Is the Renaissance a Myth?

Dr. Eleanor Janega reveals the darker side of the Renaissance with Dr. Ada Palmer, challenging the notion that it was a golden age, exposing it as a period of political instability, medical decline, and relentless power struggles. From the propaganda of the era to the destructive reign of Renaissance popes, Eleanor and Ada hugely enjoy dissecting the complexities and darker realities that belie the glorified stories of the Renaissance while contrasting it with the misconceived 'dark' Middle Ages. Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. Edited by Amy Haddow, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:53Eleanor Janega?

  Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga, and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here.

• 2:25Eleanor Janega?

  Before we start today's episode, a word of warning. We are talking about the Renaissance, and that means that we also make some references to sex acts that people may or may not have been indulging in at the time. You may want to have a listen and decide whether it's appropriate for the little listeners in your life before you launch in. It's historical gossip, you see. We couldn't help it.

• 2:49Eleanor Janega?

  In 1350, Francesco Petrac wrote a letter to his former confessor, Dionigi di Borgo San Sepulcro, telling him that he and his brother Gerardo had recently ascended Mont Ventoux in Provence. At the top, Petrac sat down and opened a copy of Augustine's Confessions, which he had hiked up the mountain with for some reason, to very conveniently stumble across the phrase, "And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not." This prompted Petrac upon descent to

• 3:32Eleanor Janega?

  consider the majesty of human thought, the nobility of the human spirit, and to dash off a letter in which he claimed to have been the first person since antiquity to have climbed a mountain just to see the view. And with that, so the old story goes, the Renaissance began.

• 3:50Eleanor Janega?

  I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga, and today on Gone Medieval from History Hit, I'm speaking with Dr. Ada Palmer, a historian of the Renaissance at the University of Chicago and the author of the amazing new book, Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age. We're talking about how stories like this belie a period of instability, medical decline, and fractious religious intrigue.

• 4:15Eleanor Janega?

  We'll examine why we tell these stories, who benefited from them, and how our desire to tell an easy story about a triumphant Golden Age occludes the amazing innovations of the early modern period, which unfurls slowly over a period of centuries. Ada, welcome to Gone Medieval.

• 4:35Speaker 04

  I've been looking forward for so long. This is a treat.

• 4:37Eleanor Janega?

  I am delighted because in very many ways, I think, you know, I'm not going to take credit for your amazing book, but I definitely at least egged you on.

• 4:49Speaker 04

  I was very shaped by the teamwork, especially the teamwork I saw you and David Perry and other medievalists doing during COVID, when we all got this flurry of questions from journalists about the Black Death suddenly. And you guys were doing such a great job on the medieval end. But I was like, where are my people doing the second half of this about the Renaissance? So it took a while to see the book out there. But I really think of this as the other half of the project you guys were doing. And I want to join the team.

• 5:18Eleanor Janega?

  I mean, I think that this is the way forward. And you have very perfectly set up one of the big problems that we have as historians, especially when, you know, you and I, I'm a historian, especially of the later medieval period, and you of the Renaissance. But this kind of implies what I would say is kind of a false dichotomy. Right? And it's really fostered by these super outmoded narratives we have that place the Renaissance as a sort of foil of the medieval period. And, you know, there's this really easy narrative that's, oh, the medieval period is very bad and dark. And that's when the Black Death happened. And then the Renaissance happens. And which was the thing

• 6:03Eleanor Janega?

  that was happening all the time during COVID, where everyone was like, well, don't worry, everyone, because after the Black Death, there's the Renaissance. And I was like-

• 6:11Speaker 04

  So that means if we sit back and do nothing, COVID will cause an economic boom, right? That's when these things work. Yes.

• 6:18Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, right, right.

• 6:21Eleanor Janega?

  So, I mean, you and I are both laughing, but I think that this is the easy assumption, right? It's like the medieval period is separated from the Renaissance. The Renaissance is this period of golden humanity in contrast to the darkness of the Middle Ages. But I think you and I can both agree that that is not true.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  And when people ask me what the Renaissance is, I begin by saying the Renaissance is propaganda. It's propaganda claiming that a particular bunch of stuff is somehow categorically different from a bunch of other stuff. And one of the ways you can really tell it's propaganda is if I go to campus and wander around my University of Chicago and knock on different people's doors in different departments and ask them, "When is Renaissance?" Their answers differ by more than 200 years. Because if I knock on my friends in the English department, they're like, "Renaissance is Shakespeare. The Renaissance gets going in 1500. And, you know, the really great stuff is coming to its peak in the latter eighteenth century." And if I go down the hall to where the Italianists are, knock on their door and ask, "When is the Renaissance?" They're

• 7:23Speaker 04

  like, "Oh, the Renaissance is, you know, Dante, and it's mostly dwindling down by 1400 already." And you're practically modern by the time you get to 1500. There's no difference between 1500 and 1900. And you don't get answers that contradictory unless you're talking about something that's very vague and very deliberately vague and very carefully not a real thing. You know, often when we're talking about where early modern gives way to modern, most people will say, "The French Revolution was a big line in European history. It changed a whole lot of things, from fashion to diplomacy." Everybody can kind of agree, the French Revolution definitely happened. There was a French Revolution. It's a thing. We can, it had a

• 8:05Speaker 04

  date. You know, we can put a line there. When you ask people, like, "What began the Renaissance?" "Oh, the spirit of humanity emerged from a slumbering something, something that occurred." And then we had Shakespeare. And you're like, hmm. And what date did this slumbering spirit of humanity emerge from under this shadow of superstition, right? Which is what gets you at how amorphous this construction is and is why, as you saw, only part of the book inventing the Renaissance is about the Renaissance. A big part of it is about the 18th century, the 19th century, the 20th century, and all of the reasons that this propaganda remains useful to everybody.

• 8:43Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, oh, absolutely. And I so, I mean, and this is the thing, right? Oftentimes, I will say, when people say what the Renaissance is, I say that it's an infomercial to sell art. And which I think works really well. And I mean, I think, OK, we've got the easy story, right? And the easy story is like, oh, one day in Italy, everybody woke up, they're like, wow, guys, I'm a humanist now. Part of what has happened is that, you know, there are all these varying city-states on the Italian peninsula, and they all hate each other, and they are

• 9:18Speaker 04

  Low with each other.

