August 2011 to present · 141 posts · 15-year span · wildly uneven (31 posts in 2011, one in 2023, eleven in 2025 — almost all short book-launch pieces — most recent 29 Jan 2026) · one clear pivot around 2014, from a Florence food-and-travel blog into a venue for long historical essays · This page is based on 11 posts read in full, from August 2011 to January 2024, five of them from the earliest period
In the 1200s, average life expectancy in Italy was 35 to 40. By 1500 — solidly the Renaissance, Leonardo at work on the Mona Lisa — it was 18.
Cut in half. Walking from the "dark" Middle Ages into the "golden" Renaissance cost Italians half their lives.
Ada Palmer says that whenever she gives those numbers live, the stunned silence is followed by a guy objecting that they're deceptive, she's including infant mortality. She has the answer ready: the medieval 35 includes it too, so the drop is just as real. Fine — exclude everyone who died before 12, and you go from 54 down to 45–48. Still a drop. And infant mortality in the first year held steady at 28% on both sides. What fell out was children who survived their first year and then died between two and twelve, of newly circulating diseases.
Why did it drop? Her answer is one word:
Why did life expectancy drop? Counter-intuitively the answer is, largely, progress.Black Death, COVID, and Why We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age, 2020
Statecraft improved, so rulers could raise money, so armies got bigger, so wars killed more. Metallurgy and chemistry improved, so there were daggers designed to leave wounds that would fester. Trade and insurance improved, so English wool could travel to Italy for oiling and spinning — and plague could travel with it. Banking improved, so a single family could grow rich enough to field more soldiers than its own city-state's government, which made coups routine: most Italian cities saw at least four violent regime changes in the 1400s, some as many as ten or twelve. The Knights Hospitaller normally required four generations of nobility to join; for Italians they dropped it to two, because otherwise there would have been no one.
Which raises the question: how did an era that awful produce the Mona Lisa, the David, and the design for St Peter's?
Palmer's answer is the least romantic and most explanatory thing this site has read in a while: those masterpieces are not the fruits of peace, they are symptoms of panic.
Legitimacy is a thing that runs entirely on belief. "The secret we all know is that governments, countries, laws, they're all just a bunch of stuff we made up." They exist only while everyone keeps agreeing they do — more dependent on belief, she says, than Tinkerbell. A duke who just took power by murdering his uncle, and who may be murdered by his nephew, needs everyone to agree he belongs there. The cheapest thing he can buy is spectacle: an intimidating palace, a big parade, an equestrian statue in the square everyone walks past, an expensive tutor so the prince knows Greek. Culture is a form of political competition — if war is politics by other means, so is culture, at lower risk.
Hence her formula: (A) rising wealth + (B) rising instability = (C) a surge in art and innovation. Not because people finally had the leisure, but because they had just survived three civil wars and were hoping to avoid a fourth. Florence's Laurenziana library cost more, as a share of GDP, than the Moon landing.
So where did "the Renaissance was a golden age" come from in the first place? She traced it, and the source stops you: the Renaissance invented it about itself.
Petrarch was the first to describe the centuries after Rome as one long age of ash and shadow. Then, in the 1420s–30s, Leonardo Bruni of Florence formally cut history into three parts — ancient, middle, modern. That is where the Middle Ages come from, and the people who made the cut needed it: announcing that the darkness is over and a new golden age begins with your regime is an excellent way to make a teetering regime look inevitable.
Then she tells a story that is hard to shake. Bruni's history had Florentine cunning defeating Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the Viper of Milan. When it circulated in 1444, the Viper's grandson did a spit take: "What the?! We didn't lose that war! Granddad dropped dead of a f*ing fever and the troops had to go home! The Florentines never beat us in a single battle!"
It turns out history isn't written by the winners; history is written by the people who write histories.Black Death, COVID…, 2020
So what does the grandson do? There is only one move: hire a classically trained humanist of your own and commission a history that frames things your way. Which is what everyone did. Milan, Venice, France, England, Hungary, Naples — everybody had to have one, and every one of them said there had been a bad middle age, that it was over, and that a glorious new age had begun with [insert prince here].
This is the thing she has actually been wrestling with for fifteen years, and it is much larger than correcting a popular error: the knife we use to slice history into periods was forged for somebody's political needs, and we are still cutting with it. Every "make X great again" is Bruni's knife.
Her blog is called Ex Urbe, "from the city." It opened in 2011 as a travel-and-food blog by a young scholar on a research year in Florence — genuinely about how to spot good gelato and where to buy tripe sandwiches. Its first real piece is "My Fight with Florence," a dialogue in which she says she is staying in to work and the city offers pizza, gelato, frescoes, perfect weather, a live orchestra playing Vivaldi. She says she isn't listening. The city says: fireworks. She writes: "I lost."
Fifteen years later the blog is where she ground out three large claims: how golden ages get manufactured; why Machiavelli invented an entire new branch of ethics; and why the real product of censorship was never silence but fear — an Inquisitor spent hours blacking out a book page by page when "it would have taken seconds to throw this book on the fire," because the blacked-out page was the product.
Her final answer to the 2020 question isn't "no." It's harder than that. The Black Death produced no golden age; it produced change — wages rose in a few places, fell in others, and in others elites cracked down with new laws restricting movement, inventing the first workhouses. As for us, she says we should aim for better than the Renaissance, because we have what they didn't: we know what a virus is, we know a vaccine can be made, we can compare policies against data. All Petrarch could offer after losing his world in 1348 was the consolation of dying with much good company.
In the 1200s, average life expectancy in Italy was 35 to 40. By 1500 — solidly the Renaissance, Leonardo at work on the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo's David newly standing — it was 18.
