In this book, Ada Palmer challenges the conventional narrative of the Renaissance as a uniformly “golden age”. Drawing on fifteen intriguing character portraits of men and women from the era, and exploring how later centuries invented many of the myths we accept about this period, Palmer shows how the real Renaissance was more international, more desperate, and more complex than its legendary reputation. She examines the role of money, culture, power and belief—how books cost as much as houses, how humanists still used medieval scholastic Latin, how the Medici and the Borgias shaped the period, and why the myth of a rebirth may tell us more about later generations than the fifteenth‑century themselves