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Summary
Summary
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.
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.
Author Notes
Stephen Greenblatt is a literary critic, theorist and scholar.
He is the author of Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley (1965); Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980); Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (1990); Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (1992); The Norton Shakespeare (1997); Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004); Shakespeare's Freedom (2010); and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this gloriously learned page-turner, both biography and intellectual history, Harvard Shakespearean scholar Greenblatt (Will in the World) turns his attention to the front end of the Renaissance as the origin of Western culture's foundation: the free questioning of truth. It hinges on the recovery of an ancient philosophical Latin text that had been neglected for a thousand years. In the winter of 1417 Italian oddball humanist, smutty humorist, and apostolic secretary Poggio Bracciolini stumbled on Lucretius' De rerum natura. In an obscure monastery in southern Germany lay the recovery of a philosophy free of superstition and dogma. Lucretius' "On the Nature of Things" harked back to the mostly lost works of Greek philosophers known as atomists. Lucretius himself was essentially an Epicurean who saw the restrained seeking of pleasure as the highest good. Poggio's chance finding lay what Greenblatt, following Lucretius himself, terms a historic swerve of massive proportions, propagated by such seminal and often heretical truth tellers as Machiavelli, Giordano Bruno, and Montaigne. We even learn the history of the bookworm-a real entity and one of the enemies of ancient written-cultural transmission. Nearly 70 pages of notes and bibliography do nothing to spoil the fun of Greenblatt's marvelous tale. 16 pages of color illus. (Sept. 19) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Literary scholar Greenblatt focuses on Lucretius, ancient Roman author of the brilliant and beautiful didactic poem On the Nature of Things, which challenged the authority of religion, and papal counselor and book hunter Poggio Bracciolini, whose recovery of a copy of the subversive text a millennium and a half later added momentum to the Renaissance and shaped the world we call modern. Lucretius, Greenblatt reminds, was a radical figure very much ahead of his time. Many of his insights for example, that everything is made of invisible particles of matter that are constantly in motion have been borne out by modern science. Others, such as the idea that religions are defined by cruelty and superstition, remain hotly controversial to this day. Vatican humanist Bracciolini, about whom we know quite a bit more, if not quite enough, may in the end be the more interesting personality. He knew what he had found, but did he know what it meant? Do we? A fascinating, intelligent look at what may well be the most historically resonant book-hunt of all time.--Driscoll, Brenda. Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
How a Renaissance book dealer kept a classic from disappearing. HISTORY can be fatal to literature. Aeschylus wrote 80 or 90 plays, and Sophocles 120, yet we have just seven of each. Didymus Chalcenterus of Alexandria reportedly wrote 3,500 books; not one exists today. Between classical antiquity and us, there has been a hecatomb of words. They have been burned, thrown away, lost to mold or pulverized. They have been rubbed off so that vellum and papyrus could be reused. Bookworms have eaten them by the dictionary-load. Among the works that survived - but only just - is one so beautifully written and so uncannily prescient that it seems to come to us out of a personal dream. Titus Lucretius Carus' "De Rerum Natura," or "On the Nature of Things," is a 7,400-line poem in Latin hexameters written in the first century B.C. It covers philosophy, physics, optics, cosmology, sociology, psychology, religion and sex; the ideas in it influenced Newton and Darwin, among others. Yet Lucretius almost went the way of Didymus. In "The Swerve," the literary historian Stephen Greenblatt investigates why his book nearly died, how it was saved and what its rescue means to us. About Lucretius himself, we have little more to go on than the lurid story told by the fourth-century church father St. Jerome: that he was born in 94 B.C., went mad as the result of a love potion and killed himself at 43. We can add that he was a disciple of Epicurus, who lived 250 years earlier, and hence of the even earlier Democritus, whose theory of atoms underlay Epicurean ideas. (The original texts of both philosophers also didn't make it, as a surgeon might say with a sad shake of the head in a TV drama; we know them only secondhand.) Democritus thought that everything was made of material particles, and Lucretius took that as his starting point. Such "atoms," he wrote, are infinite and eternal; no one made them, nothing can destroy them. They hurtle through the universe, not in straight lines - that way they could never tangle up together to form objects - but with a minuscule "swerve" or "clinamen" in their trajectory. Veering slightly off course, each atom bumps into other atoms and clings or entwines with them for a while; later, their swerve carries them away again. Humans are made of