It feels sort of wrong to criticize it as I have not read it and will never read it, but Ada Palmer has a deeply stupid book out arguing that the Renaissance was fake.
Fucking Christ.
No one — literally no one — believes that the Renaissance was some golden age. When your entire work is arguing against a straw man why write it in the first place? Most educated people know that time period was one of conflict, massive social change, and unrest. The era also saw huge innovations in art, proto-science and political organization. In fact, there was far more change in a roughly 200 year period than there had been in the previous thousand years of Western civilization.
In a tortuous series of events, this denial of the obvious is at least partly (perhaps wholly) the result of broken academic anti-racism crusades. Here’s how it happened: To fight racism, scholars who wanted to keep their jobs started believing two things:
1) That if there is a continuous gradation, then there is no difference between any two items in the distribution. In their view, a mountain is the same as a molehill with no relevant distinctions1. One can see how this specious line of thinking could be used to battle racism (and it was).
2) That no culture should be judged for any reason, no matter how vile.
Combine these two and you get wacky-ass shit like believing the Western Roman empire never fell and that the Renaissance was fake news. This, however, is a terrible way to do scholarship or to understand the past. Under this chowder-headed view, nothing of consequence has ever happened and no culture is better than any other.
Both obviously extremely false assertions.