Gonzaga vs Sanseverino: I Fart in Your General Direction

Buckle up, friends, it’s time for the real life “I fart in your general direction”: Marquis Francesco Gonzaga’s unforgettable reply to the 1503 duel challenge from Galeazzo Sanseverino. (Part of my countdown to “Inventing the Renaissance.”)

Meme of the image from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which the French soldier on top of the battlements taunts the knights, sticking out his tongue and sticking his thumbs in his ears as he shouts down "I fart in your general direction!"

I posted last time introducing Galeazzo Sanseverino “Son of Fortune”, the famously handsome mercenary captain and lover of Duke Ludovico Visconti-Sforza who held such sway in his beloved’s city that the Milanese called him “the Second Duke.” Everyone doted on Galeazzo, even the French generals he fought wars against! And also the nearly-impossible-to-please Isabella d’Este, sister of the Duke of Ferrara, the famous art lover, patroness of Leonardo da Vinci, and the most easily affronted woman in the Renaissance.

Titian's portrait of Isabella d'Este. Dressed in lavish gowns, leopard fur, and with an enormous golden turban-like hat covered with pearls and gems, Isabella frowns disapprovingly at the viewer.
Titian’s portrait of Isabella d’Este. Isabella frowns disapprovingly at the viewer.

The only people who did *not* love the dashing and fortunate Galeazzo were rival mercenary commanders who lost out on valuable commissions leading Milan’s armies as Ludovico started promoting his beloved over all others.

Detail portrait of Ludovico Sforza from the "Pala Sforzesca." Ludovico has black hair down to the nape of his neck, a slightly chubby build, and wears a garment of costly pomegranate pattern light blue silk brocade with gold edging and a huge gold chain around his neck. The background shows the lavish garments of the saints who surround the duke in the complete painting, which shows him and his wife amid religious figures kneeling in prayer.
Detail portrait of Ludovico Sforza from the “Pala Sforzesca.”
Portrait possibly of Galeazzo Sanseverino. A man with auburn shoulder-length curly hair stands looking at the viewer. He wears a black cap, a costly black velvet overgarment lined with leopard fur, a red doublet partly unbuttoned down the front, and gray gloves.
Portrait possibly of Galeazzo Sanseverino.

Trusting one’s lover with one’s armies was (not a bad tactic, since your true love *will not* change sides for cash mid-war, like mercenaries so often did) – for a sample of strategic side-changing see William Caferro’s fabulous book on John Hawkwood.

William Caferro John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth Century Italy

One rival who lost out through Galeazzo’s promotion was Francesco Gonzaga Marquess of Mantua, a formidable military commander and ruler of a very militarily important city-state strategically positioned in the intersection of Milan’s territory, Venice’s, and Ferrara’s.

Portrait of Francesco Gonzaga. His expression is grim and severe. He has dark brown hair down to his chin and a dark and full moustache and beard, and wears gleaming armor edged in decorative gold. He holds a strong wooden rod in his hand, which could be a spear or the handle of a weapon, or simply a stick to beat servants with.
Portrait of Francesco Gonzaga.

Francesco Gonzaga came from *extremely* noble stock: his mother and grandmother were kinswomen of the Holy Roman Emperors, his sister Elizabetta the Duke of Urbino, and he himself married the splendid Isabella d’Este (sister of Galeazzo’s lover Ludovico’s wife Beatrice, who also *loved* Galeazzo).

Painting of Isabella and Beatrice d’Este together. The sisters are both teenaged girls in Renaissance gowns, leaning near each other as if one is embracing the other. Both have their hair semi-loose, with ribbons or snoods holding it with loose netting, and wear necklaces of black beads and gowns of dark blue with many decorative ribbons showing from the edges of the white chemises underneath. The one in the foreground (probably Isabella) holds a lute.
Painting of Isabella and Beatrice d’Este together as girls, from a fresco in the family palace.

When tensions mounted until Galeazzo challenged Francesco Gonzaga to a duel (by letter), Francesco began his unforgettable reply with: “Prù—this is a fart sound I make with my mouth with the addition of a fuck-you gesture (manichetto) and a fig sign.”

Photograph of a stone statue, probably depicting Galeazzo Sanseverino as the model for Saint Victor the Martyr (statue in Milan cathedral museum). Extremely handsome with shoulder-length curly hair, he wears a cloak over decorated Roman armor, and has his arms bound behind him in a sexy pose, giving him a homoerotic look similar to depictions of Saint Sebastian but more military.
Photograph of a stone statue, probably depicting Galeazzo Sanseverino as the model for Saint Victor the Martyr (statue in Milan cathedral museum). He has his arms bound behind him much like images of Saint Sebastian but more military, a pose with strong homoerotic associations in the period (as now).

 

Black and white print portrait of Francesco Gonzaga, looking much like his earlier portrait with a full manly beard and wearing full armor. His coat of arms, covered with imperial eagle imagery, appears in the top left corner.
Print portrait of Francesco Gonzaga. His coat of arms, with imperial eagle imagery, appears in the top left corner.

Gonzaga, the letter continues, was lord of the great city of Mantua, Galeazzo a born vagabond who lived “like dogs do at the expense of others,” a prostitute famous only for his “ass favors,” adding “I have my parties at the door of others, not at mine,” i.e. when I have gay sex I’m on the top, you’re on the bottom! Such ferocious sexual language was not unusual from Gonzaga, a man who often sealed his letters, not with a signet ring with his coat of arms, but an image from an ancient Roman token depicting a couple having anal sex.

We aren’t 100% sure how these tokens were used in antiquity, but many thousands exist depicting different sex acts. One theory is that they were tokens used at brothels; one bought them at the central cashier and redeemed inside, like ordering off a menu with tokens with a photo of the food, and Gonzaga was a collector of antiquities, especially *crude* antiquities.

Image of both sides of what looks like a coin. The front depicts two naked people face down on a bed in the act of having anal sex. The back, surrounded by a Roman olive garland, depicts the Roman numeral III, indicating value and price as the token is used in a brothel.

Ancient Rome left us *thousands* of phalluses: phallus-shaped lamps, ceramic good luck phalluses displayed by the doors of shops to bring abundance, the many phalluses broken off of ancient statues by accidents or deliberate art censorship, and Gonazaga was one of many collectors.

Photograph of four ancient Roman clay oil lamps in the shape of satyrs with enormous penises, from the Secret Cabinet of the Archaeological Museum in Naples which collects a huge number of the kinds of sexually explicit antiquities that fascinated Gonzaga and his contemporaries.
Four ancient Roman clay oil lamps in the shape of satyrs with enormous penises, from the Secret Cabinet of the Archaeological Museum in Naples which collects a huge number of the kinds of sexually explicit antiquities that fascinated Gonzaga and his contemporaries.

 

From the same museum collection, an ancient Roman bronze flying phallus, with additional phalluses coming off of it, with bells hanging from it, designed to hang like a wind chime or a bell on a store's front door.
From the same museum collection, an ancient Roman bronze flying phallus, with additional phalluses coming off of it, with bells hanging from it, designed to hang like a wind chime or a bell on a store’s front door.

For those wondering, Gonzaga *did not* use the anal sex image to seal letters to his wife Isabella d’Este, he had a more formal seal for such letters– there are fascinating collections of their letters, showing their negotiated co-rule of Mantua and almost good-cop-bad-cop balancing of performance of power.

Isabella d'Este and Francesco Gonzaga: Power Sharing at the Italian Renaissance Court Sarah D.P. Cockram

Gonzaga also had a love-affair with his sister-in-law Lucrezia Borgia, wife of Isabella’s brother Duke Alfonso d’Este of Ferrara. Lucrezia’s more famous affair was with the poet-scholar Pietro Bembo, whose exchange poetic romantic letters Byron called “The Prettiest love letters in the world.”

The Prettiest Love Letters in the World: Letters between Lucrezia Borgia and Pietro Bembo 1503 to 1519 Translated and prefaced by Hugh Shankland, Wood engravings by Richard Shirley Smith

The Lucrezia-Gonzaga letters are *not like that*, and much more along the lines of “Let me describe my enormous penis.” “I love when you describe your enormous penis!” Their contrast with the Lucrezia-Bembo letters reveal Lucrezia as who enjoyed many different genres of love & relationship. Francesco Gonzaga’s refusal to duel Galeazzo Sanseverino, though hilariously dramatic, was also strategic, magnifying the differences between the two of them in order to avoid risking losing face if he lost the duel against Galeazzo. Given that this is 1503, many are surprised to see gay sex be so overt, both in Gonzaga’s letter and Galezzo’s relationship with Duke Ludovico, a gay relationship fully public in the face of all Italy.  Didn’t the Inquisition police such things with an iron fist? Yes *and* no.

Meme image of the silly Spanish Inquisition from Monty Python, with the caption "Everyone Expects the Inquisition."

The answer is that Renaissance justice was extremely malleable if one had *political influence* meaning in the period *patronage*. If you were powerful (duke, marquis, cardinal) you *and those in your favor* could get away with anything, and not just local enforcement but even the Inquisition didn’t dare interfere. There’s a letter from a friend in Rome to Machiavelli saying Rome is cracking down on homosexuality, and all their gay friends *who don’t work for cardinals* are scared & doing things like hiring female prostitutes to hang around & make them look straight. Those who work for cardinals are safe. Elite favor created bubbles of liberty beyond the law. We even have letters of inquisitors complaining to each other about dukes insisting their courtiers and favorite scholars be allowed to have and read banned books, and that they can do nothing. The Inquisition needed local authorities to cooperate with them, lend them troops, jail cells etc., and the popes were from political families and needed allies, and would rather let the Duke of Milan parade his boyfriend around than piss him off in the middle of a French invasion.

Map of central and northern Italy circa 1450, showing the Papal States surrounded by a complex colorful array of other powers, clearly a messy political situation.
Map of central and northern Italy circa 1450, showing the Papal States surrounded by a complex colorful array of other powers, clearly a messy political situation.

This applied high & low: in Florence, a carpenter who works for a middlingly-important family gets in trouble, he writes to his employer, they write to a bigger family they serve, & a letter from Lorenzo de Medici or Palla Strozzi gets the sentence on the books (death!) reduced to a small fine.

Goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini’s unreasonably interesting autobiography describes how he would wait until he had a major commission from a pope or a king & *then* murder someone he hated, knowing the patron will get him off in order to still get the art they commissioned. Cellini *boasts of this* expecting the audience to be impressed with his cleverness in manipulating the system to get away with murder, maiming, vandalism, necromancy (really!), and a variety of sexual exploits. Cellini’s idol & role model, famously gay Michelangelo, was similarly never in danger since his boss was always a pope or duke. Even a pope authorized a crackdown on the general populace, it didn’t apply to the man painting His Holiness’s ceiling.