atoms too, including our souls. If gods exist at all, they are uninterested in us. We are free, liberated by the unpredictability of the swerve, as are all living things. We are all connected, and when we die, our atoms go off to join other atoms elsewhere. Death is only dispersal; there is no need to fear any afterlife, or mutter spells and prayers to absent deities. We do better to live by the simple Epicurean law: Seek pleasure, avoid pain. This does not mean indulging ourselves gluttonously, but cultivating tranquillity while avoiding the two greatest human delusions: fear of what we cannot avoid, and desire for what we cannot have. One extraordinary section describes the frenzies of lovers, who exhaust themselves futilely trying to possess one another. The beloved always slips away. Instead, we should step off the wheel and contemplate the universe as it is - which brings a deep sense of wonder, rather than mere resignation or gloom. "What human beings can and should do," as Greenblatt summarizes it, "is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world." It was an attractive philosophy, exquisitely expressed, and a few decades later Ovid enthused that "the verses of sublime Lucretius are destined to perish only when a single day will consign the world to destruction." A world without Lucretius seemed unimaginable - yet that was just what nearly ensued. All ancient copies vanished, except for a few charred scraps in a library at Herculaneum. Some medieval copies circulated, but these too mostly expired from neglect or deliberate destruction, for Epicurean philosophies were uncongenial to Christianity. At last, in 1417, probably in the southern German Benedictine abbey of Fulda, one stray ninth-century copy caught the eye of a Renaissance book hunter from Italy, Poggio Bracciolini. Poggio saw the manuscript's significance at once, presumably knowing of Lucretius from Jerome and Ovid. He had a copy made and sent to a friend in Florence, who copied it anew. (That copy survives; both Poggio's and the original have gone down Didymus Gulch.) Two more copies would turn up in Leiden 200 years later, but for now Poggio's was alone, and it spawned more copies. With the advent of printing, it spread even farther and won more admirers. Among 16th-century readers was the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, who filled his copy with annotations, including one suffused with obvious delight: "Since the movements of the atoms are so varied, it is not unbelievable that the atoms once came together in this way, or that in the future they will come together like this again, giving birth to another Montaigne." It was one of those "rare and powerful" moments, as Greenblatt writes, when a long-dead author seems to reach directly through time to a particular reader, as if bearing a message meant only for that person. Another such magical moment would occur some 400 years later, when the young Stephen Greenblatt himself picked up a 10-cent copy of Lucretius for vacation reading. He too was amazed by how personally it spoke to him. Such encounters have become central to the philosophy Greenblatt has elaborated in several decades of work as a literary historian and theorist of the "new historicism" in literary studies. It combines hardheaded investigations of historical context with a profound feeling for the way writers somehow pull free from time, to enter the minds of readers. "I am constantly struck," Greenblatt told The Harvard Gazette in 2000, when he was named a university professor, "by the strangeness of reading works that seem addressed, personally and intimately, to me, and yet were written by people who crumbled to dust long ago." It is a rich literary paradox: authors are embedded in history, yet they slip away; they time-travel. The voyage of "De Rerum Natura" through time traced an hourglass shape: it billowed, then dwindled, then billowed again. At the waist of this hourglass stands Poggio, and his life forms one of the main narrative strands in "The Swerve." We follow him from his modest birth in 1380, through a glittering but ill-fated career at the Vatican to an insatiable life of manuscript collecting. It made him rich, yet his love for books was Epicurean in the sense once conjured up by Petrarch, another collector: "Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us and join with us in a living and intense intimacy." This intimacy is one theme of "The Swerve"; its alarming fragility is another. What saved Lucretius for us was a "swerve" of sorts; apparently bent on oblivion, his poem abruptly changed course and found its way back. Similar uneven lines of chance are involved in bringing individual readers to particular books; an accident throws a work in our path or an odd sentence catches our eye, and the book becomes a lifelong companion. Again, the lines are rarely straight. As Greenblatt writes, the story of Lucretius' text is one of "forgettings, disappearances, recoveries, dismissals, distortions, challenges, transformations and renewed forgettings." It could have finished Lucretius off - but we are lucky. The "vital connection" goes on. The intimacy and the fragility still go hand in hand, and Lucretius lives to breathe at least another few breaths. What human beings can and should do, Lucretius said, is embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world. Sarah Bakewell is the author, most recently, of "How to Live: Or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer."