Cut in half. Walking from the "dark" Middle Ages into the "golden" Renaissance cost Italians half their lives.
Ada Palmer says that whenever she uses those numbers live, the shocked and mournful silence is followed by a guy objecting that they're deceptive, she's including infant mortality — voiced as if that should settle it. She has the answer ready: the medieval 35 includes it too, so the drop is just as real. Fine, exclude everyone who died before age 12, and the drop shrinks from 48% to 12–16% — 54 down to 45–48 — but it is still a drop. And infant mortality within the first year held steady at 28% before and after 1348. So what fell out was children who survived the first year and then died between two and twelve, of new diseases.
She adds one more turn of the knife: women's lifespans weren't dragged down by childbirth, which held steady at roughly one death per forty births across both periods; what widened the gap was war and violence, which made adult male mortality far higher. Among the longest-lived 20% of Renaissance Italy, she notes, you find almost entirely widows and nuns.
Then comes the line that is the key to this whole mind:
Why did life expectancy drop? Counter-intuitively the answer is, largely, progress.Black Death, COVID, and Why We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age and Bad Middle Ages, June 2020
Ada Palmer is a professor in the History Department at the University of Chicago. Her field, in her own words from the blog's About page, is "heterodoxy, heresy, freethought, censorship and information control" in the Renaissance. She is also a science fiction novelist (the four-volume Terra Ignota, beginning with Too Like the Lightning) and a composer and singer.
A detail with a picture in it: this blog did not begin as a history blog at all. In 2011 it was a travel-and-food blog written by a young scholar on a research year in Florence — how to spot good gelato from fifteen feet away, where to get the tripe sandwich, a food map of the city. Its first real piece is titled "My Fight with Florence," and the whole thing is a dialogue between her and the city. She says she's staying in to work. The city offers pizza, gelato, frescoes, perfect weather, a live orchestra tucked into a square below playing Bach and then Vivaldi. She says she isn't listening. The city says: fireworks. She says, "Wait, really?" The last line is two words:
I lost.My Fight with Florence, 7 August 2011
Another detail: she lives with chronic pain, and has written that she often has fewer than seven usable days in her week. When she launched a Patreon she went out of her way to explain that she isn't short of money — the university pays her a living wage — she is short of the means to hire help: an assistant for the calendar and the firehose of email, a sound editor so a podcast could exist at all.
The blog is not dormant, but its rhythm is extreme: 31 posts in 2011, four in 2019, one in 2023; then a sudden eleven in 2025, nearly all short book-launch pieces; most recently 29 January 2026. The book is Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age (2025), which won the 2026 Hugo Award for Best Related Work and was named a New Yorker Best Book of 2025. Its seed is the 2020 blog post this page is built on — in which she says, mid-essay, that she started writing it weeks earlier and "rapidly discovered that a thorough answer will be book-length (the book's now nearly done in fact)."
She backed into this problem by being blamed for it.
Whenever she is with medievalists, she says, and the talk turns to the slanders against the Middle Ages — dark, backwards, superstitious, stagnant, oppressive, all homogeneous — she makes a point of speaking up: "Yeah, that's my guys's fault. Sorry." It was a joke the first time. She keeps doing it because of what appears on the medievalist's face afterward: a particular warming, affirming smile that says I've always felt I deserved an apology from the Renaissance.
So she went looking for whose fault it actually was. What she found is the load-bearing claim of her whole body of work: the golden-Renaissance / dark-Middle-Ages story was invented by the Renaissance, for political reasons.
Step one is Petrarch (1304–1374). He described himself as born in exile — literally in space, since his parents were banished and he grew up in Avignon while the papacy was under French control, but also, he thought, in time, exiled from the community of antiquity that was his spirit's true home. He read that under the Pax Romana you could walk in safety from one end of the empire to the other, and then looked at his own age: the papacy in French hands, Italian cities slaughtering each other, and the Black Death, which took nearly all his scholar-friends. Two survivors wrote to plan a precious reunion; they were attacked by bandits on the road, one murdered, the other missing for months. You can see why this man called his age one of ash and shadow — and why he became the first person to lump the whole long sequence after Rome together as one bad period.
Palmer inserts a correction here that matters: Petrarch did not claim his own era was already golden, and never used the word Renaissance. He claimed his era needed a transformation, that desperate times called for desperate measures, and that Italy's only hope was to reach back for what antiquity had and lost. And what he thought would actually change things was not Roman engineering but Roman people — intellectual technologies. He wanted the library that educated Cicero, and Seneca, and Caesar.
Step two is Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444), a child when Petrarch died, who grew up inside the heady excitement of trying to build the golden age Petrarch proposed. Bruni served as Chancellor of Florence and, imitating the ancient Roman historians, wrote his History of the Florentine People — which for the first time formally divided history into three parts: ancient, middle, and modern. That is where the Middle Ages come from.
And the reason the knife swept Europe, in Palmer's account, is blunt: it sold. Claiming you are the start of a new golden age is an ideal way to make a teetering, illegitimate regime look exciting, full of momentum, glorious.
Then she tells the story that exposes the whole machine. Bruni's history covered the conquests of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the Viper of Milan — a man who ambushed and supplanted his own uncle, seized Milan, took Verona, Vicenza and Padua, won a great victory at Casalecchio in 1402 and looked set to swallow northern Italy — until, according to Bruni, brilliant Florentine cunning arranged his downfall.
