This is a cross-post from https://www.250bpm.com/p/ada-palmer-inventing-the-renaissance.

For over a decade, Ada Palmer, a history professor at University of Chicago (and a science-fiction writer!), struggled to teach Machiavelli. “I kept changing my approach, trying new things: which texts, what combinations, expanding how many class sessions he got…” The problem, she explains, is that “Machiavelli doesn’t unpack his contemporary examples, he assumes that you lived through it and know, so sometimes he just says things like: Some princes don’t have to work to maintain their power, like the Duke of Ferrara, period end of chapter. He doesn’t explain, so modern readers can’t get it.”

Palmer’s solution was to make her students live through the run-up to the Italian Wars themselves. Her current method involves a three-week simulation of the 1492 papal election, a massive undertaking with sixty students playing historical figures, each receiving over twenty pages of unique character material, supported by twenty chroniclers and seventy volunteers. After this almost month-long pedagogical marathon of negotiations and backstabbing, then a week of analysis, and reading Machiavelli’s letters, students finally encounter The Prince. By then they know the context intimately. When Machiavelli mentions the Duke of Ferrara maintaining power effortlessly, Palmer’s students react viscerally. They remember Alfonso and Ippolito d’Este as opportunists who exploited their vulnerabilities while remaining secure themselves. They’ve learned the names, families, and alliances not through memorization but through necessity: to protect their characters’ homelands and defeat their enemies.

Then, one year, her papal election class was scheduled at the same time as a course on Machiavelli’s political thought. The teachers brought both classes together, so each could hear how the other’s class (history vs. political science) approached the things differently. Palmer asked both classes: “What would Machiavelli say if you asked him what would happen if Milan suddenly changed from a monarchal duchy to a republic?”

The poli sci students went first: He’d say that it would be very unstable, because the people don’t have a republican tradition, so lots of ambitious families would be tempted to try to take over, so you’d have to get rid of those ambitious families, like the example Livy gives of killin

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