Choice Review
Adopting the conceit of the "swerve" as the fulcrum of this work, Greenblatt (Harvard) presents a narrative study of Poggio Bracciolini's discovery in 1417 of Lucretius's lost poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things). He provides an engaging synthesis of Christianity's tactical obliteration of Epicureanism and the concomitant consignment to oblivion of the poetic elucidation (i.e., works like Lucretius's) of atomic and hedonistic fundamentals the Christian world-view deemed so antithetical. Artfully woven in are erudite delineations of the arcana of medieval book production, the mores of life in a monastic scriptorium, the intrigues of 15th-century papal politics, and the considerable perils of theological heterodoxy. By fortuitous chance, a manuscript of the lost De rerum natura was discovered in one dramatic moment of instantaneous recognition by Poggio, one of the greatest of the humanist bibliomaniacs. Adducing this as the "swerve," Greenblatt causally connects this recovery of Lucretius to the unleashing of the forces of scientific inquiry and aesthetic humanism that characterize the Renaissance and thus inform the substratum of modernity--hence the subtitle. Provocative, stimulating, and certain to catalyze scholarly debate, this elegant book deserves a wide readership. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. J. S. Louzonis St. Francis College, Brooklyn, NY
Guardian Review
In the winter of 1417 a papal secretary made a great discovery. In an abbey in Germany he came across a manuscript of a long-lost classical poem, Lucretius's De Rerum Natura ("On the Nature of the Universe"). Lucretius believed that the gods did not concern themselves with mortal affairs and did not create the universe, which was composed of minuscule particles. Greenblatt sees it as the origin of the Renaissance and, in effect, of modernity. Greenblatt's story of the unleashing of the pleasure principle on the European world conveys his own passion for discovery, and displays his brilliance as a storyteller. The Swerve is, though, a dazzling retelling of the old humanist myth of the heroic liberation of classical learning from centuries of monastic darkness. The light of Rome fades into gloom, sheep graze in the Forum then the humanists rebel against the orthodoxies of the church, bring about a great recovery of classical texts and generate a new intellectual dawn. This book makes that story into a great read, but it cannot make it entirely true. - Colin Burrow In the winter of 1417 a papal secretary made a great discovery. In an abbey in Germany he came across a manuscript of a long-lost classical poem, Lucretius's De Rerum Natura ("On the Nature of the Universe"). - Colin Burrow.
Kirkus Review
Greenblatt (Humanities/Harvard Univ.;Shakespeare's Freedom,2010, etc.) makes another intellectually fetching foray into the Renaissancewith digressions into antiquity and the recent pastin search of a root of modernity.More than 2,000 years ago, Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius wrote On the Nature of Things, which spoke of such things as the atomic structure of all that exists, of natural selection, the denial of an afterlife, the inherent sexuality of the universe, the cruelty of religion and the highest goal of human life being the enhancement of pleasure. It was a dangerous book and wildly at odds with the powers that be through many a time period. That Greenblatt came across this book while in graduate school is a wonder, for it had been scourged, scorned or simply fallen from fashion from the start, making fugitive reappearances when the time was ripe, but more likely to fall prey to censorship and the bookworm, literally eaten to dust. In the 15th century, along came Poggio Bracciolini humanist, lover of antiquity, former papal secretary, roving hunter of booksand the hub of Greenblatt's tale. He found the book, perhaps the last copy, in a monastery library, liked what he saw (even if he never cottoned to its philosophy) and had the book copied; thankfully, history was preserved. Greenblatt's brilliantly ushers readers into this world, which is at once recognizable and wholly foreign. He has an evocative hand with description and a liquid way of introducing supporting players who soon become principals: Democritus, Epicurius, scribe monks, Thomas More, Giordano Bruno, Montaigne and Darwin, to name just a few.More wonderfully illuminating Renaissance history from a master scholar and historian.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Roughly 600 years ago, book hunter Poggio Bracciolini happened upon a "lost" copy of On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura), a poem by Lucretius. It postulated that the world is made up of nature (atoms) and that religion is harmful and damaging to human life. Bracciolini had the manuscript copied and widely distributed. Some believe that this poem caused the world to swerve and change philosophical direction, thus beginning the Renaissance. VERDICT Whether one poem could be so influential is questionable. In addition to this overzealous history, book lovers are rewarded with brilliant descriptions of the history of books, libraries, and fascinating detail about manuscript production. Narrator Edoardo Ballerini's rather professorial presentation gives listeners the sense of participating in a one-sided lecture. ["Greenblatt's masterful account transcends (Bracciolini's) significant discovery," read the review of the National Book Award-winning Norton hc, LJ 6/15/11.-Ed.]-Susan Baird, formerly with Oak Lawn P.L., Chicago (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.