When the history circulated in 1444, the Viper's grandson, Duke Filippo Maria Visconti, did a spit take:
"What the?! We didn't lose that war! Granddad dropped dead of a f*ing fever and the troops had to go home! The Florentines never beat us in a single battle! They can't say won the war!" They can. They did.Black Death, COVID…, 2020
It turns out history isn't written by the winners; history is written by the people who write histories.Black Death, COVID…, 2020
So what does the grandson do? There is exactly one move: hire one of these new classically-educated humanist types to write a history of your city and your family framed your way. Which is what everybody did. Milan, Venice, France, England, Hungary, Naples. In England, the boy-king Henry VI's uncle Duke Humphrey of Gloucester tried to hire Bruni himself to come over and write something that would shore up the shaky Lancastrian claim — the Wars of the Roses were starting. Bruni stayed in Florence, but another major Florentine, Poggio Bracciolini, was lured by the pay to go work for Humphrey's rival, Cardinal Beaufort.
And every one of these histories said the same thing: there had been a bad middle age, it was over, and a glorious classical-revival-powered new age had begun thanks to the virtues of [insert prince here].
This is the root problem she has not put down, and it is far bigger than correcting an error: the knife we use to slice history into periods was forged for somebody's political needs, and we are still cutting with it. Every "make X great again" is Bruni's knife.
The fuse was a question journalists kept putting to her in 2020: if the Black Death caused the Renaissance, will COVID create a golden age?
She says the impulse to use history to understand the present is a good one — the trouble is that it is now doing fresh damage, most dangerously by suggesting that sitting back and letting COVID kill would by itself turn the economy around and raise wages.
So she starts by taking the phrase apart. "Golden age," she says, invokes two unrelated things: (1) an era of great achievement, whose wonders later ages queue up to see in museums; and (2) an era that was good to live in — prosperous, stable, reasonably safe, with room to rise, where hard work paid off; the one you'd pick if you had to be stranded somewhere in history.
The Renaissance fits the first. It "absolutely positively no-way-no-how" fits the second. And collapsing the two is where everything goes wrong.
Then she puts two voices from the same decade side by side. On 25 February 1506, Ercole Bentivoglio, commander of Florence's armies, wrote to Machiavelli urging him to keep writing his verse history of the last ten years — not for their contemporaries, but for posterity, so that:
"knowing our wretched fortune in these times, they should not blame us for being bad defenders of Italic honor, and so they can weep with us over our and their misfortune, knowing from what a happy state we fell within brief time into such disaster."Bentivoglio to Machiavelli, 1506; quoted in Black Death, COVID…, 2020
And in 1869, Burckhardt — the founder of modern Renaissance studies — wrote of that same decade: "The first decades of the sixteenth century, the years when the Renaissance attained its fullest bloom, were not favorable to a revival of patriotism; the enjoyment of intellectual and artistic pleasures, the comforts and elegancies of life, and the supreme interests of self-development, destroyed or hampered love of country."
Burckhardt, Palmer says, seems to be describing a different universe. And that same decade produced the Mona Lisa, the David, Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin, Bramante's design for the new St Peter's, Josquin's El grillo, the first chapters of Orlando Furioso, and Castiglione's earliest courtly work at Urbino.
These are not two universes. They are two bodies of sources, and her methodological incision is right here: Burckhardt was correct, if you look only at the sources he was looking at. Read treatises, orations, dedicatory prefaces, writing on art and courtly conduct — and especially work written a few decades later, like Vasari's Lives of the Artists of 1550, the first to call the age a rinascita — and you see a self-conscious golden age. Read instead the private letters flying between Machiavelli and his correspondents and you see terror, invasion, plague deaths, a desperate man scrambling to track ever-moving threats, while family and friends beg for frequent letters because every silence makes them fear he is dead.
So how did an era that bad produce that art? Her answer is the least romantic and most explanatory thing on the blog.
The key word is legitimacy. She puts the cards on the table first: the secret we all know is that governments, countries and laws are just a bunch of stuff we made up. They exist only as long as we all keep agreeing they exist and act accordingly — "Far more than Tinkerbell, regimes and governments need us to believe in them or they die." And when belief goes, the usual consequence is not that the structure quietly evaporates but that some rival notices the confidence gap and takes power instead.
So regimes work hard to buy legitimacy. A usurper who murders the old king marries his widow, sister or daughter; with no royal bride available he marries a princess from a famous distant kingdom and fills his court with expensive exotic treasures, implying strong allies and money. And then there is the rest of the catalogue: get trusted local elites to work for you, get religious leaders to bless you, publish your pedigree (fake or real), crack down on crime with showy trials, pay an astrologer to circulate a glorious horoscope, mount a big parade, put an equestrian statue of yourself in the square everyone walks past, receive ambassadors ostentatiously so everyone sees how foreign powers honor you, repair bridges and care for orphans so people talk about your generosity. Palmer closes the list with a jab at the present: a modern city funding a zoo and an orchestra and an art museum is doing the same thing.
Which closes the loop. In desperate times, those in power pour money into art, architecture, grandeur, even science, because those things buy legitimacy and legitimacy buys stability.
Her formula: (A) increasing wealth + (B) increasing instability = (C) increasing art and innovation — "not because people are at peace and have the leisure to do art, but because they're desperate after three consecutive civil wars and hope they can avoid a fourth one if they can shore up the regime with a display of cultural grandeur." In an era when a book cost as much as a house (it really did), Florence's Laurenziana library cost more per GDP than the Moon landing. You don't get investment at that level unless elites think they're getting something out of it.
And where did the "worse" come from? Not from a rupture, but from an invented powder. She borrows a story from the 1951 children's book Centerburg Tales: a peddler sells a powder called Ever-So-Much-More-So, which enhances all of a thing's qualities, good and bad. Sprinkle it on a comfy mattress and you get mattress paradise — but if it had a squeaky spring, you'll never sleep again.
