Other Arkansaws

While walking around a delightful small town in Florida, a woman discovers that if she tilts her head just so, the scene before her changes from one of bougie cafes and bookstores to blight and desolation and hopelessness. Such a discovery doesn’t shock this particular woman as much as it should, as she has been traveling across the country for a while now, visiting isolated points on the map where “another America” seems to be breaking through.

At least, this is the story of the second series of Alice Isn’t Dead, a fictional podcast my wife and I have been listening to for the past few weeks. I liked horror of this variety much more when I was younger, but it’s delightfully atmospheric and well narrated. But I bring this up because I’ve also been reading Ada Palmer’s 2025 book Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, which is easily the best work of historiography I have read. Palmer works with readable diligence to get across a few select theses: 1) what we call the Renaissance was not understood at the time as a great “rebirth” of classical knowledge; 2) the Renaissance was not a clear break with the medieval past; 3) qualities we describe as the dominant characteristics of Renaissance culture—increasing secularism and rationality—are qualities attributed to the period only in retrospect; 4) our notion of the Renaissance is heavily skewed by the many historical accidents that ensured the survival of specifically Florentine art and architecture down to the present day; 5) there were many different Renaissances, not just one.

Or as Palmer writes:

The Renaissance is not a set of years, it’s our name for the idea that there was a period of change between medieval and modern, during which some special innovation, some X-Factor, arrived and made the world different. Its start and end dates shift with what different people see as the X-Factor, what we each think makes things modern. If you think the X-Factor was a change in art, you give a different start date from if you think it was an economic shift, or a political change, or a key idea or author. That is why there are Renaissance courses that go from 1300 to 1550 and others that go from 1520 to 1700, and back in the History Lab—where we brew up new timelines as colleagues down the street in molecular engineering brew RNA—we often see English literature students amazed that our Renaissance people look as early as Dante, while Italian lit students are amazed that we look at someone as late as Thomas Hobbes.

Even when Renaissance thinkers exhibit some novelty in their thinking that is definitely different from what came before, it can be difficult to recognize because these same people worked so hard to abjure any sense of originality. Raffaello Maffei il Volterrano’s Commentaria Urbana disguises its fundamental moral project as just another encyclopedia, while so much other original work is done in commentaries on ancient writers such as Livy or presented in the prefaces to new translations of those works. It’s easy to look at a painting and say, “Ah, this exhibits perspective—I remember that term from high school, and that means this is Renaissance!” Harder to sift through some scholar’s footnotes where more truly radical notions take hold. So is the Renaissance best typified by that painting, or by those less glamorous footnotes?

Too, the Renaissance was no “golden age” for those living through it—that quickly becomes clear in Palmer’s book. The wages of war and the ravages of plague were enough without all the political and religious intrigue that could exterminate one’s fortunes as quickly as it built them. Many a writer left behind laments that they should live in such an evil time.

The Renaissance was a real phenomenon; it just differed depending upon what angle you were regarding it from. Just remember—there are always other Renaissances out there.

There are lessons here even for those of us whose careers don’t regularly entail explorations of fifteenth-century papal intrigues or Venetian architecture. Just the other day, I received an email from a person proposing to write an entry on a particular southern Arkansas teacher. This teacher was born, lived, and died in the same county, but she obtained her bachelor’s degree from a teacher’s college in Kentucky and later received a diploma from an institution in Rome. She later took summer courses at the University of Chicago and traveled throughout Europe, all to become a better teacher of the children back home in her rural Arkansas county. She held teacher-training workshops across Arkansas and even taught future teachers at two different Arkansas colleges.

That story will soon be in the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas. It’s a story that challenges the usual image of Arkansas as closed off from the rest of the world. Here, we find a teacher from Arkansas traveling the world just to bring back that knowledge to her rural Arkansas community. Arkansas author Charles Portis famously lamented how few people seemed to achieve sufficient “escape velocity” to separate themselves permanently from Arkansas, taking for granted the notion that true talent will always leave this state if it has the chance. That’s certainly been part of our story: all the Arkansas actors who go off to Hollywood and never come back, for example.

But tilt your head just slightly and a different Arkansas emerges. Actually, multiple Arkansaws suddenly appear. (I’m not indulging in fanciful archaism with the spelling—Arkansaw is just easier to make a plural.) Here, in a rural part of the state, we have a woman who traveled to Italy to study and learn, all to become a better teacher to her students back home. Maybe the stories she told her students of the “Italian” Renaissance only reinforced that old metanarrative that Ada Palmer is working so hard to complicate. But by having shared even that, from her own personal experience, she complicates the old metanarrative of Arkansas.

It turns out that we don’t have to travel the road so long to find hints of another America, another Arkansas. The traces of these stories are all over the place. We’ve just too often accepted the stories we’ve been told about our home, keeping us from developing the curiosity we need to experience it anew.

Guy Lancaster is the editor of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas.