Ada Palmer on Viking Metaphysics, Contingent Moments, and Censorship

Ada Palmer — historian of the Renaissance and author of the Terra Ignota science fiction series — joins Tyler Cowen in Ep. 191 for a conversation that moves from why the Renaissance was deadlier than the Middle Ages, through the real goals of the Inquisition, to why pornography is the wrong battleground for censorship.

Key ideas

1. The Renaissance was progress made lethal. Urbanisation, trade, and military scale amplified every existing cause of death. A city of 200,000 emptied by plague in 1494 was full again within twenty years — people chose the city’s risks for its economic rewards — but those risks were real. The period Palmer calls ‘the Middle Ages, only slightly bigger and more so’ is a lesson in how improvement and danger compound together.
2. Florentine art was a defence mechanism, not an ornament. Tiny city-states with mountains of gold and no armies had to make themselves too culturally valuable to destroy. Confronting a sceptical French ambassador with ancient Greek scholarship, recovered Roman bronzes, and architecture no one had seen since antiquity turned a military liability into an alliance asset. Culture served diplomacy because the military option was foreclosed.
3. Censorship aims above all at self-censorship. The Inquisition — not one unified body but a loose set of local authorities borrowing local prisons and police — spent far more effort frightening would-be writers than destroying books that already existed. Silencing Galileo publicly silenced Descartes and dozens of others who saw what happened and chose not to write. The same logic operates in China today: intentionally unpredictable enforcement maximises the zone of self-restraint.
4. Censorship infrastructure always gets repurposed. The apparatus built to exclude a bad word from talkies in New Zealand, Australia, and the US was the same apparatus later used to persecute communists during the Red Scare. Palmer’s rule: never create a censorship tool you would not trust in the hands of your worst political opponent, because those hands will eventually hold it.
5. Contingent moments — small decisions by unfamous people — shape enormous outcomes. Voltaire nearly ended up in South America because of his father’s near-decision. Had Descartes not withdrawn a treatise in fright after Galileo’s condemnation, France might have had an Enlightenment (the period in which reason was applied to society and religion, roughly 1650–1800) less divided between rationalism and empiricism. Palmer’s interest in biography and in ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ counterfactuals is a method for recovering the agency of everyone who did not make the history books.

Content

Living in the Renaissance: progress as compounded risk

Palmer opens by inverting the usual picture of the Renaissance as a golden age. As trade recovered after the Black Death (Yersinia pestis) and merchants circulated more widely, so did disease — the death rate for children between two and twelve ‘skyrocketed.’ Military technology and urban concentration made wars larger and more lethal. Richer kings hired bigger armies. The Renaissance did not replace medieval causes of death; it scaled them.

Yet people flooded into cities anyway. Naples, emptied to nothing by plague in 1494–96, topped 250,000 within twenty years. A Florentine day labourer working three days a week could live comfortably and spend the rest looking at art. Palmer’s point is not that the Renaissance was bad but that ‘better’ and ‘worse’ are multidimensional — life expectancy fell while consumer experience rose — and that the choice to urbanise was rational given the trade-offs people actually faced.

Art as a defence mechanism

Palmer’s account of Florentine art turns on a thought experiment: you are a French ambassador, son of a count, on your way to Rome. Florence has a terrible reputation — a merchant republic that executed anyone of noble blood, notorious for sodomy across five European languages. You arrive expecting nothing. Instead you find recovered Roman bronzes, architecture you last saw in the ruins behind your father’s castle, scholars reciting Ancient Greek poetry composed by a banker’s grandson.

In that moment Cosimo de’ Medici asks whether France would like an alliance. The alternative — sacking the city — destroys something the French court cannot produce and desperately wants. Cultural supremacy substitutes for military strength: the art keeps Florence safe precisely because it cannot be replicated by force.

Palmer extends the point to why Florence has so much art: the city was uniquely protected during the Second World War, when both sides forbade damage to its legacy even as Milan, Genoa, and Naples were bombed freely. Survival rates, she notes, are not just a function of what was made but of what subsequent centuries chose to preserve.

Methods of doing history

Palmer argues that biography is the most underrated current method in historical scholarship — partly because it was fashionable in the 19th century and was subsequently pushed to the margins, and partly because it became disproportionately written by women who had been sidelined from academic posts and needed a commercially viable form. That gendered association reduced its prestige.

The methodological power of biography, though, is that it cuts across periodisation. A biographer of Titian — who lived into his 90s — cannot draw a line between ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Baroque’: the man was alive on both sides. We forget that historical periods are analytical constructs layered onto lives that ran continuously through them.

Her planned biography of Machiavelli would be a choose-your-own-adventure: at each contingent moment — the times when small decisions by non-famous actors might have sent him, and therefore European political thought, somewhere else entirely — readers would see the branches. The same format for Voltaire centres on the near-miss where his father almost had him exiled to South America. The exercise is less about counterfactual history than about restoring the reader’s sense that every person shapes what comes after.

