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Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction�
Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Non-Fiction
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. 16 pages of color illustrations
- Sales Rank: #8650 in Books
- Published on: 2012-09-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.30" h x 1.10" w x 5.60" l, .97 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 356 pages
Review
In this gloriously learned page-turner, both biography and intellectual history, Harvard Shakespearean scholar Greenblatt turns his attention to the front end of the Renaissance as the origin of Western culture's foundation: the free questioning of truth. --starred review"
The ideas in The Swerve are tucked, cannily, inside a quest narrative. . . . The details that Mr. Greenblatt supplies throughout The Swerve are tangy and exact. . . . There is abundant evidence here of what is Mr. Greenblatt s great and rare gift as a writer: an ability, to borrow a phrase from The Swerve, to feel fully 'the concentrated force of the buried past.' "
In The Swerve, the literary historian Stephen Greenblatt investigates why [Lucretius' ] book nearly dies, how it was saved and what its rescue means to us. --Sarah Bakewell"
More wonderfully illuminating Renaissance history from a master scholar and historian. --starred review"
Every tale of the preservation of intellectual history should be as rich and satisfying as Stephen Greenblatt's history of the reclamation and acclamation of Lucretius's De rerum natura from obscurity. --John McFarland"
In this outstandingly constructed assessment of the birth of philosophical modernity, renowned Shakespeare scholar Greenblatt deftly transports reader to the dawn of the Renaissance...Readers from across the humanities will find this enthralling account irresistible. --starred review"
It's fascinating to watch Greenblatt trace the dissemination of these ideas through 15th-century Europe and beyond, thanks in good part to Bracciolini's recovery of Lucretius' poem. "
But Swerve is an intense, emotional telling of a true story, one with much at stake for all of us. And the further you read, the more astonishing it becomes. It's a chapter in how we became what we are, how we arrived at the worldview of the present. No one can tell the whole story, but Greenblatt seizes on a crucial pivot, a moment of recovery, of transmission, as amazing as anything in fiction. "
[The Swerve] is thrilling, suspenseful tale that left this reader inspired and full of questions about the ongoing project known as human civilization. "
Can a poem change the world? Harvard professor and bestselling Shakespeare biographer Greenblatt ably shows in this mesmerizing intellectual history that it can. A richly entertaining read about a radical ancient Roman text that shook Renaissance Europe and inspired shockingly modern ideas (like the atom) that still reverberate today. "
A fascinating, intelligent look at what may well be the most historically resonant book-hunt of all time. "
Pleasure may or may not be the true end of life, but for book lovers, few experiences can match the intellectual-aesthetic enjoyment delivered by a well-wrought book. In the world of serious nonfiction, Stephen Greenblatt is a pleasure maker without peer. "
The Swerve is one of those brilliant works of non-fiction that's so jam-packed with ideas and stories it literally boggles the mind. --Maureen Corrigan"
About the Author
Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, he is the author of eleven books, including The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (winner of the 2011 National Book Award and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize); Shakespeare's Freedom; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture; and Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. He has edited seven collections of criticism, including Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. His honors include the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize, for both Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England and The Swerve, the Sapegno Prize, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Wilbur Cross Medal from the Yale University Graduate School, the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, the Erasmus Institute Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He was president of the Modern Language Association of America and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Most helpful customer reviews
516 of 548 people found the following review helpful.
How The Past Made Us What We Are
By John D. Cofield
In the early 15th century Western Europe was just emerging from a couple of centuries of plague, famine, and conflict. Led by the city states of northern Italy, the Europeans were attempting to find their footing, and to do so they looked back 1500 years or more to the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. Scholarly humanists began to search out and restudy old scrolls and ancient manuscripts in order to relearn much of what had been lost during the Dark Ages. Of these none was more important than Poggio Bracciolini, a papal secretary whose Pope had been overthrown and replaced, and who dealt with his loss of power and income by searching monasteries in Germany and Switzerland for forgotten scripts. His greatest discovery was Lucretius' long poem On The Nature Of Things, which he copied and had distributed, ensuring that it became a seminal document of the emerging Renaissance.
Lucretius had been a Epicurean philosopher during the Roman Empire, who taught that the soul did not survive death and that all living things were made up tiny particles or atomi. Epicureans called on people to enjoy a good life (not a hedonistic one as is often supposed) without worrying about the wrath of God or the gods, who did not concern themselves with anything so insignificant as human affairs. This has a modern ring to us, as it should since Lucretius' writings, as Stephen Greenblatt so ably shows, helped to shape the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. Lucretius' ideas were unwelcome to many in the Church hierarchy, and those who followed his ideas were often in danger of perseuction or even execution.
Stephen Greenblatt has produced a fascinating chronicle of Lucretius, Poggio, and the worlds they inhabited. Much of the book is concerned with Poggio's life and times, which were very long for the period and rich and full of incident. There is also much excellent material on the tumultuous political world the Church and secular powers struggled to dominate, as well as some fascinating discussion on how Lucretius probably came to create his poem and on how its rediscovery and publication influenced the world, whose development turned or "swerved" dramatically as a result of Lucretius and other classical writers renewed popularity.
