Another thought: yes, the author acknowledges that she's writing about Italy because that's where we have the most sources, but - she centers some people we don't have much material on, too.

So why not include Jews and Muslims, their thoughts and perspectives? There must be *some* sources!

Still thinking about this "that the hero who shaped us must have been like us", apparently a common wish.

It's a thought only the maximally privileged could entertain, I think. Everyone else knows they wouldn't have been allowed to shape the world of ideas because of their gender, class, race; wouldn't have been able to because of their disability; and so on.

The past is not only a foreign country, but hostile territory for many of us.

"The printing press also spread exponentially, so—like anything exponential—growth was slow at first."

Exponential spread, both of tech and knowledge and a new information distribution network, you say?

I told you there a was a Renaissance singularity!!!

"While Luther developed new methods for reading the Bible very different from anything practiced in the studia humanitatis, his project of retranslating and correcting Scripture used new translation methods, and new tools for understanding Greek, developed when Ficino had translated Plato, Poliziano Homer, Valla Aristotle and so on."

This seems obvious, but I've never thought about it this way. Neat.

"We keep asking if Machiavelli was an atheist because we want to believe that big historical changes are caused by people who intend to cause those changes, that the hero who shaped us must have been like us."

I really hate this "we". Speak for yourself; *I* don't give a fuck because I know that people in different times were radically different from me and had different outlooks, goals, and beliefs. *I* don't believe in heroes and "great men".

"We see this too in the medieval popularity of what is either the best or worst board game ever invented, rithmomachia, “The Philosophers’ Game,” an asymmetric chess-like game except that each side’s pieces have a unique set of numbers on them (so one side has 2, 4, 6, 8, 36, 64, 153, 289, etc. while the other has 3, 5, 7, 9, 18, 49, 120, 361, etc.) ..."

(1/2)

"...and the goal is to get the combination of your numbers and your opponent’s numbers into an arrangement so the ratios between the numbers and the distances between them harmonize with the proportions of the celestial spheres."

(2/2)

TIL: "[The] use of queen for a female monarch, as opposed to a king’s wife, was new at the time, appearing only toward the end of the reign of England’s Prince Elizabeth I; when Machiavelli wrote The Prince the term included women"

"Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola—nephew of our Pico—witnessed some of Camilla’s prophecies, and wrote later that she had divine foreknowledge of Savonarola’s sermons and their messages"

Given that "I had a vision" was a relatively safe way for a woman to do theology, and preaching was out of the question, we can theorize that maybe she knew his sermons beforehand because she (co-)wrote the things.

"In 2011, even as your operas continue to be performed, two different television series will depict different Lucrezias, one anachronistically shocked at the prospect of an arranged marriage at age fourteen"

Hah, I snarked about that scene in the Borgia TV show too!

(And no, I have no idea why the author chose to write this section in second person singular)

"Even when Erasmus’s efforts to reconcile Luther with the papacy made both sides feel obliged to formally condemn him, both sides still loved this frenemy, and the Inquisition still let Catholics teach and read his works, all you had to do was ritually cross out his name on the title page."

I love this

"[...Τ]he important History Lab maxim that, when you zoom in on a moment in the past, it’s always (A) messier than you thought, and (B) includes more women."

Well, they *are* almost 50 % of the population.

"The Latin gratias, often rendered as grace, also meant political influence, so, in fact, a perfectly valid translation of the Archangel Gabriel’s words at the Annunciation, Ave Maria gratia plena, is “Hail Mary full of political influence.”

Okay, that made me laugh out loud, as it's also the start of a really common prayer - which sounds *very* different rendered like that

(Very feminist, actually, which is pretty fitting.)

"[T]he most common sentence in a heresy conviction, or even a witchcraft conviction, was being compelled to sit through a serious [sic] of tedious lectures from Dominican Thomists using Aristotle to explain the best route to Heaven."

I imagine it was quite tedious for the Dominican Thomists too

"Florence’s tax system, for example, was more a wealth tax than an income tax, and for many years was based on officials interviewing your neighbors each year to ask them how rich they thought you were"

I can *so* see a near-future science fiction story were it's done like this, but by a LLM reviewing data from a ubiquitous social media app.

2025 book eighteen: China Miéville: The City & The City ️️️️ #bookstodon #fiction #ChinaMieville #ebooks #kindle #bookstagram #books2025

"Do you remember, in geometry class, when you had to write out a tedious thirty-two-step proof that the angles of a triangle had the ratio that you already knew from the start they had, so why bother?"

No.

Well, yes, I remember the proofs.

I also remember the awe I felt because I was able to prove how this was *always* true, for *any* triangle in flat space; the beauty of that reasoning. *That's* why we bother.

"The plan called for a larger dome than had ever been built, [...] but without a plan for how actually to do it: they just knew it would take a century to build the foundation and walls and figured that, by the time it was Dome O’Clock, some clever Florentine would figure out this hitherto impossible engineering miracle."

Now *this* reminds me of how we "deal" with climate change.

"Ever since banning nobles, all Florentines have been extremely wary of any princely behavior [...],so Cosimo must be very careful to always dress and act like a simple merchant [...].This is essential to prevent suspicion and attacks from within Florence,but at the same time it’s super inconvenient beyond Florence,because in this world you have to be a nobleman [...] to be taken seriously on the world political stage [...]."

Now what does this remind me of.

"Each lab brews different things to make our world better: Chem Lab, new meds; Physics Lab, new particles; History and Philosophy Labs, new proofs that Nazis are wrong.)"

Lovely view of academia. Wrong, of course, but this is as it should be.