Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer
About this episode
The episode explores the complexities of Renaissance history, focusing on the printing revolution and its social impacts through a conversation with historian Ada Palmer.
Renaissance history is so much wilder and weirder than you would have expected. Very fun chatting with Ada Palmer (historian, novelist, and composer based at the University of Chicago). Some especially fascinating things I learned from the conversation and her excellent book, Inventing the Renaissance : Not only did Gutenberg go bankrupt in the 1450s (after inventing the printing press), but so did the bank that foreclosed on him, and so did his apprentices. This is because paper was still very expensive, and so you had to make this big upfront CAPEX decision to print a batch of 300 copies of a book - say the Bible. But he’s in a small landlocked German town where only priests are allowed to read the Bible - so he sells maybe 7 copies. It’s only when this technology ends up in Venice, where you can hand 10 copies to each of 30 ship captains going to 30 different cities, that it starts taking off. Speaking of which, the printing revolution wasn’t just one single discrete event, just as the computer revolution has been this whole century of going from mainframes -> personal computers -> phones -> social media, each with different and accelerating social impact. Books came first…
People in this episode
Host: Dwarkesh Patel
Guest: Ada Palmer
Topics covered
- Renaissance history
- printing revolution
- technology impact
- historical events
- book publishing
- pamphlets
Keywords
- Renaissance
- Gutenberg
- printing press
- pamphlets
- historian
- Ada Palmer
- Florence
- technology
- history
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: University of Chicago
Books & works: Inventing the Renaissance
Places: Florence, Wittenberg, Venice, London
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