• 9:19Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, they do. They really do. And they are all dying to prove that they are better than each other. And a big way that they do that is by patronizing artists, which is great. Like, more of that. Can we bring that back as like a form of, you know, a form of competition? I would love that, right? And at the same time, we have some changes in the way that banking is done. So things like lending money at interest become more acceptable. And then this allows private individuals who are neither noble nor members of the church to become wealthier. So they therefore patronize more artists than bada

• 9:58Eleanor Janega?

  bing bada boom, everyone wakes up and is Roman again, somehow, right? But, OK, you've already mentioned, you've already touched on the fact that people will say, well, Shakespeare's the Renaissance in England. I'm a huge fan of artists of the so-called Flemish Renaissance, right? Like, I love Van Eyck and people like that. And again, this is happening at a completely different time, you know, in a little. And so when we're talking about the Renaissance, which you've described as both like a well-kept secret and a myth, which both things work, are we just talking about Italy here?

• 10:33Speaker 04

  I know. And definitely not, because we're not even talking about all of Italy if we're talking about Italy. Because a lot of this patronage of art is by definition very elite, and it's very competitive. And when we say patronage of art, we're also including music, and architecture, and library building, and scholarship. And it's very expensive to have a giant stone statue. It's also very expensive to have a guy copy out the works of Plato in beautiful calligraphy on leather. Which means that where the culture transmits is from wealth capital to wealth capital, or court to court. And if something is a fashion in Florence, you're gonna see it in Barcelona before you're gonna see it in the smaller, more impoverished towns that are four days' ride from Florence.

• 11:17Speaker 04

  And it spreads very rapidly via the capitals of Europe that have reason to wanna compete with each other. And there's a way I enjoy describing this. You know, we're almost going out of order because we're not doing the why they start doing this stuff. But once they start doing this stuff, you have the experience where you're on a horse and you're on your way to Rome. Let's say you're an envoy and you're on the way to the new pope has been elected and you have to go from France or Portugal and deliver the speech that always has to be delivered that is a long-winded way of saying, "I come from a mighty king of a powerful country, and he's so glad you're the pope. Congratulations on being the pope." Except you do this for an hour. And you're on the way and you're stopping off in Florence because it's on the road.

• 12:02Speaker 04

  And you're sort of scornful of this city because it doesn't have any nobility because they cut all their heads off and put them on pikes. And so there's no actual people worthy of speaking to you in this city. Because if you're an envoy, you're at least the son of a count. And there's actually no one in this city of rank to speak with you. They're all merchant scum and they're equal in rank with your servants. And also, they're all perverts because Florence has this reputation as Europe's sodomy capital. And the verb for anal sex in five different European languages is Florentine. And in several countries, you can be indicted for sodomy on the grounds of ever having visited Florence, right? So you're on your way to this Star Wars-level pit of scum and villainy. And you don't even know who you're gonna stay with

• 12:46Speaker 04

  because there's no families of worthy rank to host you. But you're gonna stay with your dad's banker because you know his name, right? And you go in this city. And then the city is full of these things that don't exist or can't exist, but here they are. And here are these giant... Mega, the larger-than-life-sized bronze statues of a quality that looks like they're just about to burst into life. And these things don't exist, except as fragments that you've seen, you know, that was dug up in the background of your father's castle, where there's Roman ruins. And so you have like a hand. But here is the whole thing, and it's obviously brand new. What is this? This is so neat. You get as far as the house where you're staying, and the banker greets you humbly at the door and apologizes that his house is unworthy to host your excellency, right? And then he brings you in, and then

• 13:28Speaker 04

  you go inside, and you're suddenly surrounded by this luminous light, as a different shape of architecture from anything you've ever seen, allows this brilliance in the courtyard, and there are beautiful bronze statues in the middle of it, some of which are clearly ancient, some of which are brand new, and naked, and extremely sexy and distracting. And around the edges of the courtyard are busts of all the Roman emperors and above them are portraits of this dude and his family. And over in the corner are some guys in robes, speaking a language you've never heard before. And you're like, what language is that? And he's like, oh, they're Platonists. They're speaking in ancient Greek. And you're like, we don't have ancient Greek. We lost ancient Greek centuries ago. Only the Ottomans have ancient Greek. Oh, we have lots of ancient Greek. And here's my grandson Lorenzo. He's

• 14:11Speaker 04

  just composed a poem about the three parts of the soul in ancient Greek. Would you like to hear him recite it to you? And now there's this six-year-old boy reciting a poem to you in ancient Greek. And you're like, where am I? Did I walk through a time portal? What is happening? None of this stuff can exist, which is the moment that your host, Cosimo de Medici, turns to you and says, would your country like to make an alliance with our country? Right? And this is the moment that you can say no. You can say, actually, our country has a population to orders of magnitude larger than yours, and we're planning to invade Italy, which is an extremely sackable area, full of wealthy city-states with no friends, and large piles of banker's gold, literally piled in the basements. We're going to burn it down, and we're going to take your gold, and then we're going to go home.

• 14:56Speaker 04

  And all of these things will be gone.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  Or you can say, yes, let's make an alliance. Send my king, an architect, and a bronze smith, and a blatantist, and a Greek tutor. And we're going to redo the royal court like this. And then when the ambassador from England comes, he's going to feel like a barbarian, just like I feel right now. Right? And so there's instant adoption of this tool of competition via culture. If we talk about war as politics by other means, or politics as war by other means, this is a substitute for war. We're competing with each other, showing off. I can make a big bronze statue. I could probably also make a big bronze cannon. You don't want to fight me.

• 15:41Speaker 04

  I have secret arts for Plato that can project your soul out of your body. You don't know what they can do, because they can do impossible things. So it's rapidly adopted in every royal court and major city that is anxious about power. And the rapid adoption is in places that are really in turmoil, like Hungary, which is the first place outside of Italy to start building these neoclassical buildings. They do it right away, because they're at the middle of a five-way war with warlords rampaging around. You know, so what do you want to do then? You want to build the shiniest castle you can possibly build? So the people will look at it and be like, that guy seems like a king. He has a way shinier castle than my castle. I should not fight that guy. I should submit to that guy. He seems like an emperor.

• 16:27Speaker 04

  And so when we say it's Italian Renaissance, it's because they're exporting all of this stuff everywhere and exchanging all of this stuff, and indeed importing it. And the musicians and some artists are coming from north down into Italy, but being seen at places like Rome, where every ambassador has to go every time there's a pope. And pokes are old, so they die once a decade. So once a decade, you have this giant showcase in Rome of, here's all the art in culture. Everyone sees it. Everyone exchanges it. And this is how things are spreading to the major capitals, even if they're on the other side of Europe, faster than they are to the medium-sized town that might be a few days' journey away, but doesn't have somebody who has reason to invest in Plato, because he's not trying to impress the English ambassador.

• 17:09Eleanor Janega?

