Blog (Ex Urbe)

On my blog, Ex Urbe, I write essays about history, philosophy, mythology, science fiction and fantasy, movies, comics, food, and other topics.  I often discuss my research travel, especially my times in European cities including Florence and Rome.  I also post travel photography, focusing on historic sights and art.  Many of my essays are more casual examinations of topics I have been teaching or researching, ways of sharing my work in a lighter and more public setting than the classroom or academic books.

I also record the Ex Urbe Ad Astra Podcast jointly with my good friend and award-winning F&SF novelist Jo Walton. In it we interview fellow writers, historians, scientists, and other friends, discussing topics ranging from the craft of writing, to city planning and philosophy, to Martian geology, to gelato and other nifty topics. You can listen to it for free on Libsyn, on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, or support my Patreon to receive episodes in advance.

Recommended Ex Urbe Blog Entries:

I also regularly post historical photos & facts on twitter as Ada_Palmer tagged either #historypix or #SomethingBeautiful 

I also sometimes blog for Tor.com.  There I write about fiction, the craft of writing, mythology, history, literature, television, and manga & anime.

 

RSS The Latest Posts

  • LGBTQIA+ Reanaissance February 14, 2025
    As we resist those who claim diversity distorts scholarship, let’s run through the acronym & show how easy it is to find the rainbow in every era. We don’t even need to look beyond the Renaissance celebrities that are household names today! LESBIAN: Lucrezia Borgia’s last husband Alfonso d’Este appears in a lot of big […]
  • Rags to Riches Stories Fake & Real, or Always Look Up Everybody’s Mom! February 12, 2025
    Rags to Riches stories were popular long before modern iterations like the “American Dream” or “self-made man”, or even early modern ones like Jack the Giant-Killer or Cinderella. And they were also always used as propaganda. Looking back at two Rags to Riches tales of cardinals in the Renaissance, one fake one real, can show us the […]
  • History’s Largest & Most Famous Disability Access Ramp February 11, 2025
    Time for the largest, most famous disability access ramp in the world, paired with a twist about how our feelings about a piece of history can reverse completely based, not just on the historian’s point of view, but what questions we start with. (Part of my series of posts counting down to the release of […]
  • Clarice Orsini de Medici’s Extremely Illegal Hat February 10, 2025
    Time to share my current historical obsession: Clarice Orsini de Medici’s EXTREMELY ILLEGAL HAT! A cool reflection on performing social class (and part of my release countdown to the release of Inventing the Renaissance. Clarice Orsini, wife of Lorenzo de Medici “the Magnificent” came from the great Roman Orsini family, massively powerful nobles who traced […]
  • Gonzaga vs Sanseverino: I Fart in Your General Direction February 5, 2025
    Buckle up, friends, it’s time for the real life “I fart in your general direction”: Marquis Francesco Gonzaga’s unforgettable reply to the 1503 duel challenge from Galeazzo Sanseverino. (Part of my countdown to “Inventing the Renaissance.”) I posted last time introducing Galeazzo Sanseverino “Son of Fortune”, the famously handsome mercenary captain and lover of Duke […]
  • Galeazzo Sanseverino & Milan’s Sovereign Polycule-Threesome February 3, 2025
    Time to meet one of my favorite Renaissance friends: Galeazzo Sanseverino, a mercenary whom contemporary sources describe as the sexiest thing in pants in Italy, part of the badass polycule threesome that ruled Milan in the early 1490s. (This is part of my series counting down to the release of my new book Inventing the […]
  • Resistance when the Tyrant is in Power: Florence’s Vasari Corridor January 27, 2025
    Let’s talk about resistance after a conqueror takes power. Specifically let’s talk about this bendy yellow building, and what it shows us about the moment the Florentine Republic finally fell to its kleptocratic/proto-capitalist banking-fortune Medici conquerors. (Originally a Bluesky thread, part of my countdown to the release of Inventing the Renaissance) In a post last […]
  • The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars January 15, 2025
    Looks fake, doesn’t it?  This implausible Medieval forest of towers, as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers, is our best reconstruction of the town of Bologna at its height, toward the end of the Medieval Guelph-Ghibelline wars. We don’t see many such towers today… or think we don’t, but actually their remnants are all over Italy. Often […]
  • Cellini’s Perseus & the Violence of Renaissance Art January 13, 2025
    Inventing the Renaissance comes out in one month in the UK (2 months USA), so I’m going to try to post daily this month on social media to share cool pictures and stories of things related to the book. I thought I would also gather them here, posting them sometimes as individual posts, sometimes gathering […]
  • Inventing the Renaissance (book) coming out! January 8, 2025
    It’s time at last. If you’ve enjoyed my ExUrbe blog posts and stories about history over the years, here’s the book-length version on its way!  Inventing the Renaissance: the Myth of a Golden Age, coming out February 13th 2025 in the UK (pre-order through Amazon.co.uk in hardcover, Kindle e-book or Audiobook) and March 21st in the USA (pre-order from […]