The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

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Overview

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.

Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction

Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

In his 2004 Will in the World, Harvard scholar Stephen Greenblatt artfully described how Shakespeare became Shakespeare. In this equally brilliant combination biography and intellectual history, he shows us how one chance discovery in a dusty fifteenth century German library became a seminal moment in the creation of the Renaissance and, indeed, modern times. When Italian bibliophile Poggio Bracciolini opened the pages of Roman philosopher Titus Lucretius On the Nature of Things, he was, Greenblatt insists, not only rescuing a masterpiece of Epicurean poetry, he was planting the roots of an age beyond superstition and dogma. The Swerve possesses the drive of an absorbing narrative and the power of seeing a new age dawn.

Publishers Weekly

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)

NPR

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.

WHYY-FM/Fresh Air

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

Library Journal

Harvard humanities professor Greenblatt shows how the discovery of the last existing manuscript of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things—a radical book proclaiming that the world manages without gods and is made of small particles in constant motion—led to the Renaissance. The swerve? Lucretius allowed for the existence of free will in his atom-bound universe by theorizing that those little particles swerve randomly. I bet this will be as absorbing and informative as Greenblatt's Shakespeare study, Will in the World. With an eight-city tour.

Library Journal

In this outstandingly constructed assessment of the birth of philosophical modernity, renowned Shakespeare scholar Greenblatt (Cogan University Professor of English & American Literature & Language, Harvard; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare) deftly transports readers to the dawn of the Renaissance, when in 1417 bibliophile Poggio Bracciolini uncovered the Roman poet and philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus's Epicurean work, On the Nature of Things, in the dusty confines of a German monastery. After lying dormant for centuries, Lucretius's "atomist" philosophy reemerged, promoting the joys of this world over the punishments and rewards of the next, gradually conquering humanist circles and influencing such luminaries as More, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Newton. At the heart of Lucretius's Latin verse lies the core argument that by understanding the world around us, abandoning superstitious delusions, and coming to grips with humanity's insignificance, we begin to take ownership of our lives and set out on the pursuit of happiness. VERDICT Greenblatt's masterful account transcends Poggio's significant discovery to encompass a diversity of topics including the Roman book trade, Renaissance Florence, and the Catholic Church's attempts to deal with heresy and schism. Students and general readers from across the humanities will find this enthralling account irresistible. [See Prepub Alert, 3/21/11.]—Brian Odom Pelham P.L., AL

Kirkus Reviews

Greenblatt (Humanities/Harvard Univ.;Shakespeare's Freedom,2010, etc.) makes another intellectually fetching foray into the Renaissance—with digressions into antiquity and the recent past—in 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 books—and 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.

Dwight Garner

…a warm, intimate…volume of apple-cheeked popular intellectual history. Mr. Greenblatt…is a very serious and often thorny scholar…But he also writes crowd pleasers…The Swerve…brings us Mr. Greenblatt in his more cordial mode. He wears his enormous erudition lightly…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."
—The New York Times

Newsday

“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.”

Booklist

“A fascinating, intelligent look at what may well be the most historically resonant book-hunt of all time.”

Newsweek

“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.”

Salon.com

“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.”

Boston Globe

“[The Swerve] is thrilling, suspenseful tale that left this reader inspired and full of questions about the ongoing project known as human civilization.”

New York Times

“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.'”

Philadelphia Inquirer

“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.”

John McFarland - Shelf Awareness

“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.”

Maureen Corrigan - WHYY-FM/Fresh Air

“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.”

Sarah Bakewell - New York Times Book Reivew

“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.”

Shelf Awareness

“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

New York Times Book Reivew

“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

NPR/Fresh Air

“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

Maureen Corrigan - NPR/Fresh Air

“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.”

New York Times Book Reivew - Sarah Bakewell

“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.”

Shelf Awareness - John McFarland

“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.”

NPR/Fresh Air - Maureen Corrigan

“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.”