  I mean, I think that this is such an incredibly important point, because two things can be true. It can be true that incredibly wealthy and influential people get some cool art. Which they absolutely do. But it can also be true, and what both you and I insist upon talking about is that this isn't like a trickle down thing. You know, the average person in Italy, maybe they're going to see some of the statues that the Medici put up, right? But it's not like they have their own bunch of frescoes. It's not like they get to learn ancient Greek.

• 17:45Speaker 04

  As printing gets going, they'll have like a woodblock print that's a copy of the famous painting. And this is going to get going in the late 1400s into the 1500s. Woodblock printing being slightly before the real dissemination of Gutenberg's movable type press. But at least in Florence, which is the city I know best, a good way to describe it is the people who are making the art and literature are the exciting Hollywood celebrities of the day. And people are not reading the Platonic treatise on soul projection, but they sure know that it was written and they're proud of it and they're excited about it and they want to hear about these things, right? As early as Petrarch and Boccaccio, both of them are constantly complaining that whenever

• 18:29Speaker 04

  they send anybody a letter, every town the letter travels through on the way there, people stop, open it, read it aloud to everybody in the entire town, copy it and send it all over the place. And that they'll both experience this thing where they get replies to their letter to each other from third parties, well before the letter reaches the other one, because it takes like weeks for it to travel, because everybody, oh my God, there's a letter from Petrarch to Boccaccio, we gotta read it, we gotta all read it, we gotta read it aloud in the pub. And they're literally reading them aloud in the pub. And these are the mega celebrities of the day. And like, there was a time that Brunelleschi and Donatello, of course, were a couple. And there was a point that Donatello agreed to do a job for Brunelleschi's arcani cuberti. And so like, they almost broke up.

• 19:13Speaker 04

  And all Florence is just exploding with, oh my God, Donatello and Brunelleschi might break up. This is the biggest celebrity gossip of the decade. You know, that they all care, even if they never see the thing that's being made or never hear the poem. This is the celebrity culture. And that kind of buy-in, the fact that there can be an announcement of somebody has discovered an extremely esoteric Greek text that nobody in this entire city will ever look at, but we're very proud that it happened. In the same way, that every year when the Nobel Prizes are announced and they're like, "Some astrophysicist has discovered a thing about dark matter that you don't know how to understand because none of the vocabulary for describing it is something that you've

• 19:56Speaker 04

  ever heard before, but we're very proud of humanity having achieved this thing." And, you know, a place can be really proud if their hometown boy, you know, gets that Nobel Prize for figuring out something about dark matter, whether it exists or doesn't. And so similarly, if someone says, you know, "I have discovered an ancient text and I have translated it," the whole town is proud, right? In fact, the whole town is still proud and you can still go to little towns in Italy and they're like, "We had a guy once who knew Raphael and he translated three pages of Greek and here is his portrait and it's the postcard that you get for our small Italian town still." And no, none of us actually cares or understands the significance of the particular bit of

• 20:39Speaker 04

  Greek that he translated, but we're very proud of him, 400 years later.

• 20:45Eleanor Janega?

  Okay, so yeah, you've touched on several things here, right? Because oftentimes when I talk about the Renaissance and it being this kind of, you know, myth or, you know, commercial or, you know, propaganda campaign as well. You know, a really great person to shovel a lot of blame at is, of course, Francesco Petrarch, who've you, who've you've met, that, you know? And this is the guy that everyone says, "Oh, he's the father of humanism and he's a poet." And he's also the one that kind of came up with this idea of like the Dark Age of the medieval period versus the Golden Age.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  It's Petrarch and then it's Leonardo Bruni and these are my guys and I apologize on their behalf to the Middle Ages and all medievalists. They all deserve an apology. These guys totally messed up everything. It is entirely their fault.

• 21:36Eleanor Janega?

  And it's like, it's, oh, and it's very frustrating, right? Because Petrarch was in correspondence with my boy, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. You know, in a regular, regular responses back and forth. And I always think that it's incredibly funny that you could say, "Oh, we're, we're having the Renaissance down here in Italy." And I'm like, "Oh yeah, like as opposed to Prague where things sucked, right? Everyone looks around at 14th century Prague and they're like, 'Man.'" This is really awful. But like, one of the reasons why you have Petrarch kind of really advocating for this idea that there is some kind of very specific Italianate spirit of living.

• 22:16Eleanor Janega?

  And Roman-ness, I would argue, is kind of driven by the fact that, like, yo, I'm sorry, you probably want to be in Prague at the time and not on the Italian peninsula.

• 22:28Speaker 04

  You don't want to be on the Italian peninsula. Not during the, as Guido Ruggiero aptly puts it, the Italian 300 years war plus 200 years more war.

• 22:40Speaker 04

  Italy is so wealthy and so fragmented that, except for the one bit of ancient Rome under the good Gay emperors, Italy has never had extended peace in entire recorded history. It's just a constant war fest. And it's because the agriculture is so good that individual towns can be so wealthy that they don't have to depend on larger cities next to them. And so you can have enormously granular countries, which therefore are capable of having more granular and constant war. Also, Italy is extremely sackable. You can land just about anywhere, has this wonderful approachable coastline. None of the cities will defend their neighbors because they all loathe each other.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  You can just land, sack something and leave. This is the best place. If you're a young king and you want to make your name and like, go have a small war and then come home with a bunch of trophies so that your people will like you. Italy is your basket for having a nice, convenient, you know, small war against somebody who has no allies. So, no, you would never want to be in Italy, especially because being the trade and transit hub, right? And having all the ships and things moving in and out also means the diseases are way worse and move faster and the life expectancy is lower. And the more what we're calling the beginnings of the Renaissance get going, meaning banking is increasing, trade is increasing, prosperity is increasing, the economy is moving, people are moving more, the diseases are moving more also.

• 24:08Speaker 04

  And life expectancy falls rather than rises from what we can call medieval to what we can call Renaissance. And the numbers are all over the place, but you know, a commonly medieval average life expectancy for Tuscany is about 35 in what we would call the Middle Ages. And by the time we're into the 1400s of fully on Renaissance, it's gone down to 18. As one of the lowest average life expectancies we've ever calculated.

• 24:33Eleanor Janega?

  Right. That is not good.

• 24:34Speaker 04

  Because there's so much disease and most of that increased mortality is kids between the age of three and 12 who have made it through the dangerous infancy, but are then dying of diseases in juvenile phase.

• 24:47Eleanor Janega?

  Wow. And you know, this is the thing, right? Is that it's all well and good if you've got a really nice statue, but if like all of your children have just died, like, I don't know. Like, what would you rather have?

