Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer

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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, but they’re slow to print, and made in small batches. The real revolution is pamphlets - much faster, much harder to censor. Pamphlet runners are how you can have Luther’s 95 Theses go from Wittenberg to London in 17 days.So much other wild stuff from this episode. For example, did you know that the largest and best-funded experimental laboratory in 17th century Europe was very likely the Roman one run by inquisitors? Ada jokes that the Inquisition accidentally invented peer review. The focus of the Inquisition is really misunderstood - it was obsessed with catching dangerous new heretics like Lutherans and Calvinists - it only executed one person for doing science.And this leads Ada to make an observation that I think is really wise: the authorities and censors are always worried about the exact wrong things given 20/20 hindsight. When Inquisi