Library Journal

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

The Barnes & Noble Review

Have you read the plays of Sophocles? No, you haven't -- or at any rate, you have at best read an extremely small selection them, for only seven survive of the hundred-odd plays that came from Sophocles' pen. And Sophocles was one of the lucky ancient authors who managed to pass some of their works down to present-day readers. As Stephen Greenblatt, author of a hugely entertaining biography of William Shakespeare (Will in the World), reminds us in his fascinating book, it ought to seem astonishing that we can still lay hands on any of the classics when we contemplate the profound fragility of parchment, paper, ink, and other vessels for the written word:

At the end of the fifth century CE an ambitious literary editor known as Stobaeus compiled an anthology of prose and poetry by the ancient world's best authors: out of 1, 430 quotations, 1, 115 are from works that are now lost.... The actual material disappearance of the books was largely the effect of climate and pests. Though papyrus and parchment were impressively long-lived (far more so than either our cheap paper or computerized data), books inevitably deteriorate over the centuries, even if they manage to escape the ravages of fire and flood. The ink was a mixture of soot (from burnt lamp wicks), water, and tree gum: that made it cheap and agreeably easy to read, but also water- soluble. (A scribe who made a mistake could erase it with a sponge.) A spilled glass of wine or a heavy downpour, and the text disappeared. And that was only the most common threat. Rolling and unrolling the scrolls or poring over the codices, touching them, dropping them, coughing on them, allowing them to be scorched by fire from the candles, or simply reading them over and over eventually destroyed them.

Against the background of this immense and heartbreaking cultural loss, The Swerve offers a portrait of an unlikely hero, a fifteenth- century humanist author, manuscript copyist, papal secretary and book hunter named Poggio Bracciolini. Bracciolini spent much of his life in the employ of the Catholic Church during a particularly tumultuous period -- the so-called Papal Schism, during which multiple contesting popes claimed authority over the Church. Bracciolini, who remained a layman throughout his life, kept himself somewhat apart from ecclesiastical affairs, gazing back longingly on an idealized vision of ancient Greece and Rome and spending much of his energy attempting to discover and restore relics of those lost worlds. He was particularly interested in manuscript copies of works by ancient authors. These manuscripts were mostly to be found in the libraries of Europe's monasteries -- outside of these secure havens, few survived -- where they tended to languish for centuries, untouched and largely unread. But if they were inanimate objects of little interest to most of the monks who served as their guardians, they were, to Bracciolini, something else entirely -- literal embodiments of their authors:

All Poggio could hope to find were pieces of parchment, and not even very ancient ones. But for him these were not manuscripts but human voices. What emerged from the obscurity of the library was not a link in a long chain of texts, one copied from the other, but rather the thing itself-wrapped in gravecloths and stumbling into the light.

The Swerve pivots on the fateful moment when Bracciolini, exploring the shelves of a monastic library in Germany, happened upon a manuscript of a work that was thought to have disappeared centuries ago: Lucretius' visionary poem, On the Nature of Things. This was by far Bracciolini's greatest discovery, for the poem was to exert a profound influence on the thought of Renaissance Europe. As Greenblatt puts it -- borrowing a metaphor, the "swerve, " from Lucretius himself -- the result of Bracciolini's discovery was that "the world swerved in a new direction."

Why was Lucretius' poem so influential? The work, which dates from the first century BCE and is essentially an exposition of the philosophy of Epicurus, describes a universe in constant flux, composed, at the fundamental level, of atoms -- atoms that were in themselves eternal but were constantly assembling, disassembling, and reassembling to form the physical objects encountered on a daily basis. Those physical objects included human beings, and because humans were made of nothing but atoms -- there was no soul or other immaterial substance added in to give us permanence or let us transcend the limits of materiality -- it followed that human beings were as fragile and ephemeral as the rest of nature. (In what was perhaps his most impressive act of intellectual precocity, Lucretius described humans, and other living things, as resulting from an essentially Darwinian view of evolution by natural selection.) Moreover, the Epicurean/Lucretian view was not only a physical vision of the cosmos but also a vision of how human beings ought to live:

In a universe so constituted, Lucretius argued, there is no reason to think that the earth or its inhabitants occupy a central place, no reason to set humans apart from all other animals, no hope of bribing or appeasing the gods, no place for religious fanaticism, no call for ascetic self-denial, no rationale for wars of conquest or self-aggrandizement, no possibility of triumphing over nature, no escape from the constant making and unmaking and remaking of forms.? What human beings can do and should do, he wrote, 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.