• 24:58Speaker 04

  And Petrarch agrees, right? But I think a really moving bit of Petrarch. Petrarch doesn't say it's a golden age now. Petrarch says it's terrible right now. We need a golden age to save us. He doesn't say the Renaissance is great. He says, actually, right now is the worst. Uh, it's terrible. We live in an age of dust and ashes. We need a giant transformative project to try to make the world better. And it's really interesting to me to look at how he thinks the arena that we have some power over is war, that the arena we have some power over is politics.

• 25:39Speaker 04

  Uh, that if people coordinate and learn, and especially if people imitate the ancient Romans, because he's looking at a Italy that is stabbing itself in the face and saying, when wasn't Italy stabbing itself in the face? Ancient Rome. Well, if we do the things they did, maybe we will stop stabbing ourselves in the face. We think about the imitations of the art and the technology, but the focus is for him and for a lot of his immediate successors, the books. He wants to reconstruct the library that raised Cicero and the library that raised Seneca. Because here are people who were patriots and who were willing to give their lives for the good of their country and their fellow citizens.

• 26:19Speaker 04

  Instead of the Montagues and Capulets and Romeo and Juliet, who do not care how destructive to Verona all this nonsense is. They just want to bite their thumbs at each other and then stab each other in the street. Right? And, and the prince of Verona is powerless to do anything about this bloodshed as it depopulates Verona. And that's Petrarch's world. But he thinks if we can raise the next generation, right? If the education young Romeo and young Juliet had was this. Maybe instead of dueling Tybalt, they would act like Cicero and think about the good of the state and put it first. And that's what he wants, right? And then he says, go find the books. Go, go assemble these libraries, go raise the next generations on this.

• 27:03Speaker 04

  And maybe they will rule better and therefore we will have less war. He doesn't think we can do anything about plague. He just addresses plague as the, we are powerless in the face of it. I was rereading recently a bit from his De Remedies Contra Fortuna, this book of remedies against fortune fair and foul. That is moral advice on how to console yourself and keep a calm soul. You know, are you grieving for your friend? Your friend is beyond the touch of pain now. You know, you have your happy memories of your friend. Are you sick and in pain? Well, remember that the important part of yourself is your soul and the inside and not your body. And that nothing that is truly valuable is being harmed by the illness. And he also has remedies against good fortune.

• 27:48Speaker 04

  You know, oh, are you proud that your book is being published? People are going to criticize it far away where you're not there to defend yourself. It's going to suck.

• 27:56Eleanor Janega?

  Wow, okay. Yeah, it was like, it was cut right to my soul, Ada, fine.

• 28:02Speaker 04

  Yep. Petric, there's a good modern edition of this called his Four Dialogues for Scholars. And that's on why you shouldn't be proud of having a graduate degree, why you shouldn't be proud of your book being published, why your book being translated into other languages is bad, and also why you shouldn't be proud of owning a lot of books. Cause you're never going to finish reading all of them. And also they're full of errors. Uh, and if you have countless books, they're full of countless errors and you're going to spend your whole life trying to fix them. I love Petric.

• 28:30Eleanor Janega?

  Okay, well, he's personally attacked me, so yeah.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  He talks about plague. And he's had all these consolations for everything. Is your country being conquered by tyrants? Here is how to cheer yourself. But when it's plague and he says, do you fear the plague? Good, you should. Uh, if what you feel is pity for the human condition, that is appropriate and there's little more we can do. And if you want consolation, he adds, the only thing I can say is, why should you fear more? To die in much company than you would fear to die alone. All right, that is all he has. Wow. He has no hope on this front. But in fact, the libraries that end up being built are the libraries that over the next centuries

• 29:19Speaker 04

  stimulate a bunch of questions, bring new texts in, cause revolutions in scientific thought and medical thought, and the challenging of the way medicine has been getting worse and worse in the Renaissance, and Renaissance medicine worse than medieval medicine. Yeah.

• 29:35Speaker 04

  And eventually leads to the germ theory of disease. Farco Staro getting ideas from Lucretius, who was picked up by Paul Gio, who was a student taught by one of the friends of Petrarch, right? And this eventually doesn't have the peacemaking effect Petrarch expects, but it does eventually conquer the horsemen of the apocalypse he thought couldn't beat, right? And if we have vaccines now, this helped. And it's one of the steps along a long transformation. So I find it very moving to look at, he thought war was the easier one to solve. Right? And we would say he was wrong. We've made much bigger strides in disease than we have in war. But we had made strides in government that have less tyranny than it did in some ways.

• 30:21Speaker 04

  And boy, have we made strides in the other arenas and wouldn't have if there hadn't been a big push toward preserving, transforming, and especially multiplying knowledge so that we could have more people participating in science. And that is something that grows substantially and that Petrarch genuinely did influence.

• 30:53Matt Lewis?

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• 31:36Matt Lewis?

  You don't have to spend weeks searching or sitting on a waitlist. They partner with over 120 insurance plans and the average copay for Rula patients is just $15 a session. Rula helps you pick a therapist based on your goals, preferences and needs with appointments available as soon as tomorrow. Getting support shouldn't add another layer of stress. So let Rula lighten the mental load. If this time of year has you feeling less like yourself, talking to someone can be a good place to start. Visit rula.com/medieval to get started. That's R U L A dot com forward slash medieval.

• 32:19Matt Lewis?

  You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget.

• 32:26Speaker 01

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• 33:00Speaker 02

  Hey, it's Hannah Berner from Giggly Squad and the holidays are around the corner, which means I'm officially entering my hostess Hannah era with Arm & Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. You guys know I love cats and fostering, but when I'm hosting, I do not want my house smelling like cats. I want people focusing on my hosting skills. That's why I love Arm & Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. It delivers long-lasting odor control and forms compact clumps that make cleanup easy so that's one less thing I need to worry about when people come over. Be guest ready with Arm & Hammer Cat Litter. Find it now at Walmart or Amazon.

• 33:32Speaker 06

  As the saying goes, if these walls could talk. And on the Betwixt the Sheets podcast, we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors, and even more importantly, in the bedrooms of people all throughout history. Kings, queens, mistresses, servants, and everyone in between. We also get up close and personal with medieval aphrodisiacs, lethal Victorian makeup routines, and look at the scandalous lives of beloved children's authors. Nothing is off limits. In other words, it's the best bits of history with me, Dr. Kate Lister. Listen to Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, twice a week, every week, wherever it is that you get your podcasts.

• 34:16Speaker 06

  Brought to you by the award-winning network, History Hit.

• 34:32Eleanor Janega?

