Inventing the Renaissance The Myth of a Golden Age

"In this new book, the award-winning novelist and renowned historian Ada Palmer seeks to dismantle the myth of the Renaissance as a "golden age" compared to the plague- and war-ridden Middle Ages. For those who inhabited what we now think of as the Renaissance, Palmer argues, it was "a darker, grimmer age than the 'dark ages' that preceded it." The book, then, is as much about the real Renaissance…