This is why those goons at the start of Romeo & Juliet are willing to risk their lives for the Montagues & Capulets: Lord Capulet is their social safety net, who’ll care for them if they’re disabled, raise their orphans if they’re killed, get them off if they commit crimes, and protect them if they’re queer.

Meme showing a combat scene with actors in Renaissance garb stabbing each other, with the captions: "Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?" "Yes, to protect my boyfriend!"

This flexible judicial system—one sentence on the books, a much lighter one if someone important writes a letter—is how homosexuality, radical heterodoxy etc. could be illegal yet *not* covert, and how the ferocious sentence in the law (Off with his head! Off with his hands!) was so rarely enforced that it’s the aberration, not the norm. My friend Michael Roche’s brilliant book “Forbidden Friendships” shows how 40% to 60% of Florence’s male population was indicted for sodomy (a capital offense!) at some point in their lives, yet practically all indictments ended with a fine.

Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence Michael Rocke
I cannot recommend this book enough!!!!

The exception was if you fell out of the patronage system. If you pissed off your patron, suddenly you face a ferocious justice system which will happily dismember you in the town square make an example. The message: don’t commit crimes *and anger the duke* or this will happen. This is one more way the Renaissance judicial system (then as now) operated as a tool to keep elites in power, and to keep populations obedient to elites. It’s a big part of why Enlightenment thinkers thought that making standardized sentences (one crime = one punishment) would be equalizing. Elites abuse post-Enlightenment judicial systems in many ways too, but it’s neat to be reminded what the principle of “Equality under the law” hoped to end, a world in which the desire to live and love as one wished in safety (or read and think as one wished) was another chain binding you to obedience.

I treat the entanglement of patronage and law at much greater length in “Inventing the Renaissance,” how it bound every layer of society together in a system whose coercive power is a cheering reminder that, while today’s society has many flaws, we have taken some real steps toward equality.

Galeazzo Sanseverino & Milan’s Sovereign Polycule-Threesome

Time to meet one of my favorite Renaissance friends: Galeazzo Sanseverino, a mercenary whom contemporary sources describe as the sexiest thing in pants in Italy, part of the badass polycule threesome that ruled Milan in the early 1490s.

(This is part of my series counting down to the release of my new book Inventing the Renaissance!)

Photograph of a stone statue, probably depicting Galeazzo Sanseverino as the model forSaint Victor the Martyr (statue in Milan cathedr al museum). Extremely handsome with shoulder - length curly hair, he wears a cloak over decorated Roman armor, and has his arms bound behind him in a sexy pose, giving him a homoerotic look similar to depictions of Saint Sebastian but more military.
Photograph of a stone statue, probably depicting Galeazzo Sanseverino as the model for
Saint Victor the Martyr (statue in Milan cathedral museum).

Galeazzo was the third son of Roberto Sanseverino d’Aragona, one of the most celebrated mercenary generals of the 1400s, who had fathered 25 children before dying heroically in the Battle of Calliano at the age of 69!

Relief sculpture in speckled orange marble from the tomb slab of a knight, Roberto Sanseverino. He is carved wearing full plate male, with a sword at his side and a spear in his hand, standing with great confidence.
Relief sculpture, tomb slab of Roberto Sanseverino.

Suit of silvery plate armor, standing erect. It is undecorated and practical, with very hefty protection on the shoulders. The different and inferior time - pocked quality of the helmet displayed with it shows that it is a substitute, not part of the original surviving suit.

The armor Roberto died in (captured as a trophy) still survives.Roberto’s eldest son Gianfrancesco became a general in the French king’s armies, the second Fracasso the most famous jouster in Europe and a favorite of Emperor Maximilian, and practically all his sons were soldiers, so as #3 Galeazzo had to do a *lot* to stand out. Boy did he succeed!

Miniature painting of Galeazzo Sanseverino in the midst of a procession in Milan. He wears red robes and a red cap, and carries a banner with the black eagle on gold of the emperor, which is part of the Sforza crest.
Miniature painting of Galeazzo Sanseverino in the midst of a procession in Milan.

Galeazzo became the favorite lover of Ludovico Visconti-Sforza, who ruled Milan, first as regent then as duke, until his capture by the French in 1499. He made Galeazzo leader of his armies, and trusted him with so much power & sway in the city that people called him “The Second Duke”.

Detail portrait of Ludovico Sforza from the "Pala Sforzesca." Ludovico has black hair down to the nape of his neck, a slightly chubby build, and wears a garment of costly pomegranate pattern light blue silk brocade with gold edging and a huge gold chain around his neck. The background shows the lavish garments of the saints who surround the duke in the complete painting, which shows him and his wife amid religious figures kneeling in prayer.
Detail portrait of Ludovico Sforza from the “Pala Sforzesca.
Portrait possibly of Galeazzo Sanseverino. A man with auburn shoulder - length curly hair stands looking at the viewer. He wears a black cap, a costly black velvet overgarment lined with leopard fur, a red doublet partly unbuttoned down the front, and gray gloves.
Portrait possibly of Galeazzo Sanseverino.

Galeazzo was *also* a beloved favorite of Ludovico’s young wife, Beatrice d’Este–one of the noblest princesses in Italy, sister of the Duke of Ferrara–whom sources say gave Galeazzo access to her private rooms at all hours, reveled in his company, and played croquet with him every afternoon.

Sketch of Beatrice d'Este by someone in the circle of Leonardo da Vinci. She wears anelegant gown on her sloping shoulders, and has her long hair pulled back in the Neapolitan or Spanish style favored at the court of Milan, with a circlet around the top of her head and a hair net over the back of it above a long bundled braid.
Sketch of Beatrice d’Este by someone in the circle of Leonardo da Vinci.

Beatrice had *loathed* her husband’s female lovers, like Cecilia Gallerani immortalized in Leonardo’s famous painting “Lady with an Ermine” but loved Galeazzo, and happily welcomed him as family.

Leonardo's portrait of Cecilia Galleraniknown as "Lady with an Ermine." Wearing the same hairstyle as Beatrice d'Este in her portrait, Cecilia gazes to the right while holding a snow white ermine, representing purity and virtue. She wears a blue overgown lined with gold over a red gown, and a long necklace of black beads.
Leonardo’s portrait of Cecilia Gallerani known as “Lady with an Ermine.”

While contemporary sources are very explicit about the openly sexual relationship between Ludovico and Galahad, no sources (even written by enemies) ever suggested any sexual relationship between Galahad and Beatrice despite their intimate friendship and close contact.

Portrait probably of Beatrice d'Este by Bernardino de' Conti called "The Rothschild Lady." She wears the same hairstyle with a circlet cord around her forehead and a golden hairnet over the back of her head, above a long braid wrapped in blue fabric. A large red brooch with a drop pearl and a feather pins the circlet at the side of her head. Her gown is blue and gold spiral brocade with green sleeves attached with pink ribbons. She wears a necklace of large pearls, and holds a letter in her hand.
Portrait probably of Beatrice d’Este by Bernardino de’ Conti called “The Rothschild Lady.”

The young duchess *was* very close with her husband’s illegitimate daughter Bianca Giovanna Visconti-Sforza, who was nine when the sixteen-year-old duchess came to Milan in 1491, & became her dear companion/playmate.

Probable portrait drawing of Bianca Giovanna by Leonardo da Vinci. She too is depicted in profile with her hair in the Spanish style, a golden circlet holding a golden hair net in place above her long gold-bound braid. She wears a greenish gown over red and yellow underlayers.
Probable portrait drawing of Bianca Giovanna by Leonardo da Vinci.

To tie the family together, Ludovico had Galeazzo marry young Bianca Giovanna, making his lover his son-in-law (which is what most histories call him). Accounts describe the very young princess enjoying playing chastely with the husband who treated her more as a stepdaughter than a wife.

Portrait of Beatrice d'Este, a detail from the same painting of the ducal couple kneeling among their patron saints. She wears pearls in her hair, a costly brooch, and a gown of bold gold and black striped silk.
Portrait of Beatrice d’Este, a detail from the same painting as the earlier portrait of Ludovico.

Two sons born to the ducal couple (and doted on by Galeazzo & Bianca) seemed to secure the family’s future, and even when the French invaded in 1494 Duchess Beatrice (shown here as a girl with her sister Isabella d’Este) visited and charmed the French king, securing a (brief) alliance.

Painting detail of two teenaged girls in Renaissance gowns, leaning near each other as if one is embracing the other. Both have their hair semi-loose, with ribbons or snoodsholding it with loose netting, and wear necklaces of black beads and gowns of dark blue with many decorative ribbons showing from the edges of the white chemises underneath. The one in the foreground (probably Isabella) holds a lute.
Painting detail of two teenaged girls in Renaissance gowns, leaning near each other as if one is embracing the other.
Portrait of Massimiliano Sforza, eldest son of Beatrice and Ludovico, shown as a little boy with shoulder-length auburn hear wearing a red cap and child-sized armor.
Portrait of Massimiliano Sforza, eldest son of Beatrice and Ludovico.
Portrait of the ducal couple's second son Francesco as an infant, wearing a red doublet with green sleeves.
Portrait of the ducal couple’s second son Francesco as an infant.

Alas, the joy was not to last. Relations with the French soured, and Bianca died of illness in 1496 (age 14), then Beatrice in childbed the year after (age 22). Ludovico’s mourning was so extreme he locked himself away for 2 weeks, shaved his head, & started wearing only black & a ragged cloak.

Beatrice d'Este's tomb. She is carved in white marble, lying as if sleeping serently on a bed. She wears a gown elaborately patterned with diamond stripes, and her hair is curled in a halo around her forehead.
Beatrice d’Este’s tomb.
Detail of her face in profile in the carved tomb. She appears to be asleep, and the detail of her eyelashes in the marble is exquisite.
Detail of her face in profile in the carved tomb.

Soon after, amid the wars egged on by many including the ambitious Borgias, the French seized Milan and captured Ludovico, keeping him in an iron cage in which he used to display his high-status prisoners. For a great account of this see John Gangé’s book “Milan Undone“.

 

Book cover of Milan Undone

Galeazzo too was captured but charmed the French who let his brothers ransom him be. He went to emperor’s court where, not to be outdone in drama, he wore all black and *dyed his hair black* letting it grow unkempt down to his waist as a token of his grief for Ludovico’s continued imprisonment. It was in this phase that he challenged the ferocious Francesco Gonzaga to a duel (a story that’s now a new post!), but eventually he entered the service of the French King Louis and was still so charming he became the only non-Frenchman to ever receive the title of Royal Chamberlain of France. Ludovico died in his imprisonment in 1508. Galeazzo, long outliving all his dear ones from Milan, died heroically in battle defending France’s next king Francis I in the Battle of Pavia 1525, aged 65.

Tapestry probably showing Galeazzo Sanseverino as a mature man in his final battle, wearing armor and wielding a sword as he sits atop a finely-arrayed brown horse. He is still wearing a black garment over his armor.
Tapestry probably showing Galeazzo Sanseverino as a mature man in his final battle.