  Well, so no, you've hit on something here that I think is really important, right? Because obviously, there's the art thing that we talk about all the time with the Renaissance. But there is also this, you know, idea that we see this great flowering of an improvement, very specifically in the world of science. But you, you've already, yeah, thank you, but no.

• 34:55Speaker 04

  I mean, my, my favorite synthesis of this is the biggest step forward in Renaissance medicine. In throughout the Middle Ages, one thing doctors would do is look at the color of your urine. And this is diagnostically meaningful. Color of someone's urine can tell you if there's blood in the urine. If the, you know, urine is actually something that is one of few things that tells you genuine medical information that doctors would really look at. But in the Renaissance, they realized it's so much more sophisticated. Instead of looking at the color of the patient's urine, to take their horoscope at the time that they pee.

• 35:31Speaker 04

  And that will tell you lots more than actually looking at something that is in some way connected with the body. The body sucks. So why would we pay attention to the body? The body doesn't mean anything. It's the position of Jupiter relative to Mars that is going to tell us that there's wrong with our patient, right? So Renaissance medicine just gets worse because they think they're getting smarter. And like, yes, this is in fact, much more technical and much more sophisticated. It takes more know-how to take a man's horoscope, his diabetes, eating feed than to look at his pee and say, huh, your pee is pink. I think there's something wrong with you. But it's not actually going to heal anybody. It's just going to make things worse. You know, and so here they

• 36:13Speaker 04

  are grinding up amethysts and feeding them to people with the effect of having ground glass go through your body. Like, no, it's more sophisticated and therefore deadly or even more likely to kill you.

• 36:25Eleanor Janega?

  Well, because that's the thing is sophistication in and of itself doesn't do anything, right? You know, it's like having, you know, a lot of the medicine that's available, especially to the average person in the Middle Ages, is just kind of like tried and tested stuff. Where they're like, I don't know, man, like when we boil willow bark and you got a headache and you drink that, your headache goes away.

• 36:50Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 36:51Eleanor Janega?

  Don't know what to tell you, you know, kind of a thing. And certainly, I mean, I guess one of the-

• 36:56Speaker 04

  The Renaissance guys are like, instead of that, feed the willow bark to a bird. Take the bird's poop, do auspices by looking at the bird's intestines, and then boil the bird poop and add lead and then eat that. This is much more sophisticated.

• 37:10Eleanor Janega?

  And, and then somehow medieval people get blamed and called the stupid ones. And I'm like, come on, man. Right? Like, and also, I don't know, for me, I guess, personal acts to grind here. I think this also, you know, it obscures the real scientific thinkers that existed in the medieval period as well. Like, I mean, like our boy Roger Bacon, right? Who is like, you know, a 13th century English guy and, you know, a Franciscan and he-

• 37:37Speaker 04

  And making these huge leaps.

• 37:39Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah. And like, he's like- In very many ways, responsible for kind of like the championing the scientific method in the first place. He's, you know, a mathematician. He's an alchemist, like, you know, brackets, obviously, alchemist. By this, I mean like protochemist, not like, I'm gonna make gold, right? And he puts all of this intellectual groundwork into science and things like that. And then everyone goes, oh, well, medieval people, they're really stupid. These burn and trial guys, they were on the side.

• 38:12Speaker 04

  Well, and so often, and this is how the blurry, when is the Renaissance again? Act of clear dates. A lot of the time, people will just take events that happen at the same time and say, was this event good and modern feeling? Then this is Renaissance. Was this event bad and medieval feeling? Then this was medieval.

• 38:30Eleanor Janega?

  That is, oh, that's my number one critique, right? Is that we have this huge problem where if people like something.

• 38:37Speaker 04

  Right.

• 38:38Eleanor Janega?

  Then it's Renaissance.

• 38:39Speaker 04

  And if they don't, then it's not, right?

• 38:43Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah. You know, you get this all the time with art, right? And I used to do this when I would teach the Renaissance, I would bring in a bunch of like 13th century and 14th century art and a bunch of, you know, 16th century art. And I'd show it to my students and say, oh, can you explain to me why this is Renaissance? And I'd show them a bunch of medieval things and they would be picking it all out and they'd say, oh, look, and the Roman-esque arches and oh, like, and then these bright colors and all of these things. And then you tell them that it's medieval.

• 39:10Speaker 04

  Right.

• 39:10Eleanor Janega?

  And they kind of can't, they can't even handle it, right? Because the way that we work, oh, you know, Boccaccio, even though he's working in the 14th century, he's Renaissance. You know, I have heard Dante Alighieri, a man so medieval that he was working in the 13th century. They're like, oh, no, that guy.

• 39:29Speaker 04

  Oh, my, my Italianist friends will definitely tell you he's the beginning of modern. Dante is the transition to modern.

• 39:35Eleanor Janega?

  No, that man is medieval. God damn it.

• 39:38Speaker 04

  He's very medieval. All these guys are medieval. So there's a fun thing that I do in the middle of, you know, inventing the Renaissance is a brick. I couldn't believe how long the editors let me make it. I kept suggesting like, we could remove this part and put it somewhere else. This book is really long. And they're like, yeah, but all of it is really great.

• 39:56Eleanor Janega?

  Of course it is.

• 39:59Speaker 04

  So it's a brick, but it's a fun brick, I promise. But there's this segment in the middle of it where I have 15, these 15 mini biographies of different people who are Renaissance people. And a lot of them actually lived through the same events. And so we witnessed the same events multiple times, almost in a time loop, but from different points of view. And so here we are in the point of view of, you know, a secretary under the Borgias in Rome who's terrified of them. And then under the point of view of someone who's their enemy. And then from the point of view of Lucretia Borjan. Suddenly everyone who was bad in the last chapter is good and everyone who was good in the last chapter is bad. But two of the women that I do biographies of are Alessandra Scala and Camilla Ruchelai. And these are women who are both Florentine and they're from the same kinds of very wealthy

• 40:42Speaker 04

  merchant families and they're exact contemporaries with each other. And Alessandra Scala gets celebrated as like Renaissance woman. She's the only woman we know composed poetry in ancient Greek in the Renaissance. And she studied Greek and Latin with heroic Renaissance people like Poliziano and Giovanni Piccadella Mirandola. And she had this epic, or they make it epic, romance in which she finally marries Kayla Marullo, who is a Greek refugee from Constantinople, who was also a Crusader knight and also translated Greek and worked on Lucretius and so on. And so she's made into this, there are you, piece after piece about her as the sort of ideal Renaissance woman and the representation of what women were like in the Renaissance.

• 41:27Speaker 04

  And what you point at to get to absurd sentences like when Burckhardt, in his foundational work on the Renaissance says, quote, "There was nothing like feminism in the Renaissance because the position of men and women was so equal that there was no need for..."