Sprinkle it on the Middle Ages and you get the Renaissance.Black Death, COVID…, 2020
Banking innovations started in the 1100s, insurance in the 1300s, centralization accumulated over centuries, and the art and music and epics had been ramping up all along. None of it was new. The volume was simply turned up, on everything at once, with the changes reinforcing each other. Her image for it: this is the fat end of a wedge of cheese, but it's the same cheese at the thin end. We started drawing the line where we do because people living then started drawing it, felt it was different, claimed it was different — and their claims reordered the way we think about history.
Hence her rule of thumb about "medieval" horrors: most of the scary practices we file under that word were either equally true of the Renaissance, worse in the Renaissance, or only started in the Renaissance. The medieval Inquisition began in 1184 but did not scale up book burnings, censorship and executions until the Spanish Inquisition of the 1470s and then the printing press and Luther in the 1500s; witchcraft persecution surged past medieval levels after the Malleus Maleficarum of 1486; and the variety of ingenious tortures in prisons increased over time rather than decreasing.
She lands it on a very characteristic line:
In sum, if you're a time traveler and you're being banished, don't pick the Renaissance.Black Death, COVID…, 2020
But she is not here to run the period down. She writes, almost tenderly, that she loves the Renaissance not for being perfect: "I love it because it was terrible yet still achieved so much." When she reads a letter in which a woman writes of a nearby city burning, and armies approaching, and a friend just dead of plague — and the same letter also has ideas for remedying these evils, and Xenophon's advice for times of war, and how Plato and Seneca differ on patience, and the marvelous new fresco just finished in the city hall — finding voices like that, she says, makes her love the human species all the more.
This is her earliest and boldest claim, written on the blog in 2012, before she had tenure.
It starts from a question tourists wore her out with. In Florence she had a habit of striking up conversation with passing tourists (which often led to pizza, gelato and the Uffizi), and once they realized they had a live Renaissance scholar, the questions came. Her favorite was: "So, why is Machiavelli really so important?" She says she read The Prince in school and retained the stock lines — better to be feared than loved, the ends justify the means — but had no idea why he was a big name, and she is pretty sure her teacher didn't know either. Most introductions to Machiavelli she has read never made it clear. After ten years as a specialist, she thought she could finally explain.
Her explanation has two halves. Machiavelli founded modern political science. And Machiavelli founded consequentialist ethics.
Take the second half first, because the way she sets it up is her signature move.
There are only three branches of ethics. Virtue ethics judges by the actor's interior motive — which is why the law has concepts like self-defense, heat of passion, and premeditation: the same killing, but what we are really asking is whether this person has the character of a murderer. Deontology judges against a set of presumed-universal rules external to the actor; the rules may come from law, scripture, or "natural laws" derived by reason, and what unites them is the focus on rules. Consequentialism, also called utilitarianism, judges by the consequences of the act.
The first two, Palmer says, can both be credited to Plato — the first Western philosopher to discuss ethics at all, whose dialogues contrast exactly those two approaches.
Which sets up her question:
If deontology and virtue ethics were both created at the very spark-birth of philosophy, why did it take 1,800 years for the third (to us equally obvious) branch to come into being?Machiavelli II: The Three Branches of Ethics, August 2012
Her own answer is delivered like the end of a serial chapter: "Ah, friends: before we can have utilitarianism, we must have Borgias!"
Before going on, it's worth watching how she teaches the three branches, because this is the most stealable passage on the blog. She gives no definitions. She gives a sentence, and then keeps adding conditions:
"Guido kills Paolo." That's all. The virtue ethicist cannot answer, and most deontologists can't either. Add a condition: Guido is a professional executioner, killing Paolo under a sentence ordered by a lawful government for a capital crime Paolo did commit. Now a range of deontologists can answer — if lawful government has a right to lethal force, Guido has done no evil; if execution is absolutely wrong, he has; others want to know what the crime was (murder? rape? adultery? atheism? public urination? homosexuality? freedom of speech?).
The virtue ethicist is still stuck, because he needs to know what is going on in Guido's mind. Did Guido become an executioner because he loves killing people and jumped at a state-sanctioned way to do it? Then we would probably not call it virtuous. Did he become one because he saw a botched execution as a child and thereafter determined to do it himself as humanely and respectfully as possible? Then we might call it very virtuous. Was he drafted into Hitler's army, following orders? Does he question them? Was he brainwashed? Does he hate the task, or do it unblinkingly?
And then she drops the sentence that pins the reader to her own diagram: "For anyone sitting here thinking: No! The Holocaust was unconscionable! No matter what the motives, if Guido was a Nazi it's evil! Congratulations: you have identified a point in your personal ethics which is firmly deontological."
She closes the section with a reminder: in all the executioner scenarios, whether Paolo is actually guilty does not matter — only whether Guido thinks he is.
When consequentialism enters, she changes the sentence: Guido killed Paolo before Paolo could push the nuclear destructor button and end all life on Earth. Then she starts tightening: before Paolo could exterminate a bus full of nuns and orphans. Before he could kill ten nuns and ten orphans. Two nuns? One nun? We moderns, saturated with utilitarianism, feel these situations differ from one another while feeling discomfort with "the end justifies the means" — and the scale gets slipperier and more uncomfortable as the numbers get smaller.
So what does Machiavelli's version of "the ends justify the means" actually say? Her correction is the thing most worth carrying away from this page: yes, he did argue it, and yes, he meant it — but in his formulation "the end" was limited to one and only one very specific thing: the survival of the people under a government's protection. More specifically: the survival of Florence. That cathedral, those lively alleyways, those sculptures, that poetry, that philosophy, that ambition.
And the other half — modern political science — she delivers through a war, in a way only she would. She builds up Machiavelli's position as a diplomat on the eve of the War of the League of Cambrai in 1508: everyone is forming alliances and nobody can predict with whom. Then the reveal: everyone joins forces to attack Venice. Her entire reaction is one line:
O_O ????????