Queer & complex families like this usually get erased in histories, but I love to remember them through this painting by pre-Raphaelite artist Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, imagining a happy alternate Milan where Beatrice survives & hosts visiting Leonardo da Vinci and (inexplicably) Savonarola.

A painting of the court at Milan. Standing on a checkerboard floor in front of a frescoed colonnade, Leonardo da Vinci shows a model of his flying machine to thoughtful Duke Ludovico and his son Massimiliano, who appears to be six or seven years old (older than he was when his mother died and father was captured). To the left, his mother Duchess Beatrice sits in one of a pair of fancy red chairs, while the other stands empty but a man who could easily be Galeazzo Sanseverino stands behind it, leaning close to the duchess whispering in her ear. Standing behind them are Cecilia Galerani, Elizabetta Gonzaga, and Savonarola, all recognizable from their famous portraits. A page boy behind holds a pet monkey. To the right, behind the Duke, three gentleman courtiers in gorgeous court finery watch, two looking at the model while one veils his mouth with his hat as he whispers to his companions
An imaginative 19th century painting of the court at Milan by the fantastic Pre-Raphaelite artist Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale: Leonardo da Vinci shows a model of his flying machine to thoughtful Duke Ludovico and his son Massimiliano, who appears to be six or seven years old (older than he was when his mother died and his father was captured, making this painting alternate history!). To the left, the boy’s mother Duchess Beatrice sits in one of a pair of fancy red chairs, while the other stands empty but a man who could easily be Galeazzo Sanseverino stands behind it, leaning close to the duchess whispering in her ear. Standing behind them are Cecilia Galerani, Elizabetta Gonzaga, and (inexplicably?!) Savonarola, all recognizable from their famous portraits. A page boy behind holds a pet monkey. To the right, behind the Duke, three gentleman courtiers in gorgeous court finery watch, two looking at the model while one veils his mouth with his hat as he whispers to his companions. So fantastic to see actual alternate history represented, yet another proof how linked the Pre-Raphaelite art movement was to the roots of modern fantastic, historical, and speculative fiction!

Check out my post on the Gonzaga duel story if you’d like to read more!

Resistance when the Tyrant is in Power: Florence’s Vasari Corridor

Let’s talk about resistance after a conqueror takes power. Specifically let’s talk about this bendy yellow building, and what it shows us about the moment the Florentine Republic finally fell to its kleptocratic/proto-capitalist banking-fortune Medici conquerors.

(Originally a Bluesky thread, part of my countdown to the release of Inventing the Renaissance)

Photograph of a building in Florence. A tall thin stone section rises up, from street level several stories. About the level of the second story, a yellow section sticks out from the outside of it, awkwardly wrapping around the outside of the stone part, supported by elegant sticky - outy triangular struts. The yellow section has several small circular windows, much too small for a human to climb through, barely large enough for a chubby cat.

In a post last week, I talked about how Renaissance towns used to be full of tall stone towers, built by rich families as mini-fortresses, & Florence got sick of people hiding in their fireproof towers while setting fire to rivals’ houses & letting things burn, so they made everyone knock the tops off.

Photo of a model of Bologna, with so many earthy pink tall skinny towers sticking up from every block of the terra-cotta-roofed town that it looks like plant seeds starting to come up in spring. Around the edge you can see the city's moat and battlemented walls, looking tiny compared to the towers which rise to six or seven times the height of the three-story buildings around them.

The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars

Centuries later, the stubs of former towers were still conspicuous, and owning one was a mark of prestige, that you were rich & powerful *before* the tower ban. Tower nubs symbolized patrimony and stability. With which we can now recognize our yellow thing going around one of these nubs. Why?

A photo of a street in Florence. Many tourists walk along and the buildings are all sho ps and eateries. In the center, conspicuous between buildings of yellow or beige stucco, is one building made of crude - looking yellowish stone, very rough and undecorated, with few windows and all small compared to its neighbors. A couple doors down, a sec ond conspicuous stone section like this sticks up, also strangely blank and rough amid its yellow neighbors. Both stop about half a story above the roofs of the three - story buildings on either side of them.
The stone building at center above is one of the distinctive rough stone tower nubs, originally much, much taller.
Image from further away pointing out how the yellow architectural feature, shown in the first image, wraps around one of these recognizable towers.
Our yellow architectural feature wrapping around another such tower nub.

 

The iconic Vasari Corridor was built by a conqueror who feared his people. This lovely yellow walkway over the bridge connected the old seat of government (which he symbolically had to occupy) to the new palace where he lived, keeping him from assassination behind solid walls.

Photograph of Florence's iconic Ponte Vecchio, the Old Bridge. A lower stone section with arches is covered with tiny houses in various shades of golden stucco, with little square widows with green or red shutters. Along the upper portion going across above the roofs of the tiny buildings is a long yellow corridor, matching what we saw wrap around the tower. The picturesque combination is photographed in twilight, with lights shimmering on the deep blue water. In the river below, a totally inappropriate gondola full of tourists is looking up at the bridge (Florence did not have gondolas, only Venice did, this is very silly, but very pretty!)

It was an architectural show of force, as all the families with property in the way were pressured to submit to the new duke’s demand to let him build his walkway over their roofs or even through their homes. It was also a show of fear, perhaps best personified by the fact that

Architectural diagram of the Vasari Corridor. Amid the various buildings of Florence, shown in gray, the fully colored walkway stands out. It starts in the top left at the Palazzo Vecchio, the old battlemented square palace with its tall clock tower. From there the terra cotta roof of the yellow walkway extends straight to the right to the river, then along the river to the bridge, then turns across the bridge and meanders through the buildings on the far side of the river until it reaches the large Pitti P alace complex. You can clearly see how in some sections it goes through what would have been public space, going above streets and sidewalks, but in other areas plows through private homes, and even through the small church of Santa Felicita.

around the same time that Duke Cosimo built this fortified commuter lane to avoid his people, his neighbor Duke Alfonso d’Este of Ferrara used to walk around his city buck naked (with his dick in one hand & a sword in the other) to show off his confidence that no one dared touch a d’Este.

Portrait of young Duke Cosimo I de Medici. He barely has any beard, and looks barely twenty. He wears very elaborately dec orated etched shiny armor, with a helmet in his hands, and stands in front of a velvety drape. He has no insignia of knighthood etc. but looks very warlike, and his armor has brackets for bracing a lance, for jousting.
Duke Cosimo I de Medici

 

Portrait of Duke Alfonso d'Este. He has a grizzled full beard. Wearing a red and black fur - lined brocade overgarment over a red velvet robe, he leans nonchalantly on a cannon, with his other hand on the gold - hilted sword at his b elt. A dignified chain of membership in a prestigious order of knighthood hangs around his neck (Order of Saint Michael, of France).
Duke Alfonso d’Este

The d’Este were a *very* blue blooded old family, stably in power for generations, propped up by Venice, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the papacy who all wanted stability in the duchy that was the buffer zone between their three empires, minimizing direct war.

Ma p of northern Italy. Ferrara is highlighted in yellow, positioned in between the top left section (circled in blue) which is under the dominion of the Holy Roman Emperor, the top right section which is under the ruler of Venice (circled in green), and the bottom section circled in red which is the Papal States. Tuscany is also visible as a gap between these empires to the left, but Ferrara is the skinny choke point, just south of Venice and north of Bologna.

In contrast, the Medici were mere merchant scum, commoner equals of their neighbors who, back when everyone important in Florence had a tower, hadn’t had an impressive one. Bowing before a noble-blooded prince made sense to people at the time, before that family down the street?

Machiavelli said if people are deeply invested in an institution they fight for it, so places used to monarchy (like Milan) if they became republics yield to new conquerors easily (Milan did in 1450) but peoples who truly love their would never stop fighting for their ancient liberty.

Florence did fight the ducal takeover. Cellini’s Perseus statue, the topic of my first thread in this series, commemorated Duke Cosimo crushing of one violent uprising, & his desire to cast the severed heads of his enemies in eternal bronze was a show of force, but also fear.

Left' A bronze statue of naked Perseus, beautifully muscular and youthful, holding aloft the severed head of Medusa from whose neck gore is dribbling in streams. He wears a beautiful classical helmet with wings on it, and holds a curved classical sword. In the background one can see the arched roof of the Renaissance loggia above him. Right: An orange book cover showing the same statue in much the same position, though one can also see Medusa's headless body at Perseus's triumphant feet, her neck streaming gore. The title "Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age" is superimposed over the statue, with the word "the" pierced by the sword.

Cellini’s Perseus & the Violence of Renaissance Art

When Duke Cosimo wanted to build his elevated private commuter tunnel, those heads on pikes were fresh memories. Most neighbors yielded to his architectural conquest, but there in his way was one old tower nub, cramped, unfashionable, cold, but patrimony of the Mannelli family who… were descended from the Roman Manlii family who’d had a consul as early as 480 BC, peers of Cicero and Caesar, who’d already owned the tower a century when Boccaccio’s friend Francesco Mannelli lived in it during the Black Death, 200 years before Duke Cosimo took power.

So when the duke unveiled his plans to blast a hole through it, the Mannelli told the young conqueror to get stuffed. Cosimo knew if he violated this symbol of ancient patrimony, every *other* propertied family would turn on him. The conqueror didn’t dare cross that line.

This wasn’t idealistic resistance; it came from one of the most oligarchic and entrenched of social forces: property rights. But it was resistance, and it worked. Around the tower the corridor went. Every generation thereafter pointed to it as a place the people drew the line, and won.

Image again of the corridor wrapping awkwardly around the tower.Portrait again of Duke Cosimo I.

This is not a story of the kind of resistance that groundswells and overthrows the tyrants. The Medici stayed in power until the family died out, they were never overthrown. But they were *kept in check.* A line the conqueror doesn’t dare cross is a powerful line, that protects much behind it.

Stories of revolution are dramatic and cathartic, but we also need stories like this, of resistance *under tyranny* that drew a line, *reducing harm* even while tyrant stayed. Nor was this the only time Florence drew such a line.

Rewinding a century, the Medici rose to power around 1430 through a combination of cunning, cash & cultural soft power under Cosimo the Elder the great-great-great-grandfather of the Duke Cosimo. Many times in that century Florence drew the line.

Portrait of Cosimo the Elder, wearing very expensive but humble - in - rank merchant's red robes and a merchant's red hat. He sits in a wooden chair. Next to him grows a laurel tree with a ribbon wrapped around it, repr e senting his noble descendants especially Lorenzo il Magnifico, his grandson.
Portrait of the original Cosimo de Medici the elder, dressed in merchant-appropriate red robes, lined with fur which shows they were extremely expensive, but very much not what a duke would wear.

