a deep-dive into a golden age

Palmer is willing to eliminate the gilding of academic and popular culture to the Renaissance, to destroy the legend of a heroic and transformative golden age and the legend of the jumpboard for modernity. Bir A secret about the Golden Age: a time that left us gold treasures, it was not a golden time to be alive. A deep diving into the life of Machiavelli and the lives of his friends, acquaintances, bosses and enemies, both unique art and deep despair, both matching art and deep despair. Desperate times require desperate measures. “

The real subject is the “invention” and mythologist of the Renaissance – the creation of the “Golden Age .. But I’m not sure that Palmer didn’t create a straw knight for an easy Just. Pragmatism and realism of Machiavelli, who developed in response to the chaos of the age, eliminates the game.

Even the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, who invented the heroic Renaissance more or less, was not ready to deny the egg -like reality of the 15th century: “intrigues, weapons, leagues, corruption and betrayal constitute Italy’s external past.”

The idea of a gilded age, which is dark and cruel at the same time, is not new. We see Palmer’s balanced perspective that Mary Shelley claims as a necessary correction to the construction of the Golden Age legend. ValpergaIt was adjusted at the Italian Renaissance and written 200 years ago. “Lombardy and Tuscany, which were in the most civilized regions of Italy, exhibited surprising examples of human genius, but they were also fragmented by internal groups and were almost destroyed by the anger of civil wars.

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Invented Renaissance According to the author’s puff, the entertainment-essence is a self-reference type. The authoritarian sound, the marriage of the scholar and the impressive, is clearly an attempt to reach a young undergraduate audience. However, this is a highly difficult performance that it appears to try to clamoring for cool.

Palmer’s sincerely wrote his research to read Latin poet Lucretius during the Renaissance, I am centered on a certain thread. Lucretius is the author of didactic 1st century BC Epicurean poetry On the nature of the universeand Stephen Greenblatt’s star SWERVE. An international best -selling and Pulitzer winner, Swerve’s The central claim is that the rediscovery of Lucretius in Florence in the early 15th century beat the Renaissance and created modernity.

In the archives, Palmer found that Lucretius adapted to the radical atheist and materialist message of the early Renaissance readers, and that the instructions that move after rejecting Orthodoxy are not a homogeneous step towards a secular future, but a homogeneous step in any radiant ”. These took various forms: Platonism, hermetism, mysticism.

It is a real public service to replace the Lucretian Revolution legend and the Renaissance intellectual culture with a more nuanced reading. And that’s quite cool.