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Loading... The Swerve: How the World Became Modernby Stephen Greenblatt
 CasualFriday | May 6, 2013 |  So I guess I'm a Lucretian, who knew? ;) Fascinating book, a glimpse into another time that is many ways an echo of our own. (  ) stacey2112 | Apr 22, 2013 | An engaging book that covers a range of fascinating historical moments and milieus. The central character of Poggio Bracciolini and his discovery of an ancient text by Lucretius serves as a vehicle tracing the rise and fall of cultures and the slow progression to modernity. Very enjoyable read. ( ) Mducman | Apr 22, 2013 | Really astounding. I was floored at the end to realize this one work had influenced some of my favorite writers: Montaigne and Shakespeare and really all western thought. The whimsy of Lucretius' work surviving through the ages... (  ) JenGennari | Apr 6, 2013 | A fascinating account of how one early Renaissance humanist searched for and rediscovered Lucretius' philosophical poem, De Rerum Naturam; Greenblatt argues that the discovery of this book was crucial to the birth of the Enlightenment, modern society and modern science. Maybe, maybe not, but it is a fascinating story told well. ( ) nmele | Apr 6, 2013 |
 Greenblatt's story of the unleashing of the pleasure principle on the European world after the discovery of Lucretius 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. The ideas in “The Swerve” are tucked, cannily, inside a quest narrative. The book relates the story of Poggio Bracciolini, the former apostolic secretary to several popes, who became perhaps the greatest book hunter of the Renaissance. His most significant find, located in a German monastery, was a copy of Lucretius’ “On the Nature of Things,” which had been lost to history for more than a thousand years. Its survival and re-emergence into the world, Mr. Greenblatt suggests, was a kind of secular miracle. Approaching Lucretius through Bracciolini was an ingenious idea. It allows Mr. Greenblatt to take some worthwhile detours: through the history of book collecting, and paper making, and libraries, and penmanship, and monks and their almost sexual mania for making copies of things. The details that Mr. Greenblatt supplies throughout “The Swerve” are tangy and exact.  This concise, learned and fluently written book tells a remarkable story. It may not quite tell us "how the Renaissance began", as the subtitle rather rashly promises, but the episode it describes is certainly resonant. Highly skilled, close-focus readings of moments of great cultural significance are Stephen Greenblatt's speciality, whether in "new historicist" studies such as Marvellous Possessions, about the European encounter with the New World, or in his more populist biography Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare.
References to this work on external resources.
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 Audible.comAn edition of this book was published by Audible.com.
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Wikipedia in English (3)
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I read this fairly fast, for my book group, and probably need to go back to it; frankly for me it was rough sledding at times. I perceived a surprising amount of speculation in this well-documented history book, as well as a pugnacious atheism which is probably going to annoy some of my book group cohorts. (