Conclusion: must invent Modern Political Science.Machiavelli I – S.P.Q.F., July 2012
She says she is being only slightly facetious. The War of the League of Cambrai is the least comprehensible war she has ever studied: everyone switches sides at least twice, and what begins with the pope calling on everyone to attack Venice ends with Venice defending the pope against everyone. Between that and the equally bizarre events of the Borgia papacy and Julius II's rise, Machiavelli concluded that the methods they had for thinking about history and politics were simply not sufficient.
Out of which comes the claim we now find too obvious to notice: history should not be studied as a series of moral maxims meant to rear good statesmen by saturating them in stories of virtuous rulers and hoping virtue arrives by osmosis. It should be studied as a set of examples, to be compared against present circumstances to help plan actions and predict their consequences. What worked? What didn't? What features of different times and places led to success and failure?
Palmer's verdict: this is modern political science, and it is how history is approached in every classroom now. "We are, in this sense, all Machiavellian."
That essay's ending is the best thing on the blog, and it is a pure demonstration of how to hand a historical figure back to a reader without sentimentality. She likes a game, she says: imagine sending a message back in time to tell some historical figure one thing you really wish they could have known. Tell Galileo everyone agrees he was right; tell Schwarzschild we've found black holes; tell Socrates we still have Socratic dialogues after 2,300 years. But she could never work out what to tell Machiavelli. That his name became a synonym for evil worldwide? That the Florentine republic never returned? That children on continents he never imagined read him to understand the minds of tyrants?
Now she knows:
"Florence is on the UNESCO international list of places so precious to all the human race that all the powers of the Earth have agreed never to attack or harm them, and to protect them with all the resources at our command."
He would cry. I know he would. It's the only thing he ever really wanted.Machiavelli I – S.P.Q.F., July 2012
One footnote of hers is worth adding, because the branch of ethics did eventually land. In 1764 a 26-year-old Milanese jurist, Cesare Beccaria, published a small treatise, On Crimes and Punishments, arguing that the only justification for punishment is deterrence — not retribution, not balancing sin. Voltaire seized on it and made sure everyone read it, and within decades judicial torture had virtually vanished from European law. The first state ever to abolish the death penalty was the Duchy of Tuscany, and it did so on utilitarian grounds rather than on principle — at which point Palmer turns and addresses someone 250 years dead: "Hey, look, Machiavelli! Your new branch of ethics, flourishing in Florence!" She also allows herself something she rarely does:
Rarely in the history of thought do I have a chance to say the outcome was so simply good, but it worked.On Crimes and Punishments and Beccaria, September 2013
The evidence for this one is ink and a scissor cut in a book.
She has (now in her university's library in Chicago) a copy of a 1500s treatise on scientific logic by Cardano. Cardano was condemned by the Inquisition and the order was given to expurgate copies: an Inquisitor went through faithfully, page by page, scribbling over the condemned passages in ink and, where both sides of a page were condemned, cutting them out with scissors.
Palmer asks you to do the arithmetic. This took hours of work by a highly-trained, expensive-to-hire, Latin-reading Inquisitor. Whereas —
It would have taken seconds to throw this book on the fire.Tools for Thinking About Censorship, January 2024
And at that very moment the Roman Inquisition's internal documents were full of complaints about a desperate lack of personnel — not enough Inquisitors, not enough censors to read books, not enough police — as it tried to keep up with the exponentially growing flood of print. Why would an organization that short-staffed spend hundreds of man-hours per copy drawing black lines?
The second exhibit pushes it to absurdity. Konrad Gesner's encyclopedia of animals, late 1500s: an entirely secular book with zero controversial content. But Gesner was a good scholar who cited his sources, placing beside each animal a note thanking "the learned and excellent Dr. So-and-so of Such-a-place" for sending the picture. The Inquisition's order for this book was that Catholics could own it, and all its content — but wherever Gesner thanks a scholar who was Protestant, the Inquisitor or the book's owner must cross out the words "learned and excellent," to enforce the lesson that Protestants were not learned and excellent, they were bad and wrong.
If you assume the goal was destroying information, this allocation of scarce manpower is absurd to the point of hilarity. But that was never the goal.
Her comparison is Bart Simpson writing lines on the blackboard. The rote expurgation turned a completely secular book into a tool for projecting power: page after page, that stark black patch reminding you of the Inquisition's presence. It was there to make authors and printers think, "I don't want my book to go through that."
And there is a further twist she points out. You could apply to the Inquisition for an official license permitting you to own restricted books. One condition of this seeming privilege: you yourself had to go through and cross out the banned sentences. Which made the very people who loved and wanted restricted books into middleman censors excising text from their own copies — experiencing the same mortifying, emotionally manipulative reinforcement a child does when forced to write a motto on a blackboard.
All of which leads to what she calls the first and most important principle of the field:
The majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power.Tools for Thinking About Censorship, January 2024
So her methodological demand is that we cannot and should not draw a line between state censorship and private censorship. That line is exactly the one the system wants you to draw: it advances the illusion that self-censorship is primarily a civilian phenomenon caused by public attitudes, which makes it easier to disguise how often it is the direct and intended result of organized action.
She forces the whole thing into view with a single question: did the trial of Galileo succeed or fail?
If you believe the point was to silence Galileo, it failed completely — it made him far more famous, and they knew it would. Then comes a line cold enough to keep:
If you want to silence Galileo in 1600 you don't need a trial, you just hire an assassin and you kill him, this is Renaissance Italy, the Church does this all the time.Tools for Thinking About Censorship, January 2024
The purpose of the trial, she says, was to scare Descartes. On hearing about it, he took his about-to-be-published synthesis back from the publisher and revised it to be much more orthodox. Thousands of other major thinkers of the time wrote differently, spoke differently, chose different projects and passed different ideas to the next century. The final form of Descartes' published synthesis was self-censorship — self-censorship very deliberately cultivated by an outside power. And the cost to the Inquisition was minute compared to how hard it would have been to get at all those scientists individually.