 

Portrait of Duke Cosimo I again , looking much more like a nobleman in his shiny armor compared with his humble mercantile great, great, great - grandfather.
Portrait of Duke Cosimo I, wearing very warlike and splendid armor, looking very ducal exactly as his merchant-class descendants didn’t dare look in portraits. (Despite Cosimo’s grandsons in fact owning armor and jousting, but what you choose to look like in a *portrait* is different.

They drew it violently with uprisings or assassination attempts in 1433, 1466, 1478, 1494, 1430, 1437 etc., and more quietly many times between through moments of resistance like the Mannelli telling the conqueror he and his corridor to (literally) get bent (around their tower).

The tale of resistance told by the Mannelli Tower isn’t one of revolution, it’s one of slowing down the shifting baseline. The baseline did keep shifting, less liberty for all and more power for the conquerors, but it shifted * slowly*, and many lives and rights sheltered behind that line. If we define victory as preserving the republic, there’s no happy ending, the Medici won. But if their conquest started in 1430 and they still didn’t dare pierce a symbolic tower 130 years later, that is a lot of slowing the baseline compared to what Florence’s conquered neighbors endured. Slowing the baseline shift meant many generations of Medici being careful, respecting core rights, while Alfonso d’Este didn’t just parade around Ferrara buck naked, he had his artists thrown in the dungeon if he thought they weren’t painting fast enough.

Machiavelli said peoples who treasure their liberties can preserve them even through long stretches of tyranny. That it’s peoples like 1450 Milan who yield quickly to the tyrant and don’t try to hold the line who lose their liberty completely. He wasn’t wrong.

We don’t like resistance stories without a cathartic revolution, they don’t feel like blowing up the Death Star. They feel like loss. They’re not. We need to revisit these worst case scenarios to see that, even when resistance didn’t *win* it did *work*. It saved lives & livelihoods.

A detailed image of Perseus's torso as he holds up the severed head. You can see the name of the sculptor "Benvenuto Cellini" written on a strap which goes diagonally across Perseus's naked chest, holding his scabbard - the helmet and scabbard are the only clothes he wears. A pigeon sitting on the sword is humorously positioned just in the right spot to hide the penis.

 

Florence’s republic didn’t fall to the Medici only once, it kicked them out in 1433, in 1494, in 1512, in 1530, it took many conquests. But even when it *was* the worst case, the final fall, resistance kept Florence a place that with noticeably more liberty than its neighbors.

No one in Florence knew which republic was the last republic, not in 1430, 1478, 1494, 1512, or 1530, but they did know *all* resistance held the line and preserved liberties. Partial victory is powerful. We must remember that.

(To learn more “Inventing the Renaissance” comes out in a few weeks!)

 

The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars

Photo of a model of Bologna, with so many earthy pink tall skinny towers sticking up from every block of the terra-cotta-roofed town that it looks like plant seeds starting to come up in spring. Around the edge you can see the city's moat and battlemented walls, looking tiny compared to the towers which rise to six or seven times the height of the three-story buildings around them.

Looks fake, doesn’t it?  This implausible Medieval forest of towers, as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers, is our best reconstruction of the town of Bologna at its height, toward the end of the Medieval Guelph-Ghibelline wars. We don’t see many such towers today… or think we don’t, but actually their remnants are all over Italy.

Often when in Florence one sees buildings like this, where one section is rough stone standing out amid stucco neighbors.

A photo of a street in Florence. Many tourists walk along and the buildings are all shops and eateries. In the center, conspicuous between buildings of yellow or beige stucco, is one building made of crude-looking yellowish stone, very rough and undecorated, with few windows and all small compared to its neighbors. A couple doors down, a second conspicuous stone section like this sticks up, also strangely blank and rough amid its yellow neighbors. Both stop about half a story above the roofs of the three-story buildings on either side of them.

These are actually the bottom nubs of Medieval stone towers. The town of San Gimigniano (below) is famous for having several still intact. Wealthy families built these as mini-fortresses within the city, where they could defend against riots, enemy families (think Montagues and Capulets) and invasion:

A classic image of the skyline of the town of San Gimigniano, with many smaller houses three or four stories tall with the characteristic Italian yellow stucco walls and terra cotta tiled roofs, but with eleven stone towers sticking up far above them, towering twelve stories or more. The towers are very plain and blank, just squares of stone without decoration and with few windows, clearly utilitarian more than aesthetic.

Signs of wealth and prestige, these all-stone buildings were also fireproof, leading to a terrible but effective tactic: take your family, treasures & goods up into your tower then set fire to enemies’ homes and let the city burn around you while you sit safe above. This was VERY BAD for cities.

Photo of a street corner in San Gimigniano, with several plain-sided square stone towers sticking up above the roofline against a bright blue sky.
street corner in San Gimigniano

After many disasters, Florence’s solution was to BAN private buildings over a certain height, forcing everyone who had a tower to knock the top off down to regulation height, leaving these recognizable stone nubs all around the city. This round one below is the oldest (now a restaurant).

Photograph of some buildings crammed very close together. Those on the left and right are yellow stucco with large windows. In the middle, touching both of them, is a circular section made of rough nubbly stone, that really looks like it could be the bottom part of a round castle tower, it just needs battlements or a pointy cone roof. Instead it's lopped off flat just above the roofs of the other buildings.

My favorite tower stub is this one, in Via dei Cerchi. I lived on the top floor for a year as a grad student, up 111 steps! I had calves of steel by spring, but the views from the top looked like someone had put a poster of Florence on the wall except it was a window!

Photo of a street of town buildings, all squeezed together sharing walls with no gaps between. The one on the left is yellow stucco, with an archway and a "Coin" grocery store. The one on the right is yellow stucco above with decorative faux rustic stone facing on the lower floor. In between them, about the width of one storefront, is a section where the wall is rough rubbley stone, with one small and one large arched door at the bottom, and very small windows above. The large arched door would have had a fortress gate large enough for horses to enter, but is now a tabacchi shop.

 

Photograph through a semicircular window, showing a roofline and the tower of Florence's famous Palazzo Vecchio sticking up above. This window was in the bathroom! I had this view from the toilet! It was incredible!

Only city buildings were allowed to exceed the mandated height, which is why Florence’s skyline is now all special buildings: monastery bell towers, the cathedral & baptistery, Orsanmichele the city’s granary (tall to keep grain away from water & mice), the seat of government, and one special guy…

Photograph of the Florence skyline from the south side of the river. Sticking up above the sea of fairly flat tiled roofs one can see a few distinctive buildings. To the left is the battlemented Palazzo Vecchio with its tall square battlemented tower. To the right and behind it (hard to see) is the city granary. Toward the center is the red dome of San Lorenzo, and in front of it the white hexagonal pointy roof of the Baptistery. Just to the right of the baptistery is the enormous cathedral with its stripey bell tower and massive dome. In front of the cathedral are two towers, one pointy, and one square; the square one is circled in yellow and we'll zoom in on it in a moment.

The tower on the right here is part of Bargello, the prison & police fortress, but it didn’t start that way. It was built by a private family, who sold it to the city when the law banning towers was passed, and the city incorporated it into their prison fort.

A photograph taken from my tower apartment across the roofs of Florence. Two golden stone towers stick up above all the red tiled roofs. On the left is a pointy one with crosses on it, part of the Badia monastery. On the right is a square one with battlements and big open windows, connected to a fortress with more battlements.

The city jail had to be a fortress in case someone from a powerful family was arrested and the family sent goons to break them out (those guys who bite their thumbs in the opening scene of Romeo & Juliet would *totally* have stormed the jail to bust Romeo out!).

Photograph of the inside of a Medieval fortress. The interior courtyard of pale stone is surrounded by a covered loggia with rounded arches, and the walls are covered with coats of arms of past noblemen who served as captains of the police. In the center is a well, to give it is own source of water. A woman in a brown shirt stands near the well, looking very tiny in the huge courtyard.

In this photo you can see how the brick battlements are a later addition, added to the tower as part of its transformation from private fortress to public.

In the foreground is a stone wall with battlements. Sticking up behind it, against a bright blue sky, is the top of a stone tower. The tower itself is the same yellowish stone as the wall, but on top of the tower is a balcony area with battlements clearly added in red brick, and lined on top with metal sheeting to protect against the weather. The golden weathercock on top is on edge at the moment, and barely visible.

What did Florence look like back when it had all its towers? Its long-time ally across the mountains Bologna is famous for still having two intact towers, but in the Middle Ages Bologna was known as the City of 100 Towers because so many families built them. The reconstructions look absolutely incredible. Florence didn’t have so many but did have dozens, so the richest part of the city center would have looked much like this.  Much to the despair of the city fire brigade!

Photo of a model of Bologna, with so many earthy pink tall skinny towers sticking up from every block of the terra-cotta-roofed town that it looks like plant seeds starting to come up in spring. Around the edge you can see the city's moat and battlemented walls, looking tiny compared to the towers which rise to six or seven times the height of the three-story buildings around them.

So, whether in a film or on the street, if you ever see a historic Italian city and walk along a block where for some reason one chunk of wall is stone and all the others smooth, you’re probably looking at a relic of the faction feuds that Guido Ruggiero aptly calls “The Italian 300 Years’ War.”

View down a street in Florence. The buildings on both sides are yellow stucco with stone windowframes, but the one at the end is naked brownish stone all the way up, with small windows one of which has a balcony outside with flowers.

I talk about this long war in “Inventing the Renaissance,” one of many points of continuity which show how the supposed difference between a bad “Dark Ages” and Renaissance “golden age” is 100% propaganda, but fascinating propaganda with a deep history.

And I’ll share more tidbits like over the coming days as we countdown to the book’s release!

 

Cellini’s Perseus & the Violence of Renaissance Art

Inventing the Renaissance comes out in one month in the UK (2 months USA), so I’m going to try to post daily this month on social media to share cool pictures and stories of things related to the book. I thought I would also gather them here, posting them sometimes as individual posts, sometimes gathering a few together when they’re shorter. So to start here are some notes on Benvenuto Cellini’s stunning Perseus, my pick for a cover illustration (thank you, editors!)

Left: A bronze statue of naked Perseus, beautifully muscular and youthful, holding aloft the severed head of Medusa from whose neck gore is dribbling in streams. He wears a beautiful classical helmet with wings on it, and holds a curved classical sword. In the background one can see the arched roof of the Renaissance loggia above him.  
Right: An orange book cover showing the same statue in much the same position, though one can also see Medusa's headless body at Perseus's triumphant feet, her neck streaming gore. The title "Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age" is superimposed over the statue, with the word "the" pierced by the sword.

For me, this statue personifies the Renaissance because, by standing opposite Michelangelo’s David by the Palazzo Vecchio, it’s part of a suite of famous statues every one of which commemorates some big & often violent tumult. When we meet famous Renaissance art we often hear about the artist but not the context. The severed head is there for a reason!

