The Swerve - Books.Infosec.Exchange

Hardcover, 356 pages

English language

Published Sept. 26, 2011 by W. W. Norton.

ISBN:: 978-0-393-06447-6
OCLC Number:: 711051785

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.

…

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.

4 editions

Ben Waber reviewed The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt

An Extremely Well-Written but Not Exactly Rigorous History

3 stars

Greenblatt traces the journey of various great works of Greek and Roman literature and philosophy through the centuries, examining their geographic flow, challenges in preservation, and hypothesizing about the effects of their reemergence in Europe as a precondition to the Renaissance. The writing here is excellent, but the historical analysis is shakier, with many leaps in reasoning made with no supporting evidence, although the arc of the literary industry through the centuries is well documented and fascinating. Overall, this is an interesting and useful book on a fairly understudied era of Western history.

Ben Waber

rated it

March 26

Subjects

Lucretius carus, titus
Renaissance
Philosophy, renaissance
Civilization, modern
Science, history

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