Ex Urbe

I have news to share, though not yet a new post in my Skepticism series, so thank you for your patience on that.  I will have a post up tomorrow, though, on a different topic.  But for now, news:

First, I’m leaving Texas and starting this fall in a new position as an Assistant Professor in the History Department of the University of Chicago!  I’m positively giddy. The university and department are so excellent, and when I visited campus the student conversations I overheard were about Marx and Hegel instead of football, and Chicago is a grand metropolis filled with libraries and museums and architecture and food, and I’ll have grad students!  Real grad students! So, in the academic sense, as my dissertation advisor said when he heard the news, “now there will be grandchildren.” Anyone with thoughts or advice on moving to Chicago, please share them!

Second, my academic book is now up for pre-order on Amazon.  And it has a gorgeous cover!  (And relevant, since the diagram is from one of my manuscripts.)  It’s also on Harvard University Press’s page, where the money goes to the press, but they (A) don’t have a pre-order option and make you wait until September, and (B) charge $9 more than Amazon, so I understand many of those who want the book will prefer the easy, instant purchase to the inconvenient, expensive one even if the latter helps the press.

Here’s the write-up from the publisher:

After its rediscovery in 1417, Lucretius’s Epicurean didactic poem De Rerum Natura threatened to supply radicals and atheists with the one weapon unbelief had lacked in the Middle Ages: good answers. Scholars could now challenge Christian patterns of thought by employing the theory of atomistic physics, a sophisticated system that explained natural phenomena without appeal to divine participation, and argued powerfully against the immortality of the soul, the afterlife, and a creator God.

Ada Palmer explores how Renaissance readers, such as Machiavelli, Pomponio Leto, and Montaigne, actually ingested and disseminated Lucretius, and the ways in which this process of reading transformed modern thought. She uncovers humanist methods for reconciling Christian and pagan philosophy, and shows how ideas of emergent order and natural selection, so critical to our current thinking, became embedded in Europe’s intellectual landscape before the seventeenth century. This heterodoxy circulated in the premodern world, not on the conspicuous stage of heresy trials and public debates, but in the classrooms, libraries, studies, and bookshops where quiet scholars met the ideas that would soon transform the world. Renaissance readers—poets and philologists rather than scientists—were moved by their love of classical literature to rescue Lucretius and his atomism, thereby injecting his theories back into scientific discourse.

Palmer employs a new quantitative method for analyzing marginalia in manuscripts and printed books, exposing how changes in scholarly reading practices over the course of the sixteenth century gradually expanded Europe’s receptivity to radical science, setting the stage for the scientific revolution.

“This is a brilliant scholarly work that is deeply relevant to today. In exploring the influence of Lucretius on the Renaissance, Ada Palmer shows how the modern world became open to the  ramifications of mechanical science. More broadly, her book is a fascinating look at how ideas ripple and spread.” —Walter Isaacson

I promised to be direct and honest when I talked about this book here.  This is not a lite, lively fun history like the essays I post on Ex Urbe.  It’s a formal academic history. Ex Urbe readers will find that the beginning and the end are in the familiar, strong-strokes voice you’re used to (I moved myself to tears last night doing the page proofs of the Conclusion, a good sign at a stage when one is usually so sick of the manuscript as to be exhausted by the sight of it!) but the middle is meticulous and detailed, and unavoidably a bit dry.  It has to be. It’s new data, and new data has to be presented in full, with charts and lists and all that opposite-of-jazz.  I’m taking on a big question: how we got from the alien mindscape of the Medieval world to the familiar modern one, specifically looking at how we evaluate true and false, and how we use science and religion in our daily lives.  I can’t say something new about that without justifying it with facts and endnotes. This is the fruit of my years of research on manuscripts and marginalia, and I use my results to build up a portrait of how exactly thinking, scholarship and above all reading changed between 1400 and 1600 and how that transformed the way people thought about science and religion leading to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. There are many facets to how we got from Dante and Aquinas to Newton and Voltaire, and many people have addressed the question, but usually they look at the leaders and firebrands rather than looking, as I have, at the anonymous reading public where the deeper mass transformation had to happen for ideas which were once radical heresies to become comfortable parts of daily life. To put it another way, if you read or heard about Stephen Greenblatt’s book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (which won the Pulitzer in 2012 and which I am proud to say I helped with a little bit) it treats the same topic, the rediscovery of Lucretius which suddenly gave Europe access to radical materialism, but The Swerve is about the thrill of the discovery, not its context, cause or mechanism. As I say in my own introduction: “Previous studies have described the epicenter or the ripples–I shall endeavor to describe the medium that carried the ripples so far.”