Photograph of the same bronze statue of Perseus from behind. To the lower right Michelangelo's David stands cattycorner to it, with the Medieval stone wall of Florence's Palazzo Vecchio behind it. A balcony above is crowned by the flags of the European Union, Italian Republic, and Florentine Republic.

Cellini lived in the rocky decades when (after the death of the famous Lorenzo de Medici) the Medici family had been kicked out and strove to return and seize control of the city by force. Duke Cosimo I took over in the 1530s, and commissioned the Perseus in the 1540s right after a bloody revolt.

A detailed image of Perseus's torso as he holds up the severed head. You can see the name of the sculptor "Benvenuto Cellini" written on a strap which goes diagonally across Perseus's naked chest, holding his scabbard - the helmet and scabbard are the only clothes he wears. A pigeon sitting on the sword is humorously positioned just in the right spot to hide the penis.

Perseus’s face deliberately resembled the then-teenaged duke, and Florence had long displayed corpses of traitors that square, often hung from battlements, sometimes as heads on pikes. When the statue was unveiled Medusa’s head in the duke’s hand represented very real & recent rebel heads! Detail from Bronzino's painted portrait of Duke Cosimo I, his bold straight nose and face shape resembling the face of Perseus.

Detail of Perseus's face.

A zoomed-in shot of the severed head of Medusa. Her eyes are closed as if in sleep, and her face beautiful, her hair snakes curled up like the beautiful classical curls common on ancient statues. Bronze streams of gore come down from her neck as if she was just killed.

To increase the gore factor, the statue is positioned at the edge of a roof, so when it rains Perseus remains dry, but water drips down the gore streaming from her head, from the sword point, and from her severed neck!

A photograph of the same statue angled from below shows how the sword, severed head, and the body's neck streaming gore all stick out forward from the body, so they can be in the rain while the body is under the roof above.

To hammer the message home, a relief at the bottom shows Perseus rescuing Andromeda (a personified Florence). In the top right corner a cavalry battle (which does not appear in the Perseus story!) shows the defeat of the rebels, as Perseus “rescues” Florence from the “dragon” of republican rule.

A photograph of the square bronze frieze described in the main text: in the middle Andromeda sits on a stack of stones which look conspicuously like the stones the Palazzo Vecchio itself is made of (the seat of government and symbol of the city). Above her, Perseus flies down with upraised sword to slay the sea dragon which threatens her from the bottom left. To the right, mourning citizens watch the dramatic scene, but above and behind them men on horses clash and the pikes and halberds of German-style soldiers of the era the statue was made stick up above the crowd.

In the base, Jupiter, Perseus’s father, threatens to strike anyone who harms his son, a warning of reprisals from Cosimo’s allies, especially the Emperor whose Landsknecht knights Cosimo quartered under the very roof where the statue stood! Giving it its current name “Loggia dei Lanzi.”

Another angle of the same statue from below shows the elaborate white base covered with decorations, and at the center a niche with a small statue of Jupiter, holding lightning aloft to threaten the viewer.

When we celebrate Renaissance art w/o acknowledging the terror & violence that shaped it, we repeat the myth of a bad “Dark Ages” & Renaissance “golden age” a very potent piece of propaganda, which is what Inventing the Renaissance is about, and it has plenty more Cellini anecdotes, he was a wild man who lived a wild life, documented by his book which I will always call “The Implausibly Interesting Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini.”

I hope you’ll enjoy more tidbits like this in coming days!

Inventing the Renaissance (book) coming out!

It’s time at last. If you’ve enjoyed my ExUrbe blog posts and stories about history over the years, here’s the book-length version on its way!  Inventing the Renaissance: the Myth of a Golden Age, coming out February 13th 2025 in the UK (pre-order through Amazon.co.uk in hardcoverKindle e-book or Audiobookand March 21st in the USA (pre-order from Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or for Nook or Kindle), or it’s always best to order from your favorite independent bookshop!


Combining updated versions of some of my most popular blog series (including those on Machiavelli, the Black Death & Renaissance, the history of Progress, and history of atheism) with tons of new material , this fat and playful whopper of a book (how is it 768 pages?!) is packed with fun anecdotes and intimate details, weaving together the lives of fifteen different Renaissance figures, some famous, some obscure (entrepreneurs, musicians, artists, heretics, princesses, assassins, prophets) to look at where the myth of a bad Middle Ages and golden Renaissance came from, a story partly about the period and equally about the centuries since, and the many political movements that have found it useful to claim a supposed golden age.

OFFICIAL DESCRIPTION OF THE BOOK (more of my own comments below):

The Renaissance is one of the most studied and celebrated eras of history. Spanning the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of modernity, it has come to symbolise the transformative rebirth of knowledge, art, culture and political thought in Europe. And for the last two hundred years, historians have struggled to describe what makes this famous golden age unique.

In Inventing the Renaissance, acclaimed historian Ada Palmer provides a fresh perspective on what makes this epoch so captivating. Her witty and irreverent journey through the fantasies historians have constructed about the period show how its legend derives more from later centuries’ mythmaking than from the often-grim reality of the period itself. She examines its defining figures and movements: the enduring legacy of Niccolò Machiavelli, the rediscovery of the classics, the rise of the Medici and fall of the Borgias, the astonishing artistic achievements of Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Cellini, the impact of the Inquisition, and the expansion of secular Humanism. Palmer also explores the ties between culture and money: books, for example, could cost as much as grand houses, so the period’s innovative thinkers could only thrive with the help of the super-rich. She offers fifteen provocative and entertaining character portraits of Renaissance men and women, some famous, some obscure, whose intersecting lives show how the real Renaissance was more unexpected, more international, and above all more desperate than its golden reputation suggests.

Drawing on her popular blogs and writing with her characteristic energy and wit, Palmer presents the Renaissance as we have never seen it before. Colloquial, funny and brilliant, this is a work of deep scholarship that will make you alternately laugh and cry.


I love the paperback cover too, it really gets across what the book is about!

I started writing Inventing the Renaissance in summer 2020, as a response to how constantly reporters were asking “If the Black Death caused the Renaissance, will COVID cause an economic boom?”  It’s a question founded on such profoundly distorted assumptions, I realized I couldn’t give it a short answer, a real answer required pulling back the curtain on the great and terrible Renaissance and exposing the awkward, often scared and desperate truth behind the curtain. And it took three parts:

  1. Establishing that there is no such thing as a golden age or dark age, but why the myth of dark and golden ages has been hard to wipe out because it’s so convenient for later generations, who want to use it to claim that their policy/party/movement/etc. will bring about a golden age (and to paint their rivals as the corresponding dark age).
  2. What actually caused the production of all the shiny art and architecture which makes us think the Renaissance was a golden age, but was actually born from a desperate reality.
  3. How historical change actually works, and how examining the past shows us we can never sit back and think “Well, X has happened, it will cause a golden age,” since good outcomes in history are real, but are only caused by one thing: people working hard to make it so.

The project took a long time, and ended up incorporating a ton of new material, centering on a set of fifteen mini-biographies of Renaissance figures whose paths crossed in this fascinating but desperate time, many kinds of people: a banker, a musician, an assassin, a poet, two prophets, two princesses, some heretics, ending up with our friend Machiavelli and his hard work to protect Florence during this desperate age. It’s a unique structure for a history, often retelling the same set of events several times but from different points of view, drawing on my skills as a novelist to tell stories full of passion and bias, and then to upend and invert them by suddenly switching to another point of view on the opposite side of the conflict, or zooming out to look at the different historians who have told contradictory versions of the tale.

When I sent the (very fat, very long!) manuscript off to the press I kept expecting them to tell me to cut it, separate it into different things, but my editors said they just love the way the whole thing flows, weaving together many stories, not just of the Renaissance but later eras, and drawing back the veil on historians and the work we do in inventing history, showing, with more candor than books usually do, the messy underbelly of the historian’s craft, “how the sausage gets made” so to speak.  It’s a big book but a surprisingly fast read for its length, full of warmth and intimacy as well as humor and adventure, treating historical figures as friends we meet across the diaspora of time, and history-making as a long, multigenerational collaboration where even the errors are often a fruitful and vital part of getting to better truths beyond.  It doesn’t read like most histories, but it does a lot, and, as my editors said, it ended up making them feel hopeful for our present in a way that can be rare in our desperate times.

So I hope you’ll give it a try, and enjoy sharing this taste of the Renaissance world that I’ve been living with so intimately with over my years getting to know our friends in the past, who worked so hard, and left us – not the world they wanted to make – but a world very worth having.

ORDER LINKS:

But remember, it’s always best to order from your favorite independent bookshop! If you pre-order a book they’ll notice, and they might order an extra one; that makes the biggest difference of all!

Tools for Thinking About Censorship

“Was it a government action, or did they do it themselves because of pressure?”

This is inevitably among our first questions when news breaks that any expressive work (a book, film, news story, blog post etc.) has been censored or suppressed by the company or group trusted with it (a publisher, a film studio, a newspaper, an awards organization etc.)

This is not a direct analysis of the current 2023 Chengdu Hugo Awards controversy. But since I am a scholar in the middle of writing a book about patterns in the history of how censorship operates, I want to put at the service of those thinking about the situation this zoomed-out portrait of a few important features of how censorship tends to work, drawn from my examination of examples from dozens of countries and over many centuries. The conclusions here are helpful for understanding this situation, but equally applicable to thinking about when school libraries bow to book ban pressures, how controversies impact book publishing in the USA and around the world, and historical cases: from the Inquisition, to censorious union-busting in 1950s New Zealand, to the US Comics Code Authority, to universities censoring student newspapers, etc.

The first and most important principle is that we cannot and should not draw a line between state censorship and private or civilian censorship.  Many analyses of censorship start by drawing this line and analyzing state action and private action separately.  There are many problems with trying to draw such a line, but the most important is this:

The majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power.

The majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power.

In other words, when we look at history’s major censorious regimes, all of them—I want to stress that; all of them—invested enormous resources in programs designed to encourage self-censorship, more resources than they invested in using state action to actively destroy or censor information.  This makes sense when we realize that (A) preventing someone from writing/saying/releasing something in the first place is the only way to 100% wipe out its presence, and (B) encouraging self-censorship is, dollar for dollar and man-hour for man-hour, much cheaper and more impactful than anything else a censorious regime can do.

Think about how many man-hours it takes to search thousands of homes one-by-one to confiscate and destroy a particular book, versus how cheap and easy it is to have a showy book burning or arrest of an author which scares thousands of families into destroying the book if they have it.  Will the show trial or book burning scare people into destroying every copy?  No, a few will keep it, even treasure it more because of its precious scarcity, but the number who do is no larger than the number whose copies would’ve been missed by the ever-imperfect process of the search, and the cost in manpower is 1/1000th of the cost of the search, freeing up resources for other action.

A great question to get at this is: Did the trial of Galileo succeed or fail?