• 41:42Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, come on, get, get out of town.

• 41:47Eleanor Janega?

  I do not.

• 41:49Speaker 04

  And and she's who who gets pointed at. And so she gets to be a Renaissance woman. But Camilla Ruchelai, who is her exact contemporary and starts out the same kind of family. She makes a very good merchant marriage. She's the matron of a very wealthy merchant family. But she gets excited by mysticism and by Savonarola, who's a very charismatic, intelligent, intellectual critic of the church reminiscent of Luther, but earlier in a number of ways. And she persuades her husband that they should separate and become a monk and a nun. And she becomes a nun and she's a visionary and she's reporting her visions to others. And people are to take them seriously, make decisions based on them. And even after Savonarola is burnt at the stake, she's one of the preservers of his legacy

• 42:33Speaker 04

  and one of the people who continues to relay Savonarola and visions to people. And every Renaissance historian loathes Camilla Ruchelai. All the appearances she has in books are like, she's a crazy woman. She's, you know, reactionary. She's, but she exerted more real political power in Renaissance Florence than any woman who didn't have the last name Medici. Because here are the leaders of the state actually listening to her guidance and advice and being influenced by the nuns that she leads to the degree that after Savonarola, when there's been another three changes over of government, and he's been burnt at the stake long ago, but people who remember him are still around.

• 43:16Speaker 04

  And we get to the Last Republic. The Last Republic is this brief moment in the 1530s when Florence had been ferociously conquered by some of the late Medici, but then has this moment of liberty. We get to restore the Republic and have a last brief flowering of it during which we decide to, are we doing a nice modern Renaissance thing? Are we following the advice of Machiavelli? No, what we're doing is having another theocracy in which the Signoria is being told to do, not by Savonarola, but by nuns who are hallucinating the ghost of Savonarola, telling them to do stuff. And they're like, you know, what are we going to do? We're going to have an election. We're going to elect Jesus Christ, King of Florence. That was, that was, there was, they held a vote in the seat of government and the vote was 493 to 7.

• 44:02Speaker 04

  And I want to meet those seven dudes. They're the coolest dudes in the whole Renaissance. The seven dudes who voted against making Jesus. Shut out. Doing this. And this is way more medieval feeling, right? Than all of the rest of it. And this is like, no Renaissance historians of Florence like want to acknowledge that the last republic ever existed. Like Nicholas Scott Baker, yes, he will acknowledge that this thing happened. People who work on Savonarola, like remind us that it happened. But every history of the Renaissance is like, the Medici took over in 1512 and nothing happened in 1530. There was no last republic. Because nobody wants to admit that, you know, the bastion of Renaissance rationalism

• 44:43Speaker 04

  and art and humanism decided to listen to the ghost of Savonarola telling nuns what to do in the last grace king of Florence and devote a 493 to seven. This is medieval, right? It's against our ideas of progress, but it's also what's happening in the Renaissance. And so it's the cherry picking that creates the Renaissance. The, we're going to talk about Alessandro Scala, we're not going to talk about Camilla Rucelli. That's what makes the Renaissance feel different from the Middle Ages, is that everything that we don't want in our Renaissance gets cherry picked up.

• 45:26Speaker 01

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• 46:00Speaker 02

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• 46:46Eleanor Janega?

  Well, and I think that one of the big things that's quite interesting as well, you know, when we do begin to talk about the Renaissance, you know, which then kind of like bleeds into the Reformation when you get to like the German lands and stuff as well, right? Is that there's this dichotomy presented as well, where the Middle Ages is like under the yoke of the church. Oh, and the papacy was also evil. And then, you know, now we're in this like great Protestant future. But actually, I would argue, for example, that one of the reasons you have this big break and you have the Reformation happen is because of the Renaissance, because all of the Renaissance popes were such... They were so much worse than medieval popes.

• 47:27Eleanor Janega?

  And they blew all the money on making a fancy new Renaissance Vatican, bankrupted themselves, and that's when the selling of indulgences happened, which never happens in the medieval period, right? But in the Renaissance, when it was like, oh, I don't know, they might have some cash hanging around. Maybe you could just sell it and like in order to make this new Vatican for some reason. And that just goes completely under the covers, you know?

• 47:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, the popes get way worse. I sometimes talk about Sixtus the Fourth, the man who broke Europe.

• 48:00Speaker 04

  Because it starts when, you know, popes are like, oh, I can be this bad. Oh, wait, I can be slightly worse than that. Oh, wait, that my predecessor did a bad thing. Now I could do that bad thing and I could do another bad thing. And there's a just a very rapid transpiration over the course of the last 30 years of the 1400s into the first decades of the 1500s, where it goes from like moments when people thought Paul II was the worst pope ever, right? And Paul II was not a great pope. He was a Venetian pope. He'd been elected because they were, you know, fractiously deadlocked. And here he is. And he campaigned on the grounds of if you vote for me, I will buy everybody who voted for me a palace in the Alps.

• 48:45Eleanor Janega?

  That's a pretty good, that's a pretty good campaign. What can I say?

• 48:47Speaker 04

  And then he, he becomes pope and he's like, yeah, but I don't want to live in the Vatican palace because I'm from Venice and I miss Venice. So I'm going to build a giant Venetian palace in the middle of Rome and live there, even though it's stupidly expensive. And he spent the equivalent of $10 million on a giant diamond covered hat, which he wore around the house all the time. And

• 49:09Eleanor Janega?

  All right, well, go off, King.

• 49:11Speaker 04

  And also refused to see anybody was never seen by daylight after he was elected. My students always conclude this man was a vampire. And he was supposed to have died either while sodomizing a page boy, eating a melon, or daringly attempting to eat a melon while sodomizing a page boy. And everyone was like, this pope was a bad pope. We need to not have this bad pope. Let's do better than this. We're, we're going to elect a better pope. We're going to pick the head of the Franciscans because the Franciscans are very pious and they're into, you know, modesty and they're into poverty. And this guy has come from an unimportant family, you know, Francesco Della Rovere.

• 49:51Speaker 04

  And he's famous for traveling around Italy, giving learned lectures and not receiving any pay for them because he refuses to receive money because he's a Franciscan and he's not supposed to touch it. So we're going to vote for this guy. And also he's from Genoa, which is the enemy of Venice and screw Venice because we hated the Venetian pope. So we're going to elect his enemy on purpose. And so they elect Sixus the fourth, and Sixus the fourth is like, I am the chosen battle pope. I will renew the Roman empire by fire and blood, and I'm going to invade things. And everyone's like, what the heck happened? And the primary sources are like, he was possessed by a devil. He owned an ancient Roman demon ring and it possessed him. And the Silmy explanation about this man happened.