So, that’s my first academic book.  If it sounds exciting to you, it’ll be out in September-ish 2014 through Amazon or HUP, or your preferred library or other book source.  And if you’re a bookstore person here’s the flier with the special bookstore info.  If it sounds like it’s not your thing, no worries: 2015 will bring the novels, and the fun stuff on Ex Urbe will continue to flow.

My third piece of news is that, at the end of this May, I’m embarking on a train tour of major cities of the USA, accompanying my good friend and fellow Tor novelist Jo Walton as she tours with her new novel My Real Children (a 20th century alternate history story about life, small choices, and gelato, that makes everybody cry.) Starting at Balticon and culminating with Readercon and then Worldcon in London, it’ll be an exciting hop through many cities as I meet librarians and bookstore owners, plus Jo and I have a quest to eat great food with awesome people as many times as possible.  And on June 22nd, when Jo does her reading in the Jean Cocteau Cinema in Santa Fe (an excellent independent venue owned by George R. R. Martin), I will do a concert of my music (some Viking some not) joined by my duet partner Lauren Schiller, performing as the duo “Sassafrass: Trickster and King.”

If any Ex Urbe reader (or Sassafrass friend) would like to come to one of the readings and say hello, please let me know in the comments here.

• 23-26th May, Balticon, Baltimore
• 27th May, 7pm, The Word, Brooklyn
• 28th May, 7pm, Wellesley Books, Boston
• 29th May, afternoon, BEA, New York
• 1st June, 3pm, Skokie Library, Chicago
• 3rd June, 5pm, Uncle Hugo’s Minneapolis
• 7th June, 4pm, University Bookstore, Seattle
• 9th June, 7pm, Powells, Portland
• 13th June, 7pm, Copperfields, Petaluma, San Francisco
• 14th June, 3pm, Borderlands, San Francisco
• 17th June, 7pm, Mysterious Galaxy, San Diego
• 21st June, 3pm, Page One Books, Albuquerque, followed by dinner with local SF group
• 22nd June, 7pm Jean Cocteau Cinema, Santa Fe, with Sassafrass: Trickster and King <= me & Lauren
• 28th June, ALA, Las Vegas, panel, signing, banquet
• 10-13 July Readercon, Burlington MA (Just Ada, no Jo)
• August 14-19 Worldcon, id est Loncon3, London, England

That’s it for today.  Tomorrow I will have a full post up, discussing an exciting new novelette, and in a few weeks we’ll have more Skeptics, once I’ve escaped the stack of deadlines that are looming on my desk all saying “May!”

Hello, all.  I am happy to announce that some recent, positive life changes mean that I’m now sufficiently comfortable in my career that I don’t feel I need to keep this blog anonymous anymore.

So, here I am: Ada Palmer, historian, a writer, composer.  I am an Assistant Professor in the History Department of Texas A&M University, where I teach mostly the Italian Renaissance, and long-term intellectual history.  My first academic book, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, which talks about the rediscovery of classical science in the Renaissance and its impact on science and religion, is coming out in Summer 2014 from Harvard University Press.  I also write science fiction and fantasy, and I am delighted to announce that my first science fiction novel is coming out from Tor Books in 2015.