If we believe that the purpose of the Inquisition trying Galileo was to silence Galileo, it absolutely failed, it made him much, much more famous, and they knew it would.  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.  The purpose of the Galileo trial was to scare Descartes into retracting his then-about-to-be-published synthesis, which—on hearing about the trial—he took back from the publisher and revised to be much more orthodox.  Descartes and thousands of other major thinkers of the time wrote differently, spoke differently, chose different projects, and passed different ideas on to the next century because they self-censored after the Galileo trial—an event whose burden in money and manpower for the Inquisition was minute compared to how hard it would have been for them to get at all those scientists.  The final form of Descartes’ published synthesis was self-censorship—self-censorship very deliberately cultivated by an outside power.

The structures that cultivate self-censorship also cause what we might call middleman censorship, when one actor (organization or person) is pressured into censoring someone else’s work, but via the same structures (fear, self-preservation) that cause self-censorship. The publisher who pulls a controversial title, the screenwriter who removes some F-bombs or queer content from colleague’s first-draft script, the arts organization which refuses to screen a politically provocative film, or the school librarian who makes use of Scholastic’s infamous option to “opt out of diverse books” at a school book fair, these people are not censoring their own creations, but their complicity in censorship is often motivated by the same structures of fear and power which censorship regimes use to cultivate self-censorship.  Outsourcing censorship to the populace—to the editor, the cinema owner, the awards committee, the teacher, or the author—multiplies the manpower of a censorship system by the number of individuals within its power, making it the single most effective tool of such systems.  Since self-censorship and middleman censorship are cultivated by these same deliberate systems of fear, they must be analyzed together, even as we still recognize the great difference between censoring a friend’s book and censoring one’s own.

Let’s look at another example closer to the present than the Inquisition: comic book censorship in the 20th century.  As many of you are aware, in 1954 a moral panic came to a peak across the English-speaking world (USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, etc.), blaming violence and sensuality in comic books for an epidemic of so-called juvenile delinquency. New Zealand (which has state censorship) created a state office for comics censorship, while in the USA (whose First Amendment prohibits Congress from taking such action) politicians, who knew they could capitalize on this moral panic, exerted pressure on comics companies until they created the supposedly-voluntary Comics Code Authority to censor comics. Grocery stores and most comics shops then stopped shelving comics that didn’t undergo its censorship, bankrupting publishers and hurting authors and artists.  Now, fast forward to the 60s and 70s, when the US Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum and again Congress could take no direct action against it, But publishers of comics centering Black heroes such as Black Panther suddenly found that the Comics Code Authority censorship process was being much more picky about their Black characters than their White characters, declaring things even as mild as a drop of sweat on the forehead of a Black astronaut as “too graphic” since it “could be mistaken for blood.”  This resulted in grueling extra work and perennial delays for such titles, pressuring comics companies to depict fewer Black heroes.

If we ask “Did the US government censor Black Panther?” our answer would be no if we insist on separating state action from self-censorship, since in this case the result is three levels of action removed: Congress put pressure, that created the Comics Code Authority, its individual censors felt anxious about race (egged on by government amplification of racial tension), those censors pressured comics publishers, comics publishers pulled titles and comics artists included fewer Black characters.  Even while faithful to “Congress shall make no law…” state action was able to create a middleman censorship cascade in which no direct government agent or employee acted, but which the state caused and intended to cause.  Did the FBI operations that were trying to undermine Civil Rights activism send agents to pressure the Comics Code Authority?  We don’t need to know whether they did or not to say confidently that the censorship of Black Panther and titles like it was a deliberate and intended consequence of state action.  The same is true whenever and wherever state action causes of private individuals and organizations to self-censor out of fear and pressure.

When we hear self-censorship discussed in the media, these days it is most often brought up when discussing cultural pressures or other non-state action, such as in the depressingly familiar rhetoric claiming that trends like political correctness, “cancel culture” etc. are censorious.  We are all aware of how this rhetoric is often used in bad faith to attack rather than defend free expression (on college campuses, for example), but there is a second and separate way it is destructive: this rhetoric advances the illusion that self-censorship and middleman censorship are primarily civilian phenomena caused by public attitudes and individual or community actors, making it easier to disguise how often they are, in fact, direct and intentional results of government or other large-scale organized action. And because they work through projection of fear and power, they can also affect people living in regions or nations outside the direct power of the government doing the censoring, citizens of other nations having their thoughts actions shaped by the tactics which outsource censorship from state actors to anyone who sees them and fears them.

I don’t want to dwell too much on what our evidence is that state-censorship often aims to operate through self-censorship or middleman censorship (the book will have many examples from many times and places) but to give one more very vivid one, here is a photo of some pages from a treatise on scientific logic by Cardano, published in the 1500s.  Cardano was condemned by the Inquisition, and the order was given to expurgate copies of the text, meaning going through based on a guide published in the Inquisition’s Index of prohibited books.

In the copy shown above (now at my university’s library in Chicago), an Inquisitor has faithfully gone through page by page and excised the controversial sections, scribbling them over with ink, or when both sides of a page were condemned cutting them out with scissors.  This took hours of work by a highly-trained, expensive-to-hire, Latin-reading Inquisitor.  It would have taken seconds to throw this book on the fire.

The Roman Inquisition in the 1500s was constantly complaining about its 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 books enabled by the newfangled printing press.  Why would such an organization waste hundreds of man-hours per copy on crossing out pages when they could have trivially burned the book and moved on?

Let’s look at another example:

This example is an encyclopedia of animals by Konrad Gesner from the late 1500s, an entirely secular book with zero controversial content.  But Gesner was a good scholar, and cited his sources, always placing near his picture of each animal a note saying “many thanks to the learned and excellent Dr. So-and-so of Such-a-place for sending me this picture.”  The Inquisition’s order for this book was that Catholics were allowed to own the book, and all the content in it, but wherever Gesner thanks a scholar, if the person he thanks is Protestant, the Inquisitor or the book’s owner must cross out the words “learned and excellent” to enforce the Church’s lesson that Protestants were not learned and excellent, they were bad and wrong.

This use of (limited!) manpower is absurd to the point of hilarity if we imagine the Inquisition’s goal was the destruction of information, but it wasn’t.  It was…

…like Bart Simpson repeating a phrase on the blackboard, the rote expurgation turned this completely secular book into a tool for projecting the Inquisition’s power, as you turned the pages, and page after page saw that stark black patch of crossed-out text, reminding you over and over of the presence and power of the Inquisition.  It was a projection of power, something to make authors and printers think “I don’t want my book to go through that.”  This also made use of middleman censorship: one could apply to the Inquisition for an official license granting permission to own restricted books, but one of the conditions of this seeming-privelige was that you yourself had to go through and cross out the sentences they banned. This made the very people who loved and wanted to see restricted books into middleman censors excising text from their own copies, and experiencing the same mortifying and emotionally manipulative reinforcement a child does when forced to write a motto on a blackboard. It was a didactic tool designed to be a constant reminder of the authority’s presence—just like the Comics Code Authority seal on the front of a comic, or the movie ratings green screen on a film.

Now, in the case of very large-scale censorship regimes, like the Inquisition, Stalin’s USSR, and indeed modern China, it is hard to believe they actually do suffer from limited resources.  The image rises in our minds of Orwell’s imaginary Ministry of Information, which has infinite resources, infinite manpower, and whose Thought Police partner the Ministry of Love can surveille every citizen every instant of the day.  No real censorship regime has ever approached that.  When we look at internal documents from the USSR, the Inquisition, all of them, we see constant complaints about lack of information, lack of people, lack of funds, they always depict themselves as in emergency crisis mode, desperately trying to keep up with an overwhelming task.  In the period that Spain’s Inquisition was wildly out of Rome’s control, the Roman Inquisition even printed manuals to guide its Inquisitors on how to bluff their way through pretending they were on top of what Spain was doing!  Even though they did have huge resources, those resource still were and are nowhere near enough to actively police all people and all things at all times.

But that sense of desperation and lack of manpower is only visible in the internal presentation of such regimes, carefully concealed from public view.  It is in the external propaganda of such regimes that they present themselves as always on top of things, always everywhere, always watching always as stable and effective as Nineteen Eighty-Four’s ministries.  At the same moment that Rome was publishing guides for Inquisitors to BS their way through the activities of rival inquisitions, Rome was also publically proclaiming that it had everything under control.  This illusion of infinite resources itself is one of the goals of such regimes, making people more afraid, and less willing to defy.  It is about projecting power, and we must not fall for it as we evaluate the actions of such regimes asking “Why did they do A not B?”  If we believe they have infinite resources, we will always imagine some strategic mastermind plan behind it, and fear that, if we don’t see the reason, there must be something big and scary underway that we don’t know about.  This coercive fear is especially effective at extending censorship beyond a power’s borders to citizens of neighboring regimes, who are not themselves under the censor’s power but can still feel that they or friends are vulnerable to a vast, imagined Orwellian power. Opposing censorship requires all of us to recognize that we too can become tool of censorship if we fail to be vigilant against its tactics, even if we live far from its sphere of power. If we remember that Nineteen Eighty-Four is fiction, its infinite resources impossible, that these organizations all need to conserve resources, many more of their tactics become transparent.

Fear is one of the two main ways powers cultivate self-censorship and middleman censorship, but its partner is projection of power, which is not quite the same.

When we go to a movie theater and see the big green screen with “This Film Has Been Rated G etc.” we aren’t intended to feel active fear of the movie ratings board, but we are intended to feel its power, its presence, its reach.  In addition to telling us the film’s rating, that green screen is a daily reminder of the power of that censoring body, just as much as a government poster on a wall.  Seeing that ratings reminder on every film we ever see growing up subtly shapes the thought of every person who enters the filmmaking industry—or even aspires to—and every movie script in which profanity, violence, or sexuality appears is shaped, at least a little bit, by the writer’s consciousness that the work will be judged on those criteria, and that moral attitudes toward them could shape the film’s, and the writer’s, financial future.  Even if the writer goes ahead and keeps those F-bombs, the period of thinking about the issue, the debates with collaborators about the issue, those thoughts and conversations constantly reaffirm to the very people having them the presence and power of the censoring body, shaping thought, and art.

For this reason, censorship systems want to be visible.  They don’t tend to invisibly and perniciously hide their traces, they tend to advertise it: in big printed letters, blacked-out passages, or a brightly-colored screen.  Even when a blocked website redirects you to ERROR: THIS WEBSITE IS BLOCKED, that is a deliberate choice—very different from, for example, the period in which Amazon’s website invisibly redirected searches away from Hachette titles to non-Hachette books.  The Inquisition, USSR, movie ratings board, comics code authority, all such regimes could have done their work invisibly too, but instead they tend to prefer to advertise their presence, because that causes the most self-censorship ripple impact. (Amazon’s goal was not to be feared and seen as a censor, but to hurt Hachette financially, hence its very atypical tactics.)