• 50:32Speaker 04

  He's like, I'm gonna make all of my kinsmen gardeners, even the ones that are not really my kinsmen. And now I'm going to forcibly annex things all over Italy and then excommunicate and invade stuff when they say no. And you're like, what happened? And then the next pope is like, hey, popes get to do that? I'm gonna do all those things. And all the popes keep doing all the things that the last pope did, only worse. And this just rapidly turns from, hey, I could spend 10 million dollars on a hat to, we just had 30 years of war, let's have a bigger war. You know, it wasn't enough to invade Naples and Florence at the same time. I'm also gonna attack Ferrara and try to deliberately trigger an Ottoman invasion. Because I think it'd be badass to fight the Ottomans.

• 51:17Speaker 04

  And you're like, what are you doing? You're the pope, man, chill out. And this happens very rapidly, just with, these families are richer than they've been before. Banking is making things richer. You know, capitalism makes everything high stakes because it concentrates more power and movement in a few families. The cities are richer, the families are richer, but they loathe each other just as much as they loathed each other before. And pretty soon people are waxing nostalgia for the pope who merely wanted to wear rouge and eat melons, right? Uh, because at least he didn't invade things.

• 51:54Eleanor Janega?

  Okay, well, right, it's like, do you want Borja popes? Because this is how you get Borja popes, right?

• 51:58Speaker 04

  This is exactly how you get Borja popes.

• 52:00Eleanor Janega?

  And you know, of course, there's all these stories that may or may not be apocryphal from this time in the papacy. But you know, there, there is like the very famous Feast of the Chestnuts rumor about the, the Borja popes, which is that they're like having incredible orgies, like in the papal palace. And now you can come down on two sides of that. You can say, oh, well, people are just, you know, trying to slag a Borja pope off. Or you can come down on the side of, which I do, which is like, yeah, but if you're making up these stories, it's because they're saying there is stuff going on in there. That is completely untoward. And this is not a product of the medieval period. These are conditions that are inherently modern that lead to this. And I mean, even when you get

• 52:44Eleanor Janega?

  the good stuff, right? Because, you know, the big papal thing that everybody likes from the Renaissance, right, is the Sistine Chapel. And we all say, yay, Michelangelo, great job. Love the Sistine Chapel.

• 52:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:54Eleanor Janega?

  That's commissioned by Julius II, like, AKA the warrior pope.

• 52:58Speaker 04

  Battle Pope II electric googulu Julius.

• 53:00Eleanor Janega?

  And he pays for that by essentially like invading all the territory around him, tried to expand the papal states. And it's like, these things don't come for free. Like, Michelangelo laying on his back for two years.

• 53:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:13Eleanor Janega?

  A cheap, right?

• 53:14Speaker 04

  Well, and specifically with that, what he also gets it by kidnapping Michelangelo and sending goons to drag him back to Rome when he tries to flee because the Pope is being so abusive. And then when Michelangelo actually makes it as far as Florence, threatening to besiege Florence to make Michelangelo go home. We have these letters between Michelangelo and the Signore. And he's like, please don't make me go to Rome and paint the Pope's ceiling. And they're like, I'm sorry, Michelangelo, I'm not gonna have a war against Battle Pope II electric googulu just for one dude. You have to go back to Rome and do whatever this man says. And Michelangelo's like, you know, who's the worst stalker in the world? But your stalker is the Pope.

• 53:57Speaker 04

  Because you really can't get away. And one of the reasons Julius made him fresco the ceiling, because Julius knew perfectly well that Michelangelo loathed painting. He hated painting with a burning passion. He was a sculptor. He was fluent in rocks. He loves rocks. Michelangelo has a bumper sticker that says, I'd rather be sculpting. He does not want to do anything that is not having a chisel in hand going at a hunk of stone, right? And so since he tried to run away, Julius is like, you must paint. Two years of painting for you. That's your punishment. Trying to escape my uncontrollable wrathful hand. Yeah.

• 54:34Speaker 04

  The popes were so bad. I mean, it's fun for us, right? You know, the more colorful stories the popes give us, the more we enjoy them as historians from a great, great distance. But spiritual leader to reign of terror comes within one lifetime of just watching with horror as these things get this bad this fast. And they're like, wait a minute, you know, in my grandfather's day, I think the worst things popes ever did was corruptly give church appointments to all of their nephews and embezzle a large amount of money to build a house. I don't think they sent professional assassins to go massacre the members of all the ruling families of every town in central Romania.

• 55:19Speaker 04

  That seemed to be a new sort of phase of papal action here.

• 55:24Eleanor Janega?

  Well, I mean, okay, exactly, right? This is the point, right? And I think that there is this tendency.

• 55:30Speaker 04

  It's progress. It's progress. They're inventing new things.

• 55:32Eleanor Janega?

  It's brand new.

• 55:34Speaker 04

  This is a new invention. Great progress.

• 55:38Eleanor Janega?

  But I guess that this is one of the things that we certainly battle with as historians is there is this way of thinking about history, which is that it is a story of progress, that things are constantly getting better all the time. And one of the big things that we use in order to tell this story is this idea of the Renaissance. If you study the period at all, you see that things become more politically unstable. Medicine becomes worse. You know, there are all of these things that are just inherently bad. And you know, for me, I don't really care if a couple of rich people have better art, right? Like, that doesn't really make my life better. I would argue that conditions for women become worse. You know, it's not really the thing that people want, but.

• 56:23Speaker 04

  And also, like, the art is great, but also because of the propaganda about the Renaissance, more of the art survives than of medieval. Because medieval wasn't fashionable in the 18th century and the 19th century. So people didn't protect it as much. So when we go to museums and we see, oh, there's all this shiny Renaissance art and like, two medieval things. It's not because there were only two medieval things. It's because the other medieval things got destroyed or painted over while the Renaissance things got protected because of the propaganda.

• 56:52Eleanor Janega?

  Well, and I think that this too is an important point about the propaganda around art, because there is also a tendency where anytime someone sees a piece of art that they think of as being "bad," you know, in square quotes, and they will call it medieval. The number of times I see people say, "Oh, like, look at this ugly medieval cat." And I'm like, "That's clearly 17th century."

• 57:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:12Eleanor Janega?

  Right? Like, that's clearly oil on... But what happens is that anytime you get a weird picture, it stops being Renaissance and becomes medieval. And similarly, if you get a good medieval painting, well, that's Renaissance.

