Stone College of Professional Studies.