History for Atheists

• Dr Ada Palmer on Myths of "the Renaissance"

  My guest today is Dr Ada Palmer, Associate Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Chicago and author Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age. I must say I haven’t enjoyed reading a book as much as this one in quite some time. Dr Palmer takes the traditional idea of the Renaissance – that it was a glorious rebirth of reason, artistic mastery and secular thinking after a centuries long dark age – and shows this is almost entirely nonsense. She then takes the reader on a remarkable tour of the people, places and periods we can associate with “the Renaissance” and shows – as usual – the real history is so much more complex, varied and interesting than the pop history cliches. It’s a highly engaging, chatty and personable read  – she manages to make some very complex history rather fun.So it was no surprise to find Ada Palmer is as much fun in person as she is on the page. We had a long discussion about the common misconceptions about the concept of “the Renaissance”, the myth of “the Dark Ages” and the misunderstanding of how secular and non-religious these people and periods were or were not. So I hope you enjoy my conversation with Dr Ada Palmer as much as I did.

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• Dr Nathan Johnstone Interview - New Atheist Bad History

  My guest today is Dr Nathan Johnstone. Nathan is the author of the excellent 2018 book, The New Atheism, Myth and History: The Black Legends of Contemporary Anti-Religion. Like me, Nathan is an unbeliever. And, like me, he has been concerned at the way many of our more anti-theistic fellow atheists have misused history in their arguments. His book covers many of the same examples of this as the articles on my site History for Atheist, so it was a great pleasure to get the chance to sit down with him and discuss this subject. We talk less about the examples of anti-theistic bad history and more about why the New Atheist movement tends to bungle history so badly and the sources and motivations of the flawed historiography their arguments depend on. We also discuss whether the New Atheist moment has passed. 

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• Dr David Perry Interview - The "Dark Ages"

  My guest today is Dr David M. Perry . David is a medieval historian and author of several books, including The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe and the forthcoming Oathbreakers, both co-authored with Matthew Gabriele. He has taught medieval history at Dominican University and is currently the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Minnesota. The Bright Ages sought to refute common misconceptions about the Middle Ages and counter the misconception that this period was a “dark age” of unrelieved brutality, ignorance, oppression and backwardness. So today David and I will be talking about the concept of the Medieval Period as “a dark age”, the origins of this idea and why it’s a poor way of understanding a complex 1000 year period of history.https://www.davidmperry.com/the-bright-ages/

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• Dr Kipp Davis Interview - Jewish Apocalypticism

  My guest today is Dr Kipp Davis. Kipp is a biblical scholar and an expert in early Jewish literature and history, with a focus on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester (2009), has held several professional academic appointments in Europe and North America, and has published widely on the topics related to the Bible, its creation, development and transmission in the Second Temple period. His work on manuscript forgeries in private collections and best practices for provenance research and conservation has been widely publicised in academic venues as well as in mainstream media. He presently works as a public facing scholar, and runs a YouTube channel where he regularly features videos and lectures promoting quality scholarship of the Bible.Today I’ll be talking to Kipp about Jewish apocalyptic thought, apocalyptic writings and the relevance of these to an understanding of the historical Jesus.Kipp’s video channel can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/@DrKippDavisShare this:

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• Hypatia - Myths and History

  The story often told about Hypatia of Alexandria was that she was a great scientist, rationalist and scholar who was brutally murdered by a mob of Christians who hated her knowledge and learning, with her death ushering in the Dark Ages. But this story is mostly nonsense and the real history is far more complex and much more interesting. Contrary to the myths, she was not a modern-style scientist, she was far from an atheist or what we would regard as a rationalist and her murder was due to the complex city politics of her day, not some hatred of science and scholarship.Further ReadingAlan Cameron, “Hypatia: Life, Death, and Works” in Wandering Poets and Other Essays on Late Greek Literature and Philosophy, pp. 37-80, (Oxford, 2016)Thony Christie, “Hypatia – What do we Really Know?”, Renaissance Mathematicus, 2019Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, (Harvard, 1995)Peter Gainsford, “Cosmos #3 – Hypatia and the Library”, Kiwi Hellenist, 2018Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (John Hopkins, 1997)Spencer Alexander McDaniel, “Who was Hypatia Really?”, Tales of Times Forgotten, 2018Edward J. Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher, (Oxford, 2017)Bryan J. Whitfield, “The Beauty of Reasoning: A Reexamination of Hypatia of Alexandria”, The Mathematics Educator, Vol.6:1 (1995), pp. 14-21

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