Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Non-Fiction One of the world’s most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. … world as we know it.
Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius–a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.
The copying and translation of this ancient book-the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age-fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.more
This book is amazing in the way it describes the slow change of times from the dark ages marked by the oppression of science through religious power toward the renaissance with its scientific discoveries. The Swerve illustrates the discovery of the long lost writings of Lucretius based on “The Nature of Things” by Epicurus. It might sound like …
Before reading The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, I had vaguely heard of Epicurus; I had only heard of Lucretius because I was forced to read some of his poetry once in a Latin class; I certainly had never come across the name of Poggio Bracciolini. These three figures—one Greek, one Roman, one Italian—had as much or more to do with bringing …
fascinating history of the ancient world and how it pertains to our modern world. for true lovers of history and books
Very thought provoking. Tells the story of a Greek poem “On the nature of things” which led to some of the changes in science and philosophy in the Middle Ages.
This is a book of two halves. The first half of the book will grip you in a tale of civilization hanging in the balance and it will immerse you in a past where superstition proved, for a short time, to be stronger than knowledge and science. It is a reminder that a lot of the things we take for granted are actually very fragile. That our world …
A fascinating account of the discovery of a long lost poem which changed the cultural history of the world.
Fascinating history and explication of the rediscovery of Roman Epicurean texts and the beginning of the Renaissance in Europe.
New insight into the depth of learning and understanding of the universe in our ancient forbearers.