• 57:24Speaker 04

  Or it presages the Renaissance, right? And the bad 17th century paintings, this is a holdover of medievalism still persisting in the thing. Because you can always claim that somehow these two things are mingling, when the definition of the line between medieval and Renaissance is supposed to be some internal transformation in people's heads. And so you can always claim, "Well, that person is being medieval, even while the person that they're sitting at the dinner table with is being Renaissance."

• 57:54Eleanor Janega?

  I mean, that's exactly it, isn't it? And I suppose it's also interesting, because it posits, you know, as a big part of this campaign to get Italian art seen as the best. It also posits this idea that you absolutely have to have every... Painting has to have perspective, and if something doesn't have perspective, then it's bad. And one of the things I really love about some medieval paintings, for example, is that they're almost cubist, you know? When you collapse things, and you can see lots of different things at the same time, and it's really, really beautiful. And it doesn't have to have these, you know, Renaissance...

• 58:32Speaker 04

  You know, a lot of miniatures, which continue to look medieval longer than panel paintings do, are just adorable with their wonderful perspectives. I was looking at a Renaissance-era illuminated manuscript picture of Prince Enzo. This was a grandson of the Holy Land Emperor, who was captured and kept in a cage in Bologna as the one great victory the Guelphs ever had directly against the emperors. And it's a wonderful illuminated manuscript painting of him sitting there with a little frown on his face in this cage, and the perspective is gorgeous. If you tried to do it in real proportions, it would never be nearly as delightful. I do think we have to be careful when we're talking about the made upness of the Renaissance,

• 59:15Speaker 04

  that we aren't giving the impression that there is no such thing as progress.

• 59:19Eleanor Janega?

  Hmm.

• 59:20Speaker 04

  But that the progress is more long term. And it's not you suddenly overnight take off your medieval outfit and put on your Renaissance hat. And then suddenly everyone's like, you has gone up by X amount. And people are striding around talking about perspective in the streets. One of the things that I think I try to show in in Mending the Renaissance, especially the latter portions, is that there is real progress as a part of this. But it's over multi centuries and it's longer than the period we think of as Renaissance. Right. And over the course of the Middle Ages, there's a lot of very sophisticated thought about government and about kingship and where the rights of government come from and about virtue

• 1:00:03Speaker 04

  and how to live well and what makes for good rule. The Renaissance continues to address these questions and brings into those conversations a wider array of older texts, because they do go get a bunch of things from Constantinople that weren't circulating in the Middle Ages. And so the number of voices weighing in on how does government work increases a bit. And we have maybe three times as many different rival hypotheses going on because we're looking at a wider variety of things as we continue these very medieval live questions. And Petrarch suggests maybe Roman government is the way to make stable government. People try imitating this. It explodes in your face in Borgias. Machiavelli watches it explode in your face in Borgias and say, hmm,

• 1:00:47Speaker 04

  Petrarch's theory about how Roman morals would make for good government seems not to have worked. We need to examine this deeper. Let's invent political science. Let's reexamine history books in a new way. Let's think in a new mode about how to go about analyzing history as a casebook of examples of what worked and what didn't, instead of as moral examples where we're trying to absorb the ethics of people. He proposes that. Everyone says, that's evil and terrible and religious and atheistic and you're a devil. And we're going to have Shakespeare depict you as. The role model, the Richard III wants to exceed when he can murder more people than you, you terrible person. But also the ideas circulate. People agree that his critique makes sense.

• 1:01:29Speaker 04

  From this, we get Bacon's thought, and then John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. And from this, we get new interest in democracy. And from this, we eventually get Enlightenment political thought, and we get modern democratic system. But we don't get them overnight or over one lifetime in the Renaissance. We get them over 700 years of teamwork in which medieval people are very aware that politics needs to improve and tyranny needs to be addressed. Renaissance people try something. It fails. The way in which it fails yields useful data. Analysis of the way in which it fails adds the conversation. New data comes in. We eventually arise at modern democracy, which indeed is good at limiting tyranny

• 1:02:13Speaker 04

  in a number of ways and does result in improvements in substantial ways over earlier stuff. And at the same time, as a side effect, we get improvements in medicine and vaccination and science and astronomy and all of the other things growing out of the, hey, if we have the libraries of the ancients, can we do this? That if we don't try to look at the Renaissance as this century leapt forward, it's not a leap, it's cathedral thinking. It's we take 500 years to finish something. And we start and we build the foundation, and then the next generation is going to build the next layer. And the first generation doesn't know what the top of it is going to look like yet, but trusts that the next generations will work on it. And we recognize that we've been victorious when, you know, we finished the cathedral

• 1:02:58Speaker 04

  of Milan in 1996. Congratulations, Milan, they finished their cathedral in 1996. Well done. And congratulations, Petrarch, we found remedies if you fear the plague and are thinking about, am I going to die in much company and die alone? Guess what, Petrarch? We know how that plague worked. We can treat it with antibiotics. We know how later plagues work and when they surge up. We understand them, explain them, rapidly solve the human pain that is not knowing why a thing is happening. Which is a major source of human pain. And then we address them with treatments and vaccines. And Petrarch would weep seeing that and seeing that there is a long thread in which

• 1:03:38Speaker 04

  it is connected with what he did, tried to do explosively failed. But the explosive failure itself was useful and informative. And that's natural to learning and natural to science, right? All politics is a social science. And just like anything else, experiments that fail are how we get to the ones that succeed.

• 1:03:58Eleanor Janega?

  Ada, I could talk to you about this for years, but I don't know how we are possibly going to top this inspirational message about the power of being in communion with our historical ancestors. So thank you so very much for being here.

• 1:04:15Speaker 04

  This has been an absolute treat, as I knew it would be. So thank you for having me once again on behalf of Petrarch. If he were here, he would say he is very sorry.

• 1:04:26Speaker 04

  He might not say it right away. We might have to yell at him for a while to get him to say it, but he would say it. So I will pass his apologies on. Also, Leonardo Brini's, he would probably even harder to get to apologize, actually, but we would work on it.

• 1:04:39Eleanor Janega?

  That means a lot. Thanks.

• 1:04:42Eleanor Janega?

  Thanks so much to Ada once again for joining me and thanking you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you are interested in this topic, you might want to check out my past episode about the Black Death, which Petrarch was no stranger to. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com/subscription. There are some fabulous films we've made for you to enjoy there, including my recent celebration of Medieval Winter alongside Matt Lewis.

• 1:05:19Eleanor Janega?

  You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts, and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Otherwise, the wonderful Matt Lewis will be back on Friday for more medieval action, and I'll see you, as always, next Tuesday. Until next time.