The many nations in the world which censor their internet design a variety of experiences for the user who attempts to go to a blocked website.  Some redirect to a screen which explicitly states the page is blocked by the government and why, others to a generic error page, others load a blank page or simply leave the page loading forever.  As a rule they do not (as Amazon did) seamlessly load a different page.  While the blank or ever-loading page may seem like it is trying to make the censorship invisible, such regimes make certain their populations know that the web is censored and what those endless loading times really mean; in fact, in such a system, anytime any webpage loads slowly, the user experiences a spike of anxiety wondering if this is censorship, and if trying to go to a few too many forbidden pages might lead to a knock at the door.  Just as a black line through “learned and excellent” could turn an encyclopedia of animals into a tool for projecting power, when a page loading slowly is the sign of censorship that turns every internet glitch into an emotional reinforcement of state power, saturating lived experience.

Censorship regimes use their visibility to change the way people act and think.  They seek out actions that can cause the maximum number of people to notice and feel their presence, with a minimum of expense and manpower.  This is why deliberate unpredictability is a common tactic of censorship regimes, not trying to target every person/work/organization who does a particular thing (purchases pornography, possesses banned Jazz, once belonged to a now-suppressed political organization, tries to load blocked websites). Rather they target a few people unpredictably and conspicuously, so that everyone else in a similar situation will feel fear, and self-censor or middleman-censor more, including self-censoring in arenas unrelated to what was targeted (i.e. someone who both owns porn and supports a political resistance party might become more afraid to support that party after a widely-publicized crackdown on someone who owned porn, or vice versa).  This is an extremely potent and cost-effective tactic, and a go-to for many regimes, from Imperial Rome, to enforcement of anti-sedition laws in WWI and WWII, to today’s anime/manga censorship, etc.

When using deliberate unpredictability, regimes look for potential targets who themselves lack substantial political and economic power, but where a crackdown would be widely publicized and discussed, instilling fear in a large group of people who consider themselves similar to the object of the crackdown.  And such regimes look for targets connected to existing networks of information dissemination, so word of the crackdown will spread easily (a famous person like Galileo, a well-connected person like a newspaper editor or blogger, an organization with newsletters and its own information networks, etc.)  This makes every organization under such a regime which does fit that profile (visible to a substantial network but not powerful in itself) extra cautious, and more likely to self-censor or middleman-censor. This tactic is especially effective at frightening people outside a censor’s direct power into fearing possible consequences to friends, organizations, or themselves, psychological manipulation which lets regimes coerce other nations’ citizens into becoming part of their outsourcing of censorship. Anyone can become complicit. Just as the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, one price of free speech is eternal humility, recognizing that none of us is immune to becoming a tool of censorship if we fail to recognize how its manipulative tactics shape and distort our thoughts and actions.

As I said, I have a whole book’s worth of work on patterns in how censorship regimes work, and wanted to keep this short, and focused on principles which help us think about these questions. For more details and examples, you can see my recent lecture on the topic.  But for this particular reflection, please remember these four points:

  • The majority of censorship is self-censorship or middleman-censorship, but the majority of that is deliberately cultivated by an outside power.
  • For this reason, we cannot consider state and non-state censorship separate things. State censorship systems work dominantly via shaping and causing private censorship.
  • No real censoring body has ever had the resources of Orwell’s fictitious Ministries—not even the Inquisition or the great totalitarian powers of modernity like the USSR, but they want us to think they do. Real censorship regimes tend to see themselves as constantly underfunded and understaffed, racing to grapple overwhelming crisis, while attempting to seem all-reaching and all-knowing as a part of their own propaganda.  We must analyze their actions remembering that the need to conserve resources and seem stronger than they are shapes everything they do.
  • Censorship aims to be visible, talked about, seen, feared. This increases its power.
  • Censors’ projection of fear and power is a form of deliberate psychological manipulation which can outsource censorship far beyond the censor’s sphere of control, even to citizens of other nations. We can only combat it if we work hard to cut through the Orwellian illusion and remember the realities of how censorship works.

While we must discuss and analyze censorship when we see it, we must also remember that censorship wants to be discussed and thought about, and think about how we can make sure our responses don’t strengthen the very thing they seek to oppose, by increasing the fear felt by those within the power of such regimes.  The blacked-out word on the page and the website that loads frighteningly slowly create spikes of fear in those who see them, fear which advances the goals of the censorious regime.  So can the email inviting a comment which makes an author/editor/commentator/fan fear the consequences.

Some closing thoughts:

“The only weapon worthy of humanity, of tomorrow’s humanity, is the word.”

So wrote Yevgeny Zamyatin (188401937), one of the fathers of dystopia, author of We, a lover and writer of science fiction, who passionately supported the Russian revolution in its hopeful early days, and later opposed Stalin just as passionately.  Subjected many times to imprisonment, violence, and smear campaigns, and ultimately forced to flee his homeland (sacrificing en-route the only manuscript his now-lost favorite work Attila), Zamyatin understood how complex is our great and worthy weapon, the word—how it can serve the foes of hope as well as its friends, and must always be wielded thoughtfully.  I leave you with some passages from his letters and essays, to remind us that we face these crises in solidarity with many allies across time’s diaspora.


From “Letter to Stalin,” Yevgeny Zamyatin, written 1931:

The author of the present letter, condemned to the highest penalty, appeals to you with a request to change this penalty to another. My name is probably known to you.  To me as a writer, being deprived of the opportunity to write is nothing less than a death sentence. Yet the situation that has come about is such that I cannot continue my work, because no creative activity is possible in an atmosphere of systematic persecution that increases in intensity from year to year.


From the essay “Tomorrow,” by Yevgeni Zamyatin, written 1919-20:

Today is doomed to die—because yesterday died, and because tomorrow will be born. Such is the wise and cruel law. Cruel, because it condemns to eternal dissatisfaction those who already today see the distant peaks of tomorrow; wise, because eternal dissatisfaction is the only pledge of eternal movement forward, eternal creation. He who has found his ideal today is, like Lot’s wife, already turned into a pillar of salt, has already sunk into the earth and does not move ahead. The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy: tomorrow is inevitably heresy to today, which has turned into a pillar of salt, and to yesterday, which has scattered to dust. Today denies yesterday, but is a denial of denial tomorrow. This is the constant dialectic path which, in a grandiose parabola, sweeps the world into infinity. Yesterday, the thesis; today, the antithesis; and tomorrow, the synthesis.

Yesterday there was a tsar, and there were slaves; today there is no tsar, but the slaves remain; tomorrow there will be only tsars…

The only weapon worthy of humanity—of tomorrow’s humanity —is the word. With the word, the Russian intelligentsia, Russian literature, have fought for decades for the great human tomorrow. And today it is time to raise this weapon once again.


(Translations by Mirra Ginsburg, editor of A Soviet Heretic, the English language collection of Zamyatin’s essays, which I cannot recommend enough!)

For more on censorship: see my recent Neuveen lecture on censorship patterns. I also strongly recommend, as further reading, Robert Darnton’s brilliant Censors at Work, which looks at the motives and actions of censors in a range of spheres, from Old Regime France, to East Germany, to the USSR, to the British Raj, exposing many of the thought patterns which make people willing to cooperate with censorship. Particularly vivid are the interviews with East German censors, whose expressed attitude, that they agreed to work censorship book because that way at least there would be some books published instead of none, we can easily imagine recurring in our own minds if someone told us, “We should be cautious in X or maybe they won’t let us do it again.”

Strange Horizons Column & New Essay Published


This is the front cover art for the manga Trigun written by Yasuhiro Nightow.
I am now a regular non-fiction columnist for Strange Horizons, a wonderful magazine that it’s been an absolute pleasure to work with. I’ll have an essay coming out a couple of times a year, and I’m very excited to be working on this.

I’m writing here to share the link to an essay I’m doubly excited by, first because it’s the first of my new column, and because this is an essay that’s been a long time coming and that feels to me… important in a number of ways. It’s an introduction to anime/manga that is NOT aiming to get people to read/watch anime/manga, but giving a history and description of it as an interesting history in itself, entangled with Western fan culture, with World War II and its aftermath, with histories of feminism and gender, with all the kinds of things which can make a history of any topic worth reading.

All People Are Created Educable, a Vital Oft-Forgotten Tenet of Modern Democracy

Book cover: Who Owns the News, a History of Copyright, by Will Slauter

(I have one of my more traditional history posts underway, but wanted to post this separate thought first. Felt timely.)

Many shocking, new ideas shaped the American Experiment and related 18th century democratic ventures; as an historian of the period, I often notice that one of the most fundamental of them, and most shocking to a world which had so long assumed the opposite, often goes unmentioned — indeed sometimes denied — in today’s discussions of democracy: the belief that all people are educable.  I think it’s urgent that we bring that principle back into the spotlight if we want to defend democracy from one of its common failure modes: pseudo-populist oligarchy.

Within “all men are created equal” lies the sub-principle that all people, or specifically all enfranchised citizens of a state (which often at the time meant white male adults, though some made it broader, or narrower) that all such people are, if given appropriate educational resources, capable of learning, exercising sound judgment, and acting on said judgment, thus that they all people are equally rational and capable of competent self-governance.  This thesis does not assume that all people when adults are equally prepared to participate in government, but that all people when born have the capacity to absorb education if given access to it.  Rare intellectual disabilities might make the education process challenging for certain individuals, but (the thesis argues) even then the right support and resources make education possible, and such situations are not the default human state.  This is the thesis that all people are fundamentally educable. 

Many in the 18th c. who thought democracy was absurd rejected it because they disagreed with this thesis, believing that the majority of people (even of white men) were not educable, i.e. that even with educational resources most people were born incapable of being guided by Reason and making sound political judgments. Those who believed this predicted that government by the people would collapse into absurdity, since it would be led by a parliament of fools. We get a taste of what such critics of democracy thought would happen to America in the satirical scenes in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 2 in which Jack Cade’s populist rebels happily kill each other and laugh about it, and believe they can end hunger by having everyone eat on the king’s tab at restaurants and making the gutters run with wine (and which is the source of the much-misunderstood “First thing we do is kill all the lawyers,” step 1 in which executing everyone who can read is their step 2) — this is what many 18th c. anti-democrats believed would happen if governing was truly done by the people.

Drawing of a mob of peasants brandishing weapons with two severed heads on spears, with Jack Cade waving a sword above them all.
1867 Illustration of Jack Cade and his rebels with the severed heads of Lord Say and his son-in-law, hard-working administrators, killed because Lord Say built a paper mill, supported books, and spoke Latin. Shakespeare is very overt in his depiction of the imagined savagery of a self-governing mob.