Viking metaphysics and gendered scholarship

When asked why women scholars illuminated Viking metaphysics, Palmer clarifies the mechanism. After the Second World War, Viking metaphysics was a poisoned field: Hitler’s minister of culture had written his dissertation on it, and no one wanted to cite him. When women entered academia in larger numbers in the late 1960s and 1970s, they were often pushed towards the untouched corners — and Viking metaphysics was one. They began examining weaving equipment excavated from tombs and previously set aside as ‘women’s work.’ What they found were staffs of sorcery, as clearly described in the sagas. The Norns — the Norse fates — spin and weave the threads of destiny; their tools were hiding in plain sight under a gendered assumption about what was worth studying.

Diderot, de Sade, and the 18th-century cosmos

Palmer reads Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste as a philosophical demonstration: a novel deliberately structured to feel as though it has no author, because the 18th century’s dominant way of depicting a providential cosmos was through tightly authored fiction — the sort of contrived reunions and moral lessons you find in Voltaire’s Candide. Diderot thought the world did not work that way. Characters wander, plots are interrupted, stories break off without resolution, because that is what a world without an author — an atheistic or at least non-providential world — actually looks like.

De Sade she traces to a similar philosophical root: the question Locke and Hobbes opened about what is ‘natural’ to the human being. Thomas Aquinas argued from the fit of creatures to their environments to the existence of a designer. De Sade pushed that logic to its extreme, using pornography to stress-test claims about natural impulse and to expose the arbitrariness of moral categories — asking the questions Darwin would later answer differently.

Descartes, Palmer argues, was a casualty of the Galileo condemnation. He had been about to publish a more openly deist account of physics; he withdrew it, spent years making it orthodox, and the result was a France split between Cartesian rationalism and the Newtonian empiricism imported from Britain. A bolder Descartes would have made the two feel compatible, and experimental science might have taken root in France rather than settling in England, Scotland, and Italy.

The Inquisition as local instrument

Palmer resists the definite article: there was no single ‘Inquisition.’ What existed was a loose network of local authorities operating in the name of Rome but depending on local governments for prisons, police, and funding. Rome could issue mandates, but a message from the Spanish colonies in the New World took six months to arrive; in the interval, local authorities were improvising.

The Spanish Inquisition’s particular ferocity against conversos (Jews and Muslims who had converted to Christianity) reflected Ferdinand and Isabella’s anxiety about an imagined fifth column — a local political preoccupation that had nothing to do with what the Inquisition was doing simultaneously in Italy or in Goa, where it was destroying indigenous-language texts, even as the Inquisition in Mexico City was producing indigenous-language dictionaries because translation seemed the better route to conversion.

The broadest pattern, Palmer argues, is self-censorship cultivated from outside. The Roman Inquisition’s goal in the Galileo affair was not to silence Galileo — a quiet poisoning would have done that — but to silence everyone watching. The unpredictability of enforcement, whether in 16th-century Italy or contemporary China, widens the zone of self-restraint far beyond what direct action could achieve.

Censorship’s borrowed apparatus

Asked why censoring pornography is politically dangerous, Palmer gives a structural answer: censorship tools survive their original purposes and are repurposed by later actors. The mechanism that kept bad words out of early sound films in New Zealand, Australia, and the US became the mechanism that persecuted socialist writers during the Red Scare. De Sade’s publications circulated in underground bookshops alongside Voltaire and Rousseau because the same printers, the same readers, and the same booksellers served all forbidden material; the Encyclopédie served as cover for even more banned works at the French border.

The lesson is not that any particular content should go unchecked but that the infrastructure for prohibition is durable and inheritable. Once a censorship apparatus exists, the question is not whether someone will repurpose it but when.

Science fiction and cultural dissemination

Palmer traces science fiction’s low literary status to its material origins in 1920s–30s pulp printing — cheap paper, grocery-store racks, no bookstore distribution. The genre crystallised for an audience that had no access to bookstores, which is a democratising origin but a stigmatising one. Unlike crime fiction (Hammett, Chandler), which has been partially rehabilitated, science fiction has not climbed the prestige ladder — nor has fantasy, horror, or Westerns, all born in the same moment.

Her own science fiction — the Terra Ignota series — works the other direction: using fiction to get current historical scholarship about the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and gender performance out into the cultural bloodstream. She describes the process as an hourglass: thousands of dissertations at the base, a few dozen popular histories in the middle, several hundred novels, television shows, and games at the widest point, where people actually form their mental pictures of history. Fiction reaches where scholarship cannot.

Related

• Ada Palmer — speaker; historian and author of Terra Ignota
• Tyler Cowen — host
• Enlightenment — concept; Palmer’s account of Diderot, de Sade, Descartes, and Voltaire engages the intellectual history the page covers
• Steven Pinker on Coordination, Common Knowledge, and the Retreat of Liberal Enlightenment — adjacent episode on Enlightenment values and their fragility