The Swerve should become an essential part of the library of anyone interested in the late medieval and early Renaissance eras.
814 of 908 people found the following review helpful.
Great topic - thesis questionable
By Harold Kirkpatrick
The thesis and tone of The Swerve echo Jacob Burckhardt's now somewhat discredited 19th century characterization of the Italian Renaissance with its celebrations of life and beauty as a "return to paganism" (as though the Middle Ages didn't have its festivals and gai savoir). Burckhardt's book may be outdated as history but is nevertheless a masterpiece of Romantic historiography that repays rereading. Greenblatt is no Burckhardt, but it sounds like his book will also be valuable - even only insofar as it is successful in familiarizing contemporary readers with the role of characters like the colorful Poggio Bracciolini, Lorenzo Valla and their manuscript-hunting Humanist confreres, many of whom were employees, like Poggio himself, of the Papal court.
Greenblatt seriously overstates the role of Lucretius, whose influence, until the mid to late 18th century was arguably quite marginal. Peter Gay's The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism, unfortunately not mentioned by Greenblatt, deals at length with the influence of Lucretius on French Enlightenment thinkers, many of whom really were "pagans", i.e., materialists and epicureans. The standard view, of course, is that a revival of Platonic idealism, not of "pagan" materialism, was responsible for the Renaissance preoccupation with beauty and harmony.
Poggio's fifteenth century discovery of the manuscript of Lucretius's De rerum natura was not commented on much by Renaissance humanists, who confined themselves to remarks about Lucretius's grammar and syntax. It was printed in 1511 with a commentary by Denys Lambin, who termed Lucretius's Epicurean ideas "fanciful, absurd, and opposed to Christianity" -- and Lambin's preface remained standard until the nineteenth century. Epicurus's unacceptable doctrine that pleasure was the highest good, writes Jill Kraye, "ensured the unpopularity of his philosophy". See Jill Kraye's "Philologists and Philosophers" in the Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism [1996], p. 153-154.
If Renaissance Humanists such as Valla and Erasmus seemed to paradoxically endorse Epicureanism, it was in a Christianized and Platonized form in which love of God and life of virtue were seen as the highest pleasures. They certainly did not endorse Lucretius's materialism and they probably didn't even see the significance of his belief in atoms. Montaigne in his Essays, on the other hand, quotes Lucretius repeatedly, often without attribution, indicating that Lucretius's naturalism, if not his Epicureanism, was appealing to him.
In The Swerve, Greenblatt describes the fascinating 1989 identification of Montaigne's personal annotated copy of Lucretius. Greenblatt also cites Pietro Redondi's controversial portrayal of Gallileo as a closet materialist, while gliding hurriedly over the many objections that have been raised to Redondi's assertions. As a liberal and believer in science, myself, I fully sympathize with Greenblatt's predilections. He is a lively writer, but I think the public would have been better served by more balanced presentations, such as can be found, for example, in the writings of Anthony Grafton, who is especially good on humanism during transitional period between the Renaissance and the French Enlightenment. Grafton also traces the interrelationship of humanism and modern liberal ideas in a way that is attractive and convincing.
457 of 534 people found the following review helpful.
interesting but too polemical
By sully
I consider myself to be a person in the modern camp. I am non-religious, scientifically minded and a humanist and when I heard about "Swerve", I had to read it. It seemed like red meat for me. Actually it was way too much red meat.
By the time I reached half way through the book, I was feeling such rage against the Roman Catholic Church that my heart was pounding. An institution raging in obscuritanism, mass delusion,murder and suppression of the mind had blotted out the advance of Western Civilization, until a scribe found an ancient poem. I put the book down and calmed down myself. Later on, I skimmed the last half of the book.
The problem with "Swerve" is that it is a polemic and it is trying to be something else. If you want a polemic against christianity and how it has ruined Western Civilization, I recommend Friedrich Nietzsche's "The Anti-Christ". Nietzsche admitted he was writing a polemic and he was one of best polemic writers of all time. The polemical nature of this book weakens it, since it seems that the fires have to be relit constantly and you get the impression that a lot of information is being left out that does not feed the fire.
Another problem with "Swerve", is the way Lucretius is handled. His poem is treated as the only spark that ignited generations of scientific minds in Western Civilization. It is utterly too simplistic. Indeed the Catholic Church itself harbored humanists and scientific thinkers before the Reformation caused them to shamefully over react later on. The dome of Saint Peter's Basilica was not built by other worldly delusional thinkers. Did the architects of St Peter's have a copy of Lucretius with them?
"Swerve" is an interesting read, but it is like I say sometimes after seeing a movie about a historical period. If you are interested enough in the subject, go read some books on it. If you are interested in how the world became modern, you need a lot of books, not just this one.
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