Often modern people have trouble wrapping our heads around how sure pre-modern Europeans were that human minds and their capacities (A) varied fundamentally, (B) were locked in at birth and immutable, and (C) were only very rarely rational or educable.  This doesn’t mean elite education, it means any education, grasping the basics beyond I’m hungry and I want to eat that fish.  Plato and Aristotle (and many transformations thereof over 2,000 years), described a human soul/mind led by three forces: the appetites, the passions, and the intellect i.e. reason.  The appetites were simplest and most bodily: I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, I’m tired and want to rest, I’m bored and want entertainment, I’m horny and want sex, my arms hurt I don’t want to carry this anymore.  The passions we might call mental but worldly: pride, ambition, loyalty, patriotism I want to be famous, I want to be respected, I want to be well-talked-of in the city, I want to protect my way of life, I want to have power, I want to advance the glory of the state, I want to battle evil, etc.  Reason, or the intellect, was the calculating, understanding, and contemplative power, which did math, understood the universe, aspired to the spiritual and eternal (whether Justice or the Pythagorean theorem) and exercised ethical judgment, weighing goods and bads deciding the best course (Eating this whole jar of pickles would be yummy but then I’ll get a stomachache; electing this demagogue would make me rich but then he would tyrannize the state.)  Both Aristotle and Plato say that different souls are dominated by different organs of the soul (i.e. either the appetites, passions, or intellect) and that only a tiny minority of human souls are dominated by the intellect, a larger minority by the passions, and practically all by the base appetites.  Plato’s Republic uses an exam/aptitude system to identify these rare souls of gold (as opposed to silver = passions, bronze/iron = appetites) and make them rulers of the city, and proposes a eugenicist breeding program to produce more.

The principle that souls of gold (i.e. souls fully capable of being educated & of wise rule) are a tiny minority, and that most humans are immutably not educable from birth, was very thoroughly absorbed into European belief, and dominated it for 2,000 years.  In Dante, we see the entire structure of Hell revolve around the appetites/passions/intellect distinction.  Medieval epistemology, psychology, and even ideas about medicine and plants incorporated this principle, and spun elaborate explanations for how and why different souls perceived the heavenly world (Good, Justice, Providence) better than others.  Eugen Weber’s powerful history, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, shows how people in the period wrote about their own French peasants in incredibly insulting, infantilizing, quasi-bestial terms, strikingly similar to the racist language we’re used to the Age of Empires using to demean non-Europeans. Anyone who hasn’t looked at period sources will struggle to believe how ferociously confident the European majority was in the thesis that the majority of people even in their own country could never understand a book, a moral quandary, or a political proposition.  Keeping the rare wise elites in charge was the only barrier between order and savagery.  The fact that so many people were willing to believe in the totally mythical tragedy of the commons (yes, it’s totally invented, real peasants took great care of their commons) is one relic of how certain people were for a long time (and some still are) that most people are not capable of making the kinds of prudent, sustainable judgments necessary for custodianship of a polity.

It took a lot to get even a small radical fringe by 1750 to entertain the notion that all people–or even just all men–were created equally educable.  A long survey of the causes would get unwieldy, but they include (among other things) contact with indigenous cultures in the Americas and other regions which had functional governments without European-style systems, revolutions in medicine and the understanding of the sense organs which undermined old hierarchy-enforcing ideas about how cognition and sensation functioned, second-order consequences of the rags-to-riches path opened by Renaissance courts employing scholars from any background so long as they had good Latin, and Protestantism’s second-order implication that, if people didn’t need priests as intermediaries between their prayers and God, perhaps they didn’t need aristocrats as intermediaries between them and power.  But by 1750 that fringe existed, and had enough momentum to implement its experiment in the new United States, which most people who were considered sensible at the time thought would quickly degenerate into chaos, because they didn’t think most people were capable of understanding the world enough to vote sensibly, draft legislation, or serve in a congress, and that the tiny wise minority would be drowned out by the majority wanting to vote for dining on the king’s tab and killing all the lawyers.

At this point, if this essay were a twitter thread, one would see the obligatory snarky self-proclaimed cynic pop up with a comment that America did degenerate into foolish populist chaos, look at the Trump voters, and I know of several Shakespeare companies that put on Henry VI with Cade as Trump. That is why it’s so important to focus on the distinction between educated and educableand that 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. This is why those who shaped America insisted so fiercely on universal public education; they believed (we have thousands of essays, letters, and documents to this effect!) that citizens would only be capable of being wise voters and rulers if they had access to a good education. Without education, they believed, people would indeed vote for foolish things, so they had to transform their populace, from one where rural peasants were starved for education, to one where everyone was invited to Reason’s classroom. They also believed that a well-informed public was vital, thus that news and newspapers were indispensable for democracy to function, which is why the early US government subsidized the shipping of newspapers and the circulation of knowledge through things like Media Mail–here see Will Slauter’s fantastic history Who Owns the News?

Now, at one point I helped my Ph.D. adviser James Hankins with his research on the history of conservatism.  We (mostly he) looked at many examples over many times, places, and regimes, and observed after innumerable case studies that a consistent defining characteristic of conservative thought over time is the belief that some people are better at ruling than others, thus that the best way to run a government and society is to put those superior people in power.  Whether it’s a hereditary aristocracy, an exam-based meritocracy, an earn-the-franchise-through-military-service timocracy, or a divine right monarchy, many systems posit that some are more capable of rule than others, and that the best system will put them in power.

These days, when I cite this definition of conservatism, invariably someone brings up Frank Wilhoit’s observation that “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” While this is a very powerful summary of trends in 21st century conservatism, useful for thinking about a lot of current politics, it isn’t broad enough when we want go back 1,000 years or more because (I know this will sound absurd) the idea that law is supposed to bind anyone is actually fairly new.  In my period (Renaissance) for example, law is mainly supposed to provide an Earthly portrait of divine judgment & mercy, and everyone is supposed to break laws all the time but then get the penalties waived, so the process of transgressing, being condemned, and being pardoned or let off with a lesser sentence gives the soul an ethically therapeutic preview of the universality of sin and the hope for being let off with just Purgatory instead of Hell, and the idea of law actually binding or protecting anybody maybe goal #24 in the lawmakers’ minds, with a lot of really weird-to-us-modern ones higher on the list.  But in pre-modern and modern conservatism alike, we see the shared conviction that some people are fundamentally better at ruling (or just better) than others, and that one must put the better in power.

The thesis that all people are educable is fundamentally opposed to this.

Democracy can function, says Thomas Paine (to pick a spokesman for the US founders), because human beings are fundamentally educable, and if given a good teacher, a good reading list, and some newspapers, all human beings, or at least the overwhelming majority of them, will become capable of wise judgment and self-rule.  One’s civic duty is not to identify the wise minority and put them in power, but to disseminate the tools of education so the majority can become wise.  This thesis is opposed to aristocracy, to oligarchy, to timocracy, 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.

Let’s return now to our snarky self-labeled cynic, who points at Trump voters and people who are wrong on the internet to joke that most people are fundamentally too stupid to be educated.  Setting aside the fact that the engines of social media currently make fringe and foolish voices far louder than sensible ones, making them seem like a majority, America at present does not live in the world of robust public education and state-strengthened free circulation of journalism which the minds behind the experiment thought were so essential. Today’s America has seen decades of the intentional conservative-led starving and squeezing of public education, efforts to increase the disparity in education quality between public education and private or charter school education, conservative-led homeschool movements which aim to expose people to a narrow range of ideology, and also the devastation of newspapers, journalism, and a vast misinformation campaign. All this adds up to preventing many who are educable from becoming educated. Thomas Paine, and those I’m using him to represent, would recognize this as a sabotage of their system, one they would say might indeed enable Cade-style populism, which (as in Henry VI) is easy for ambitious elites to then harness to their own ends.  Thus, Paine would say: of course the democracy isn’t working well if such an essential precondition is being sabotaged.

In sum, we need to talk more about the vital tie between democracy and the conviction that all people are created educable.  It helps make clear how strategic the strangulation of educational resources is, and that one of the less loud but most dangerous threats to our confidence in democracy is the project to make it seem like most people can’t make sensible political judgments, reducing people’s confidence in democracy as a system by seeming to prove true conservative principle that there will always be a few who should rule and many who can’t.  When I see conservative thinking start to show up in acquaintances (or Silicon Valley leaders) who consider themselves progressive but also consider themselves smart, it often begins with them feeling that most people are stupid and the world would be better off if the smart were in charge.  One can often get such people to pause and reflect by bringing up the question of 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.  Information is key.  Those peasants who shared commons maintained them sustainably for centuries because (as we now recognize) they were educated in the ways that mattered, they learned from families and communities to understand what they were doing, using local knowledge of commons, grazing etc. as they made choices.  If one’s democratic state is the commons, people will likewise maintain it well, but not if they’re intentionally deprived of access to basic knowledge of how it works and what can harm or heal it, and drowned instead in deliberate falsehoods.

We all know we need to support education & good journalism, and combat misinformation, but revisiting the principle that all people are created educable is a good way to remember that these are not merely invaluable social goods, like sanitation or public parks.  They were conceived from the start as essential components of modern democracy, in direct opposition to the many-centuries-old conservative principle that some are best to rule and others to be ruled.  Enlightenment-style democracy cannot function without the conviction that all people are created educable.  If we forget that, if we doubt it, if we let it shake our confidence in the experiment which didn’t turn into Jack Cade for more than two centuries (bets were not on America surviving for so long in 1776!), we risk opening the gates to the old failure mode of oligarchy rising when democracy wavers.

P.S. Donate to Wikipedia – both Diderot and Thomas Paine would smile.

Another illustration of Jack Cade’s rebellion. The reality was indeed destructive, but performances of such events, like the myth of the tragedy of the commons, also served to reinforce the old thesis that the people cannot rule. Turns out, we can.

Terra Ignota Nominated for Best Series Hugo!

Jo here. I’m delighted to be writing to celebrate that Terra Ignota is nominated for a Best Series Hugo. I feel this is utterly deserved, and hope very much that it will win, though really the nomination is the important part — finding one the best is much harder than finding the five or six best in a year, and I think Terra Ignota is certainly one of the best series of this year, or indeed any year. All four volumes are out now, the series is complete, and, in my opinion, thoroughly excellent. Many thanks to everyone who nominated it, and it’s very exciting to think more people will read it because of the extra attention it will get because of this nomination.

Jo is the one here writing because this is so great and Ada cares so much, and Ada has a disability where extremes of emotion, even good emotions like joy, can send her into a pain spiral that might flatten her for days. She’s just coming off medical leave and getting back to teaching (Papal Election course this quarter!) and starting a new novel (with Vikings!) and she is totally thrilled and excited to have Terra Ignota nominated for a best series Hugo, and she wants to thank everyone who nominated it, and yet she can’t, not the way she wants to engage with it, because if she does she’ll get too ill to work at the things she also really cares about and also really wants to do. This sucks, you know! I’m sure you all understand, or even if you can’t quite understand you’re sympathetic, not judging in any way. But she gets so overwhelmed by this kind of thing that it’s just best if I post an announcement and let you know: she’s really, really pleased, and she’s doing her best to be calm and productive.