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Patrick Wyman: Luther, Columbus and Gutenberg
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
English - July 20, 2021 20:00 - 1 hour - 55.4 MB - ★★★★★ - 175 ratingsLife Sciences Science Social Sciences culture history politics science Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Today on this bonus episode of Unsupervised Learning I’m excited to talk to Patrick Wyman about his new book, The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World.
Full disclosure, I enjoyed The Verge, and a review will be posted from me on National Review Online within the next week.
Wyman is the host of Tides of History, a podcast about history and assorted topics which I recommend to everyone (I’ve been a guest). If you’ve listened to him speak at length, you won’t be very surprised by the topics and style of writing in The Verge. The narrative does a great job balancing the academic with the engaging.
After reading his book I was curious to ask Wyman about how he wove social and economic history into a persona-driven narrative. We talk at length about the particular details of the significance of the 40-year-period he covers, and whether Martin Luther was a necessary man (as opposed to just being sufficient).
Patrick and I also tackle meta-historical questions such as the importance of “great men” versus forces-of-history, and whether the Protestant Reformation was inevitable due to technological changes. It’s a wide-ranging conversation, so if you are interested in the nitty-gritty of historical processes I think you’ll enjoy it.
Cross-promotion: The six-part series on Finland is done, check it out:
Part one: Duke Tales: shades of Finnish cultural weirdness in my own backyard
Part two: Weirdness as a national pastime: culture
Part three: Go West Young Siberian: genetics findings
Part four: From deepest Siberia to Europe’s edge: more genetics
Part five: Frontier Finns: cabins, rakes & Indians
Part six: Finnish brains, baiting and bottlenecks: education and medical genetics