History, Philosophy, Books, Food & Fandom
It’s a surprisingly fun question. This year, the British Science Fiction Association Awards included my nonfiction history, Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age, on its long list of nominees for Best Non-Fiction (Long). Usually works in this category are directly about SFF: biographies of writers, histories of the field, edited scripts or illustration [ ]
Time to meet one of the coolest Renaissance queens no one has heard of: Beatrice of Naples TWICE Queen of Hungary. She’s one of the awesome people who didn’t quite get a chapter to herself in “Inventing the Renaissance” but gets lots of tales woven throughout. (This is part of my countdown series for the [ ]
As we resist those who claim diversity distorts scholarship, let’s run through the acronym show how easy it is to find the rainbow in every era. We don’t even need to look beyond the Renaissance celebrities that are household names today! LESBIAN: Lucrezia Borgia’s last husband Alfonso d’Este appears in a lot of big [ ]
Rags to Riches stories were popular long before modern iterations like the American Dream or self-made man , or even early modern ones like Jack the Giant-Killer or Cinderella. And they were also always used as propaganda. Looking back at two Rags to Riches tales of cardinals in the Renaissance, one fake one real, can show us the [ ]
Time for the largest, most famous disability access ramp in the world, paired with a twist about how our feelings about a piece of history can reverse completely based, not just on the historian’s point of view, but what questions we start with. (Part of my series of posts counting down to the release of [ ]
Time to share my current historical obsession: Clarice Orsini de Medici’s EXTREMELY ILLEGAL HAT! A cool reflection on performing social class (and part of my release countdown to the release of Inventing the Renaissance. Clarice Orsini, wife of Lorenzo de Medici “the Magnificent” came from the great Roman Orsini family, massively powerful nobles who traced [ ]
Buckle up, friends, it’s time for the real life “I fart in your general direction”: Marquis Francesco Gonzaga’s unforgettable reply to the 1503 duel challenge from Galeazzo Sanseverino. (Part of my countdown to Inventing the Renaissance. ) I posted last time introducing Galeazzo Sanseverino “Son of Fortune”, the famously handsome mercenary captain and lover of Duke [ ]
Time to meet one of my favorite Renaissance friends: Galeazzo Sanseverino, a mercenary whom contemporary sources describe as the sexiest thing in pants in Italy, part of the badass polycule threesome that ruled Milan in the early 1490s. (This is part of my series counting down to the release of my new book Inventing the [ ]
Let’s talk about resistance after a conqueror takes power. Specifically let’s talk about this bendy yellow building, and what it shows us about the moment the Florentine Republic finally fell to its kleptocratic/proto-capitalist banking-fortune Medici conquerors. (Originally a Bluesky thread, part of my countdown to the release of Inventing the Renaissance) In a post last [ ]
Looks fake, doesn t it? This implausible Medieval forest of towers, as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers, is our best reconstruction of the town of Bologna at its height, toward the end of the Medieval Guelph-Ghibelline wars. We don t see many such towers today or think we don t, but actually their remnants are all over Italy. Often [ ]