Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Ada Palmer is a Renaissance historian at the University of Chicago who studies radical free thought and censorship, composes music, consults on anime and manga, and is the author of the acclaimed Terra Ignota sci-fi series, among many other things.
Tyler sat down with Ada to discuss why living in the Renaissance was worse than living during the Middle Ages, how art protected Florence, why she’s reluctant to travel back in time, which method of doing history is currently the most underrated, whose biography she’ll write, how we know what old Norse music was like, why women scholars helped us understand Viking metaphysics, why Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist is an interesting work, what people misunderstand about the inquisition(s), why science fiction doesn’t have higher social and literary status, which hive she would belong to in Terra Ignota, what the new novel she’s writing is about, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: De Sade — where does that come from? What are the influences on de Sade as a writer?
PALMER: Thomas Aquinas. No, lots and lots of things, but he’s very interested in the large philosophical milieu in the period. Remember that the 18th century is a moment when the clandestine bookshop is a major, major thing. And if anyone enjoys and is interested in the history of censorship and clandestine publishing, I can’t recommend enough the work of Robert Darnton, a brilliant, brilliant historian of clandestine literature.
But the same underground bookshops sell all underground materials, which means an underground bookshop sells pornography, and it also sells Voltaire and Rousseau, and it also sells diatribes criticizing the king, and it also sells radical Jansenist theological pamphlets about whether the Holy Spirit derives from the Father and Son equally or from the Father alone.
The same kinds of people frequent these shops, and the same kinds of people buy things. So, think about how, when you go into a Barnes & Noble, the science fiction and fantasy section is one section, even though science fiction and fantasy are different things. But they have a lot of overlap, both in the overlap of readership and in overlap in books that have both science fiction and fantasy elements. It was perfectly natural, in the same way, for clandestine bookshops to generate these works that are pornography and radical philosophy at the same time. They’re printed by the same printers, sold to the same audiences, and circulate in the same places.
De Sade uses his extreme pornography to get at questions of morality, ethics, and artificiality. What are the ethics of hurting each other? Why do we feel that way about hurting each other? What are so-called natural impulses, as John Locke and Hobbes were very dominant at the time, or Descartes, who is differently dominant at the time in rivalry with them? They make claims about the natural human impulses or the natural character of a human being. What does extreme sexuality show us about how that character might be broader than it is?
I mean it when I say Thomas Aquinas, right? One of Thomas Aquinas’s traditional proofs of the existence of God is that everything he sees around him in nature — this also is one that Aristotle uses, but Aquinas articulates it in the most famous way for de Sade’s period — that when we look around us, it’s clear that everything is designed to work.
Interesting throughout.
The post My Conversation with Ada Palmer appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
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