Ada Palmer
Ada Palmer is a cultural and intellectual historian focusing on the long-durée evolution of ideas and mentalities. She specializes in the early modern period, particularly the Italian Renaissance and Humanist reception of classical philosophy, but she also works on ancient, medieval and modern intellectual history. She completed her doctorate at Harvard University in Spring of 2009 with a dissertation entitled Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance.
Dr. Palmer has taught courses on the Renaissance and Reformation, on Intellectual History and the Craft of History Writing. During her graduate career at Harvard, she taught sections in general surveys of Western Civilization, in specialized courses on ancient, medieval, early modern and modern intellectual history, in a course on the Italian Renaissance, and in the History Department’s tutorial program. Her research interests include Renaissance Neoplatonism and Neostoicism, history of atheism, skepticism and freethought, history of atomism, history of the scientific method, history of the book, history of republicanism and history of epistemology and moral philosophy, and the history of censorship and information control, especially during information revolutions.
Dr. Palmer has taught courses on the Renaissance and Reformation, on Intellectual History and the Craft of History Writing. During her graduate career at Harvard, she taught sections in general surveys of Western Civilization, in specialized courses on ancient, medieval, early modern and modern intellectual history, in a course on the Italian Renaissance, and in the History Department’s tutorial program. Her research interests include Renaissance Neoplatonism and Neostoicism, history of atheism, skepticism and freethought, history of atomism, history of the scientific method, history of the book, history of republicanism and history of epistemology and moral philosophy, and the history of censorship and information control, especially during information revolutions.
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Papers by Ada Palmer
Lavish courts and towering cathedrals, entrancing polyphony and artistic masterpieces—our romantic fascination with the cultural glories of the Renaissance often eclipses one truth, recorded by astute observers of the age like Machiavelli, that the era of Michelangelo and Shakespeare was, in many ways, darker than the “Dark Ages” which it named. The crisis had one unexpected cause: progress. In the centuries after the Black Death, regenerating urban centers, strengthened by financial and commercial innovations, linked together to form an increasingly interconnected society. Soon English wool was no longer finished at home, but exported to be woven and dyed in Italy, before shipping out across trade networks which stretched from the Middle East deep into the New World. As Europe’s economic bloodstream strengthened, the same increase in trade and travel which let architects build with exotic stones and scholars recover lost Greek manuscripts also transmitted diseases with unprecedented speed and ferocity, while larger, denser cities were richer breeding grounds for violence and contagions. As wealth and power flowed in, richer states could muster larger armies, innovative weaponry could shed blood on unprecedented scales, and ambitious rising families could hire mercenary forces larger than frail governments could withstand.
This exhibit lays out a geography of tensions which characterized Renaissance cities. In a world still plagued by war and banditry, urban growth often meant density rather than sprawl, as swelling populations jockeyed for space within the circumferences of city walls. Crowded and wealthy cities became powder kegs, where old tensions—between men and women, citizens and visitors, Jews and Christians, religious and secular authorities—channeled the energies of new and increasing factional and economic rivalries. Shakespeare’s Montagues and Capulets are fictitious portraits of a real phenomenon, and such violence often brought ruin on far more than just two houses. Great families led patronage networks which included hundreds of clients from many social classes, whose members lived only a few blocks from their bitterest rivals, and whose alliances reached out into dozens of neighboring towns and distant capitals. Tensions between cities intensified as well, as economic interdependence, and printing which enabled the faster circulation of news and new ideas, allowed tumults in one city to bring strife to another half a world away. Cities competed to frame their political identities, claiming uniqueness and dignity by presenting themselves as the capitals of particular trades, religious movements, cultural innovations, or political structures, often in ways which contradicted or challenged the identities claimed by their neighbors. Art, literature, and culture recorded these tensions and also relieved them, offering bloodless avenues for competition, and a release valve for the pressure that kept Renaissance cities forever on the edge of violence.
Ada Palmer explores how Renaissance readers, such as Machiavelli, Pomponio Leto, and Montaigne, actually ingested and disseminated Lucretius, and the ways in which this process of reading transformed modern thought. She uncovers humanist methods for reconciling Christian and pagan philosophy, and shows how ideas of emergent order and natural selection, so critical to our current thinking, became embedded in Europe’s intellectual landscape before the seventeenth century. This heterodoxy circulated in the premodern world, not on the conspicuous stage of heresy trials and public debates, but in the classrooms, libraries, studies, and bookshops where quiet scholars met the ideas that would soon transform the world. Renaissance readers—poets and philologists rather than scientists—were moved by their love of classical literature to rescue Lucretius and his atomism, thereby injecting his theories back into scientific discourse.
Palmer employs a new quantitative method for analyzing marginalia in manuscripts and printed books, exposing how changes in scholarly reading practices over the course of the sixteenth century gradually expanded Europe’s receptivity to radical science, setting the stage for the scientific revolution.
Sections of the Project include eight public dialogues among the participants, October 5 through November 20, 2018, filmed and available online, a related museum exhibit “History of Censorship and Information Control from the Inquisition to the Internet” in the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Library, open September 17 through December 14, 2018, and a printed catalog of the exhibit, funded through Kickstarter.