Then she moves the same machine into the twentieth century. In 1954, amid a comics moral panic across the English-speaking world, the US Congress could take no direct action under the First Amendment — so politicians exerted pressure until the comics companies created the supposedly voluntary Comics Code Authority. Grocery stores and most comics shops then refused to shelve anything uncensored by it, bankrupting publishers. Fast forward to the 60s and 70s, when the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum and Congress again could act directly against it: publishers of comics centering Black heroes such as Black Panther suddenly found the Code much pickier about their Black characters than their white ones — declaring something as mild as a drop of sweat on the forehead of a Black astronaut "too graphic" because it "could be mistaken for blood." The result was grueling extra work and perennial delays, which pressured companies into featuring fewer Black heroes.
"Did the US government censor Black Panther?" If you insist on separating state action from self-censorship, no: Congress applied pressure → that created the Code Authority → its censors felt anxious about race (egged on by government amplification of racial tension) → they pressured publishers → publishers pulled titles. No government agent acted at any point, in perfect fidelity to "Congress shall make no law…" — and it was a deliberate and intended consequence of state action.
Her last and most practical tool is a reminder: remember that Nineteen Eighty-Four is fiction. No real censorship regime has ever approached Orwell's ministries with their infinite resources and total surveillance. Open the internal documents of the USSR, the Inquisition, any of them, and you find perpetual pleading: not enough information, not enough people, not enough funds, always in emergency crisis mode, desperately trying to keep up. She offers an almost comic example: in the period when Spain's Inquisition was wildly out of Rome's control, Rome printed manuals to guide its Inquisitors on how to bluff their way through pretending they were on top of what Spain was doing.
But that desperation is visible only internally. Externally these regimes present themselves as always everywhere, always watching, always in control. The illusion of infinite resources is itself one of the goals, making people more afraid and less willing to defy — and it is especially effective at extending censorship past a power's borders, to citizens of other countries who start fearing consequences for themselves, their friends, or their organizations, and thereby join the machine voluntarily. So her conclusion is not a call to denounce censorship but a rare turn inward: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and one price of free speech is eternal humility — recognizing that none of us is immune to becoming a tool of censorship.
The shortest of the four, and the one that puts current through the other three.
One of the most fundamental and most shocking ideas behind the eighteenth-century democratic ventures, she says, often goes unmentioned — sometimes actively denied — in today's discussions of democracy: all people are educable.
Modern people have trouble grasping how sure pre-modern Europeans were of the opposite. Plato and Aristotle (and 2,000 years of transformations thereof) described a soul led by three forces — appetites, passions, intellect — and held that only a tiny minority of souls are dominated by the intellect. Plato's Republic uses an aptitude system to identify these rare "souls of gold" and make them rulers, and proposes a eugenic breeding program to produce more. The principle was thoroughly absorbed: Dante's entire structure of Hell revolves around the appetites/passions/intellect distinction, and medieval epistemology, psychology, medicine and botany all spun elaborate explanations for why some souls perceive Good and Justice better than others.
Her strongest evidence isn't colonial. Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen shows French writers of 1870–1914 describing their own countrymen in incredibly insulting, infantilizing, quasi-bestial terms — strikingly similar to the racist language we're used to seeing the Age of Empires use about non-Europeans. Anyone who hasn't looked at period sources, she says, will struggle to believe how ferociously confident the European majority was that most people even in their own country could never understand a book, a moral quandary, or a political proposition.
So what were the eighteenth-century radicals actually claiming? Here she makes the distinction that defeats nearly every cynical rebuttal — and she writes the rebuttal herself first, as the obligatory snarky self-proclaimed cynic pointing at Trump voters to say America did degenerate into foolish populist chaos:
…the claim made by America's early founders and shapers wasn't that all people are capable of ruling wisely, but that all people are capable of becoming capable of ruling wisely.All People Are Created Educable, November 2022
Educable, not educated. Which is why those who shaped America insisted so fiercely on universal public education — she says we have thousands of essays, letters and documents to this effect — and why the early US government subsidized the shipping of newspapers. Without education, they believed, people would indeed vote for foolish things.
Then she names the opposite. Having helped her PhD adviser James Hankins with research on the history of conservatism across many times, places and regimes, she reports a consistent defining characteristic of conservative thought over time: the belief that some people are better at ruling than others, and that the best way to run a society is to put those superior people in power. Hereditary aristocracy, exam-based meritocracy, service-based timocracy, divine right — all versions of the same proposition.
The thesis that all people are educable is fundamentally opposed to this. It is opposed to aristocracy, to oligarchy, even to most forms of meritocracy — "since education isn't supposed to prepare people to be sorted out by the exam but to demonstrate that human beings are so excellent that everyone can pass it."
