Queer, geek, NW England, no longer late-30s.
This link opens in a pop-up window
38% complete! penwing reads (they/them) has read 19 of 50 books.
Jordy Rosenberg: Confessions of the Fox (2019, Atlantic Books, Limited)
Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess were the most notorious thieves, jailbreakers, and lovers of eighteenth-century London. Yet no one knows …
The Renaissance is one of the most studied and celebrated eras of history. Spanning the …
I don't normally read non-fiction, and when it doesn't it's modern feminism, queer theory etc. History is something I recognise as important but also something I left behind as soon as possible (I think, looking back, I was not impressed by UK school priorities and British-supremacy which pervaded the same topics over and over)
So, I thoroughly enjoyed this - even if I never type "renaissance" again. I also look forward to taking the information forward to an (eventual) reread of Palmer's (already) amazing Terra Ignota series
The Renaissance is one of the most studied and celebrated eras of history. Spanning the end of the Middle Ages …
The Renaissance is one of the most studied and celebrated eras of history. Spanning the …
We can aim for better than the Renaissance, which is what our Renaissance friends did too.
Let's try.
— Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer (duplicate) (Page 650)
Brilliant conclusion to a really fun and interesting book
The Renaissance is one of the most studied and celebrated eras of history. Spanning the …
If Petrarch were here now, would he be satisfied with what the Renaissance achieved? Hell, no! He'd still be horrified by all our wars, and keep striving for peace, and telling us to be more virtuous, and build more schools, ask more worldly questions, so someday we can have real peace like the Pax Romana of the good gay emperors. But he would say it with new hope beyond his former hope, born of realising he and his friends aided an achievement - beating back the deadly Horseman Plague! - far beyond his loftiest imagining, that humanity can aim for even better than climbing out of a pit back to antiquity's high hill - we can keep climbing.
— Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer (duplicate) (Page 644)
A tear came to my eye - beating the Horseman Plague! We can keep climbing...
The Renaissance is one of the most studied and celebrated eras of history. Spanning the …
And yet she remains irksomely real.
— Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer (duplicate) (Page 361)
(of Camilla Bartolini Rucellai, a Renaissance woman not very Renaissance-y by our desires for what the Renaissance is)
What a wonderful epitaph - almost aspirational 8-)
The Renaissance is one of the most studied and celebrated eras of history. Spanning the …
...one of my favourite frescos: Filippino Lippo's Saint Thomas Aquinas Interrupts the Annunciation to Introduce the Virgin Mary to Cardinal Carafa who paid for the painting, while patient Archangel Gabriel just had to wait.
— Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer (duplicate) (Page 284)
Bit different to the painting of Victor's mother described in Frankenstein...
The Renaissance is one of the most studied and celebrated eras of history. Spanning the …
(with up-to-date methods like taking patients' horoscopes at the time they peed)
— Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer (duplicate) (Page 283)
Palmer certainly has a fascination with this fact... It's been repeated a lot so far...
The original story of science gone berserk: one that changed how far our dreams can …
It's a little slower at the start than I would like, and dense, but so good once it gets going...
The original story of science gone berserk: one that changed how far our dreams can stretch. Imagine a human created …
The original story of science gone berserk: one that changed how far our dreams can …
I learned the possessions most esteemed by your fellow-creatures were, high and unsullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these acquisitions; but without either he was considered, except in very rare instances, as a vagabond and slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profit if the chosen few.
— Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (Norton critical edition) (Page 80)
1818... What change in 200 years eh?
This was 50 years before Marx too...
The original story of science gone berserk: one that changed how far our dreams can …
I gazed upon the picture of my mother, which stood over the mantlepiece. It was a historical subject, painted at my father's desire, and represented Caroline Beaufort in an agony of despair, kneeling at the coffin of her dead father.
— Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (Norton critical edition) (Page 49)
What is wrong with Frankenstein men?!?
The original story of science gone berserk: one that changed how far our dreams can …
Reading for #mcrsf
Prepare to die. His kingdom is near.
Sixteen-year-old trans boy Benji is on the run from the cult that raised …
The Renaissance is one of the most studied and celebrated eras of history. Spanning the …
Nine dudes in a tower
— Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer (duplicate) (Page 64 - 89)
Palmer has some great turns of phrase - this is her summary of Florentine Government (nine randomly chosen people (of certain status) locked in a tower for a two month term at a time) - but is that a better system of government than "Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords”?
