I just read Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance, a popular history book that reads like a 600-page blogpost, but takes its intellectual project very seriously. I genuinely recommend it to anyone interested in Renaissance history, or the history of ideas and ideology. I also recommend it to anyone who's interested in fictional worldbuilding, because it explains many pre-modern ideas about rank, status, patronage and governance in very vivid and useful ways.
I also recommend this book to fans of Palmer's Terra Ignota series, even if they aren't particularly interested in Renaissance history, because it contains some crucial clues as to What The Hell Is Wrong With Ada Palmer and Why Is She Like That. Of course we already knew she researched and taught Renaissance history, but this book shows the unexpected extent to which Renaissance Italy Is What's Wrong With Her, even more than the seventeenth-eighteenth century thinkers she's more likely to quote in-story. It's there in the way she writes characters, the way she writes ideology, the way she writes ideologues. And it's especially there in the way she writes political conflict: complex, confusing, convoluted, intellectual yet illogical, everybody knows there's a war coming but nobody knows who will be fighting who, and half the warring parties will end up switching sides anyway. She's drawing on the Italian wars at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which were that chaotic, with approximately five hundred "sides." All the uproar around succession, and people trying to control the succession of Mason and Anonymous comes from papal election drama. Almost everything around JEDD Mason comes down to the Renaissance question of whether you can improve the world by giving a good education to its future despot. Inventing the Renaissance made me want to reread Terra Ignota, just to get more parallels clear in my head.