I also compose and perform a cappella music for the a cappella folk group Sassafrass.  Our big Viking mythology project, Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok, should be released on CD and DVD this summer (thanks to Kickstarter, hooray!). And on the side I write Ex Urbe, and sometimes write articles or book introductions about anime and manga (another area I research).  I sometimes work as an historical consultant for various manga and anime companies.  It’s an eclectic mix, but that’s what generates the eclectic mix of topics, and approaches to topics, that I explore here.  For me, writing Ex Urbe is fun because it lets me share and explore the exciting things I run across and think about during my history research and teaching, but in a more freeform and open way, without the constraints of academic publishing, not to mention its infinite delays.

In other fun news, I am now blogging for Tor.com.  I have two posts up now, one on Ragnarok and one on horror manga. From now on, I will add links here whenever I have a new Tor.com post, and I will also make little announcements as my various publications approach, so you can see whether you think you’d enjoy the historical monograph, or the music, or the novels.  And I hope that seeing how much I’m doing will help you understand why I update Ex Urbe fairly rarely.  If there’s a long gap between entries, you can assume it’s because there’s either a research trip or a deadline for some exciting project on my plate, and henceforth I’ll post from time to time to tell you what those projects are.  You can also follow me on Twitter (Ada_Palmer); I use it rarely, either for announcements or to share fun history things.

The “About” page has been updated with this info.  For more, please visit AdaPalmer.com.  

And this seems like a good moment to thank you all for reading, and for the many enthusiastic comments and e-mails I have received over the past years.  Ex Urbe is a substantial amount of work, and when deadlines press it sometimes gets hard for me to convince myself that it’s worthwhile to take time away from grading and copy edits to write blog entries.  But the enthusiastic feedback here, combined with the genuinely stimulating responses and discussions that get going in the comments, continually re-convince me that this too is a very valuable way I can contribute to the Great Conversation.  I think Socrates agrees.

And now I shall leave you to enjoy the second installment of my Sketches of a History of Skepticism series, which I posted a few seconds ago.

After the long silence since my last post, I wanted to put up something quick to reassure friends and readers who might find the silence worrisome.  I am currently in Italy, with my academic conference duties done, my laptop broken and my camera battery fried, so, with no means of being practically productive and a holiday before me, I have no choice but to tromp about museums and enjoy myself.  Accompanied by two good friends, I have carried on a lot of valuable debate with fellow historians, as well as philosophers and classicists.  I have also researched many manuscripts, books, paintings, sculptures and other artifacts, along with many varieties of cheese, pasta, cold cuts, gnocchi, meatballs, roasts, fruits, pizzas, and, of course, gelatos.  Sometimes fate is kind.

I am brimming with ideas for new posts, which I will start on as soon as I’m not on a borrowed machine and unstable hotel internet.  I appreciate your patience.  Meanwhile I will share a piece of Italian art fun:

This is an illuminated image from a Renaissance manuscript in the Laurenziana library in Florence.  From a page of the French translation of a 14th century Latin History of Rome, the Romuleon compiled by Benvenuto da Imola, this image shows the illustrator’s imagined version of the Carthaginian army camp.  In addition to armor and siege preparation, you can see a tent on the right-hand side where a doctor is performing surgery on a wounded officer’s leg.  This kind of image is extremely valuable for historians, in learning about what the Renaissance imagined the ancient world was like, which was very much not what we imagine it was like.  Hannibal’s lovely gold slit-sleeved coat and colorful hat are particularly choice touches.  This type of illustration is also useful as a snapshot for historians attempting to reconstruct information about fleeting artifacts of Renaissance culture, like tents, plumes, the little bottles you used for a meal, or for medical treatment, things which rarely survive in physical form but are casually depicted here by an artist imagining a camp scene, complete with a doctor’s equipment.  The illustration itself takes up a whole manuscript page, so pretty close in size to what you probably see on your computer screen: