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

Ada Palmer argues the Renaissance was a 200-year chain of unintended consequences, from Petrarch’s Roman nostalgia to Galileo’s science.

• Florence executed its nobility, replaced them with a merchant guild lottery system requiring 9-man consensus to prevent tyranny.
• Gutenberg went bankrupt borrowing ~$1.5M equivalent to buy paper upfront before printing revenue materialized.
• Luther’s 95 Theses reached London in 17 days via pamphlet networks; Savonarola’s pamphlets a decade earlier took months to spread.
• The Inquisition accidentally invented peer review by building labs to verify experiments in books they were sent to censor.
• Most ancient texts were lost not at Alexandria but when papyrus decayed 400-800 AD and monks chose which 100 of 1,000 books to copy onto parchment.
• Petrarch expected recovered ancient texts to confirm Christianity; instead they contained competing Stoic, Epicurean, and Hedonist philosophies.
• Florence had 90% male literacy in the 12th century because merchants needed to read account books, not because they had access to books.

2026-03-06 · Watch on YouTube