Second paragraph of third chapter:

Thus, if we’re in the middle of the Cold War, and an influential historian publishes a book magnifying old discussions from Max Weber and Sombart arguing that the X-Factor that sparked the Renaissance was the rise of banking and the merchant class, triggered by the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, America can grab that book to say: The Renaissance was the birth of capitalism! Clearly the Renaissance’s true successor is modern western capitalist regimes! The fact that it was a golden age proves capitalism will make a golden age as well! And communism is the bad Dark Ages! If, on the other hand, we’re in the nineteenth-century rise-of-nationalism period, and someone argues that the X-Factor that sparked the Renaissance was the idea of Italy as a united nation first articulated in the late 1300s, and that the Renaissance golden age ended because Italy was conquered by outside powers, then the Renaissance can be claimed as a predecessor, not only by the Italian unification movement, but by the German unification movement, and any nationalist movement, all claiming a golden Renaissance will come when peoples become nations. Thus, each time someone (usually a historian) proposes a new X-Factor for the Renaissance, it sparks a new wave of opportunities to claim the Renaissance as a source of legitimacy.

I got this because it is on this year’s Hugo ballot for Best Related Work, but to cut to the chase, I’m not voting for it because it is not actually a work that is related to science fiction or fantasy, other than the fact that its writer is well known as a science fiction writer. I have read the author’s spirited defence of its relevance to the genre, and I am not convinced. This is not a book about sf, it is a book that does what it says on the tin and explains about the Renaissance. I will not be giving it a preference on my Hugo ballot.

Not that it’s a bad book – quite the reverse. It’s very readable and breezy, and makes some very good points about how the Renaissance is read, and by whom. There are some great anecdotes and also some quite profound analytical points. We keep coming back to Machiavelli (and to an extent Petrarch) but that’s only reasonable given their later influence. It’s also interesting to have the science of the period situated so firmly in the other cultural endeavours of the day; I have tended to read work that segregated science out, but that of course is utterly anachronistic.

I think it would have been helpful to have a few maps – I am reasonably familiar with its geography, but I can’t always keep in my head the relative locations of Florence, Siena, Pisa and Perugia, let alone remember where the boundaries of the Papal States were. And the internal geography of the major cities, Florence and Rome in particular, becomes important to the narrative.

My only other problem with the book is that it’s really very long, and absorbed a lot of reading time that I’d have preferred to give to Hugo finalists that I am more likely to vote for. But that’s a me problem, not a problem with the book.

You can get Inventing the Renaissance here.