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Table of Contents

• ↓ History, Philosophy, Books, Food & Fandom
• ↓ How is Inventing the Renaissance an SFF-Related Work?
• ↓ Beatrice Twice Queen of Hungary
• ↓ LGBTQIA+ Renaissance
• ↓ Rags to Riches Stories Fake & Real, or Always Look Up Everybody’s Mom!
• ↓ History’s Largest & Most Famous Disability Access Ramp
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"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 books, essays about the craft of writing SFF, works like (this year) Payton McCarty-Simas’s That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film, or Joy Sanchez-Taylor’s Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Colour Re-Imagine a Genre.  Among these, my history of ideas of the Renaissance era and how they evolved from the 1400s to the current century, centered in tales of Machiavelli, Petrarch, and the Borgias, stands out like an old leather-bound tome among this year’s colorful Best Novel finalists."

"The interesting part is not the yes, but that it is in so many very different ways."

"The simplest way is that it is peppered with direct genre references.  There are overt invocations of Batman, Tolkien, Assassin’s Creed, time machines, and Sherlock Holmes, subtler only-fans-would-spot-it references to works like Babylon 5 and Firefly, and analyses of magical moments in Shakespeare.  Another is that it touches on the historical sources of modern fantasy.  It also discusses, in little corners tucked among the major arguments, the histories of magical and supernatural beliefs in soul-projection, demon summoning, angelology, theurgy, Greek and Roman gods, angels that aren’t not the same thing as Roman gods, demonic possession, alchemy, the dowsing rod, and Diogenes’ Laertius’s claim that Pythagoras could fly around in a chariot of solar fire and zap people with a divine laser beam powered by his philosophical contemplation of the number ten.  And, of course, it makes an only-slightly-facetious argument, well founded in the primary sources, that Pope Paul II was a vampire, and that that Pope Sixtus IV was possessed by a demon.  (Who am I to doubt our most plausible period accounts?)  But, fun as these are, they constitute no more than two percent of the book."

"Another way—both more direct and less obvious—is that the main argument of the book is enormously important to both science fiction and fantasy as genres: that historians have agreed for decades that the Middle Ages weren’t a dark age nor the Renaissance a golden age, and that in fact the whole idea of dark and golden ages is a myth, but it’s such a narratively satisfying and politically useful myth that it persists and multiplies in fiction, journalism, propaganda, and popular imagination."

Key Topics & Focus Areas for exurbe.com:

History, Philosophy, Books, Food & Fandom

How is Inventing the Renaissance an SFF-Related Work?

Beatrice Twice Queen of Hungary

LGBTQIA+ Renaissance

Rags to Riches Stories Fake & Real, or Always Look Up Everybody’s Mom!

History’s Largest & Most Famous Disability Access Ramp