Reinventing the Renaissance | Hacker News Reader

Reinventing the Renaissance

drb.ie

41 pointsPetiver11 comments

Open articleView on HN

Related: Dwarkesh Patel recently interviewed Ada Palmer:

Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAIhVfGbREA

Also Tim O'Neill of the History for Atheists weblog/channel:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq1ksVVeRWI

* https://historyforatheists.com/2025/04/interview-dr-ada-palm...

Other interesting interviews: the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth with Bart Ehrman and also Thomas Schmidt (using Josephus' Testimonium), the date of Christmas with Philipp Nothaft, 'pagan origins' of Easter with Andrew Henry (Religion for Breakfast channel), Tom Holland. Good weblog posts too.

Also on the Toldinstone channel:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ws87TCojyc

Thanks for the links. I'd seen her before and liked what she had to say, and just subscribed.

As an ADHD nerd I find myself with "so much to see, so little time to do it", and a fair chunk of that time is learning about religion -- a subject I am not at all a fan of. But I feel compelled to better understand it because the world is filled with people who are effectively insane in their worldview and they want to impose that worldview on me.

While most folks are aware of "the" Renaissance, there were others earlier, e.g.:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_renaissances

It’s incredible how much higher quality Carolingian art is compared to the drawings that medieval art is usually associated with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_art#/media/File:Ka...

This is an excellent, delightful book filled with facts, opinions, humor and a level of expertise and diligence that in my opinion redefines how history should be written. This is one of my favorite history books--and I've read dozens.

I consider myself an "intelligent general reader" and read this last month, producing my own much briefer review [0]. Such a good book! I read a lot of popular history, but not usually written by actual practicing historians (who usually probably don't write "popular history"). Good stuff, and highly recommended.

[0] https://www.the-recliner.com/the-sixteenth-book-of-2026-inve...

Given that today there's a concerted effort to effect a similar invention today wrt AI, this book is highly relevant.

> although there are traces of an earlier edition published by a more popular press

What’s that referring to?

The sentence after it explains. The core of "Reinventing the renaissance" is basically the renaissance-related blog entries from https://www.exurbe.com/ , developed further into a book.

I know that, but a blog isn't normally referred to as a "more popular press" so it doesn't fit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com