And she ends with what may be the sharpest strike in her whole body of work, aimed squarely at the present. When she sees conservative thinking start to show up in acquaintances — or Silicon Valley leaders — who consider themselves progressive and also consider themselves smart, it almost always begins with them feeling that most people are stupid and the world would be better off if the smart were in charge. The way to make such a person pause, she says, is to ask whether they think all people are fundamentally educable, and:
…whether the solution isn't to put the reins of power into genius hands but to put the Encyclopedia in everyone else's.All People Are Created Educable, November 2022
She built a machine to run historical experiments. This is the least historian-like thing she does. Every year in her Italian Renaissance class at Chicago she runs a simulation of a papal election, circa 1490–1500. Each student gets a packet describing their character's goals, background, personality, allies and enemies, plus resources as cards: money, titles, treasures, armies, nieces and nephews to marry off, contracts to sign, artists and scholars to deploy or trade — "I'll give you Leonardo if you send three armies to guard my city from the French." Some play powerful Cardinals with vast networks; others are minor Cardinals with debts and long-shot hopes of rising three or four popes from now; others are locked in a basement chamber playing the King of France, the Queen of Castile, the Holy Roman Emperor, smuggling secret orders by text to their agents in the conclave. And others are not Cardinals at all but the functionaries who count the votes, distribute the food, keep watch, direct the choir — no votes, but they can hear, and watch, and whisper.
She designed it with no preset outcome, and deliberately moved some characters and issues in time so that students who already knew what happened to Italy would know they couldn't get the "correct" outcome even if they tried — which frees everyone to pursue goals rather than correct answers.
What matters is what she saw after running it four times. Some outcomes always repeat: the same few powerful Cardinals always lead; there is usually a wildcard candidate nobody expected; and usually a juggernaut wins — but very, very close. And the war is always totally different. Sometimes France invades Spain. Sometimes France and Spain unite against the Holy Roman Empire. Sometimes England and Spain unite to keep the French out of Italy. Once they made a giant pan-European peace treaty with marriage alliances that looked likely to unify all four great Crowns permanently — shattered by the sudden assassination of a crown prince.
Her summary is yes and no. The Great Forces always push the same way: the strong factions are strong, money is power, blood is thicker than promises, virtue is manipulable, in the end a bad man will be pope and he will do bad things, and some land somewhere will burn. But the details are always different. A Cardinal needs fourteen votes, and it is never the same fourteen, so it is never the same fourteen people who get papal favor, whose agendas are strengthened, whose homelands prosper while their enemies fall. And —
She has never once seen a pope elected in this simulation who did not owe his victory to one or more of the humble functionaries, who repeated just the right whisper at just the right moment and genuinely handed the throne to Monster A instead of Monster B.
Which is how she answers the old methodological quarrel — Great Forces history and human-agency history are both correct, and they contradict. Her answer: the dam was about to break and no one could stop it, but every person there got to dig a channel to try to direct the waters once they flowed, and that is what determined the real shape of the flood, its path, its damage. No one controlled or predicted what happened, but those who worked hard and dug their channels mostly did divert most of the damage and achieve many of their goals. Not all, but most.
She is unusually candid about the weakness of her own format. In 2012, two posts into the Machiavelli series, a reader asked, "Holy cow, why isn't more history taught like this?" She wrote a whole post to answer, and the answer is what she calls the simplification bell curve. What she does on the blog, she says, is extremely simplified: phrases like "Florence's republic went through some twists" or "everyone joins forces to attack Venice" gloss over situations an expert could unpack into many volumes; she presents neither Machiavelli's words nor citable paraphrases but the broadest summaries — it would take real effort for her or a reader to trace any of her statements to a single line of the authentic text. And then the actual confession:
This simplification involves an enormous amount of personal judgment on my part, and a corresponding amount of trust on yours, as I ask you to accept my claims while I supply no evidence to verify them.Machiavelli I (addendum), August 2012
Why a bell curve? Because synthetic simplification suits the two ends: a very introductory treatment can legitimately simplify for a novice audience, and a very expert treatment can simplify by relying on trust in the author's fluency. It is the middle — the half-expert levels — that needs details, figures and footnotes, so readers can hold the historian accountable and question anything that seems implausible, biased or otherwise sketchy. She adds an honest coda: being early in her career, she did not yet have the publications to prove her fluency to cautious colleagues, and so was not comfortable putting a piece like this into formal print.
She takes great figures down off the plinth. She insists on teaching Machiavelli through his letters, because letters give you unimportant details, the things a person cared about that week rather than the things they wanted discussed under their name for centuries. You get the serious political thought, but mixed with "Where is my salary?", "Hello my friend," "Here's the party I was at," "I have a cold." History, she says, too easily looks like a sequence of marble busts on pedestals who handed us great books, and it is much harder to convey that those were also people who messed up, ran out of money, had anxieties, failed at things, and got lonely without their friends.
Then she delivers the diagnosis that is the most portable thing in her whole method:
Because we tell edited versions of the lives of great men and great women, in which we edit out the things that feel like us.Why I Teach Machiavelli Through His Letters, March 2021
So of course our mundane lives feel unable to rise to that greatness — we aren't comparing ourselves to the real people, we're comparing ourselves to the edited version. Her proof is Michelangelo, whose autobiography stops discussing art for a stretch to detail an interminable lawsuit with the della Rovere family over a tomb (was the marble delivered, was there a crack), during which the pope in question besieged Florence demanding Michelangelo be handed back — and in which there is a line noting that he had been so stressed he hadn't picked up a chisel in four years.
How she handles counterexamples: run the objector's arithmetic yourself. The infant-mortality exchange above is the standard move — she doesn't defend or dodge, she recomputes the way the objector demands, shows the direction holds, then adds a decomposition the objector hadn't thought of. And she adds a sharp observation alongside it: she finds it telling how often people who hear these numbers try to discredit them and search for a loophole, because the facts rub against expectations. "We didn't want a wretched golden age."
