Ada Palmer

@ada-palmer · 37 positions · On ppll ↗

Historian of the Renaissance and of the history of ideas, professor at the University of Chicago, author of Inventing the Renaissance and the Terra Ignota novels, and writer of the blog Ex Urbe.

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What Ada Palmer says most about

Europe 7

Machiavelli is the first person in the European tradition to suggest that two political parties could exist in one state at once and be viable.
The papacy made Italy uniquely unstable in Europe, because each new pope inherited a precedent that he could overthrow any government he liked.

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government 4

A government only has legitimacy through long continuity, and once that thread is cut one regime change reliably becomes five.
The papacy made Italy uniquely unstable in Europe, because each new pope inherited a precedent that he could overthrow any government he liked.

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censorship 2

Every new information technology is followed by a wave of censorship in which a great many books are banned at once.
Copyright was born out of the Inquisition: the record of having passed censorship was the first document proving an exclusive right to print.

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demographics 2

Life expectancy in Italy fell sharply between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from 35-40 years in the 1200s to 18 by 1500.
A mass death does not by itself produce a boom afterwards: expecting a pandemic to renew an economy on its own misreads what followed the Black Death.

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