Anti-presentism is a daily discipline, not a slogan. She spent many dissertation years assembling vast grids of data to prove painstakingly that Machiavelli's interest in radical Epicurean materialism was exceptional for his day, more like peers seventy years in his future — noting that "Machiavelli was exceptional and forward-thinking" may be the least surprising conclusion a Renaissance historian can reach, and that such things must nonetheless be proved very, very meticulously to avoid spawning yet another distorted biography claiming Galileo was fundamentally an oppressed Bill Nye. Her closing line is frameable:
Hint: Galileo was not Bill Nye; he was Galileo.On Progress and Historical Change, January 2017
She promotes her comment section into the main text. After the progress essay, a reader asked what exactly was so awful about Hobbes. Her long reply was reposted as its own article so it wouldn't "stay buried down there" — and the reply is excellent: she clarifies that she loves Hobbes and teaches and reads him for pleasure, and that "awful" describes not her view nor the modern one but his contemporaries' view. Hobbes was Bacon's student (and for a while his amanuensis), used Bacon's new methods with absolute mastery, and reached conclusions that terrified everyone. Which produced an almost farcical situation: for two decades after Leviathan, the sole goal of western European philosophy was to find some way to refute Thomas Hobbes without undermining Bacon — because Bacon was light, hope, progress, and Hobbes was the best wielder of Bacon's techniques. It took twenty years and John Locke. Her verdict: Hobbes was the first backfire of Bacon, the first warning that progress cannot be controlled, and that while it will change the parts of society we think are bad, it will change the parts we value too.
A procedural note first: the network policy of the environment this page was written in could reach only exurbe.com. I was unable to read the original text of any review or scholarly critique of her work. So nothing below recites an argument I haven't read. What follows is of two kinds only: bibliographic facts, and tensions I can show from inside her own essays.
1. "Machiavelli founded utilitarianism" is a minority position, and her yardstick is Europe-shaped.
This is her most beautiful and most brittle claim. Standard reference works on the history of utilitarianism attribute its founding to Bentham and Mill rather than to Machiavelli, who is usually mentioned as a precursor rather than a founder. I could not open those entries in this environment to check them line by line, so I report only the attribution, not their reasoning.
But there is one contradiction I can point at using nothing but her own text. Her driving question is why the third branch took 1,800 years — a count from Plato to Machiavelli, which is a purely European ruler. Mohism in China was judging acts by their consequences in the fifth century BCE, some 1,900 years before Machiavelli. The gap that makes the whole section work is a gap only along one line.
What makes this worth raising is that the person who diagnoses this failure mode most clearly is Palmer herself. "On Progress and Historical Change" spends a whole section on how Whig history dismisses non-European regions as having "failed" to progress, and on how presentism projects today's shape onto the past. The cure she offered in 2017 — seeing how a narrative is shaped by the position of the person telling it — is exactly the tool for dissecting the shape of her own 2012 question. She was then a pre-tenure scholar writing an accessible piece for tourists, which is entirely understandable; but it remains one of her most widely circulated claims, and its framing has never been publicly revised.
2. The simplification bell curve cuts both ways — and she said so first.
She places herself at the expert end and asks readers to substitute trust for footnotes. That is why the essays are so good to read, and it is also where they are least defended. She said outright in 2012 that she supplies "no evidence to verify" her claims, and that she wasn't yet comfortable putting such a piece into formal print. This isn't a hidden weakness; it is a weakness labeled by the author — and readers should know the label is still on: every conclusion here is less verifiable than it feels while you're reading it. The essay about life expectancy falling from 35–40 to 18 is, by her own account, a compression of what would be a hundred pages in the book.
3. Arguing that progress is real requires a trans-historical yardstick, and she has argued that no such yardstick is fully neutral.
The finest passage in the progress essay is her demonstration that "progress" carries moral weight in itself. She uses two maps of the same data: render world population as terrain spiking upward and human settlement reads as natural landscape; render the identical data dripping downward in pus-yellow against black and the same cities become an infection oozing along every coastline. Same numbers, two moralities.
Then she needs to say that progress is real and things used to be worse — so she proposes metrics she considers as neutral as achievable: infant mortality, malnutrition, the frequency of massacres, and her favorite: "What portion of the population of this society can be murdered by a different portion of the population and have the murderer suffer no meaningful consequences?" (For America in 2017 her answer is: not 0%, but also not 90%.) It is a genuinely good metric. But she immediately concedes that such metrics still privilege particular values — life, justice, equality — and only aim to be compatible with as many cultures and eras as possible.
So her conclusion lands somewhere honest and fragile, and she flags the fragility herself:
My own personal assessment of it is just that, a personal assessment, with no authority beyond some years spent studying history.On Progress and Historical Change, January 2017
Her famous closing cadence — "Progress is not inevitable, but it is happening. / It is not transparent, but it is visible. / It is not safe, but it is beneficial. / It is not linear, but it is directional. / It is not controllable, but it is us. In fact, it is nothing but us." — is a beautiful credo. And a credo is a credo: someone who dismantled teleology that thoroughly still ends up asserting that "the decrease of pain in the human condition over time" is a gradual but certain outcome. Marking it as personal opinion is honest; it also means this claim, unlike the others, is not one the evidence is holding up.
4. Her politics are open, but in one essay the history stops and the advocacy starts.
In "All People Are Created Educable," the historical half — what eighteenth-century thinkers actually believed and why, Weber's French peasants, Plato's souls of gold — is solid and sourced. But when she turns to the present, the claims that public education has been intentionally starved, that homeschool movements aim to confine people to a narrow ideology, and that these plus the collapse of journalism amount to a sabotage of the system, are asserted rather than argued: that post contains no data, no citations, no case studies for any of it. She never hides her politics — she names conservatism, and she names Silicon Valley leaders — which is better than concealing them. But a reader should know that the two halves of that one essay are not backed to the same standard.
5. Bibliographic facts, without assessment. Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age was published in 2025, won the 2026 Hugo Award for Best Related Work, and was named a New Yorker Best Book of 2025. I could not access the text of any review in this environment and therefore offer no judgment on its scholarly reception.