Predictably enough, the Catholic hierarchy saw such ideas as deeply pernicious and made efforts to stop the poem from being disseminated. "Faith must take first place among all the other laws of philosophy, " wrote a Jesuit spokesman in 1624, "so that what, by established authority, is the word of God may not be exposed to falsity." And the accounts promulgated and approved by that authority had little room for the atomism or implied atheism of Lucretius' worldview. A Latin prayer recited by Jesuits at the University of Pisa actually contained explicit denials of such views, including the lines "You, O Democritus, form nothing different starting from atoms. / Atoms produce nothing; therefore, atoms are nothing."

Despite their efforts, it did not take long for the poem and the ideas it contained to spread throughout Italy and the rest of Europe. As Greenblatt argues, On the Nature of Things profoundly shaped the Renaissance; it may even have been, to a considerable extent, the initial spark that ignited it. Greenblatt mentions Montaigne, Molière, and Thomas Jefferson as among the thinkers who were deeply and directly influenced by Lucretius; but by the dawn of the twentieth century his ideas had so pervaded Western thought that it was impossible to be a serious thinker and not be influenced by him: "That the ancient poem could now be safely left unread, that the drama of its loss and recovery could fade into oblivion, that Poggio Bracciolini could be forgotten almost entirely -- these were only signs of Lucretius' absorption into the mainstream of modern thought."

It is difficult, in the end, to evaluate claims about just how much difference Bracciolini's discovery made. As it turns out, at least two other copies of On the Nature of Things also survived, so even if Bracciolini had never found his copy, the poem would still, in all likelihood, eventually have entered into European intellectual life. One might point out, moreover, that precisely because Lucretius' predictions were so astonishingly accurate, our picture of the cosmos would have ended up being the same even if every copy of the poem had perished. The world is made of atoms, after all, and life is the result of a process of evolution by natural selection; eventually, even if not spurred by a poet's vision, we would have figured these things out.

Even if this is true, though, of Lucretius' scientific claims, one wonders whether it is equally true of the ethical views expressed in On the Nature of Things. And even if we confine ourselves to the former, it is surely impossible to deny that, even if we would eventually have arrived at the same scientific view of the world, without Epicurus, Lucretius, and Bracciolini it might have taken us a great deal longer than it did. Western history would have been profoundly different. Perhaps the Renaissance would never have happened at all, or perhaps it would have followed a much different course.

"The line between this work and modernity is not direct, " Greenblatt writes. "Nothing is ever so simple. There were innumerable forgettings, disappearances, recoveries, dismissals, distortions, challenges, transformations, and renewed forgettings. And yet the vital connection is there. Hidden behind the worldview I recognize as my own is an ancient poem, a poem once lost, apparently irrevocably, and then found." It may be hard to say precisely how a particular book mattered; there is nothing in the world more speculative than speculations about counterfactual history. But in a time when so many elements in our society seem positively antipathetic to books, to reading, to ideas, to thinking, it is important, and a pleasure, to be reminded that books do matter, that we would have inherited a very different cultural landscape and would be living a very different existence if not for the vast and profound effects of their world-shaping work.

Troy Jollimore is Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Chico. His book Love's Vision will be published next year. Reviewer: Troy Jollimore

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780393064476
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date: 9/26/2011
Pages: 356
Sales rank: 70,913
Product dimensions: 6.20 (w) x 9.30 (h) x 1.30 (d)

Meet the Author

Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition, he is the author of nine books, including Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Practicing New Historicism; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, and Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. He has edited six collections of criticism, is the co-author (with Charles Mee) of a play, Cardenio, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. He honors include the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize, for Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Biography

Stephen Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, editor of The Norton Shakespeare, and prizewinning author of many academic books, including Hamlet in Purgatory.

Author biography courtesy of W. W. Norton & Company.

Good To Know

Some interesting outtakes from our interview with Greenblatt:

"As a child, I loved to read so much so that I can remember my mother calling to me, ‘Stevie, you'll ruin your eyes. Put down that book and come watch I Love Lucy.' "

"My father was a marvelous, virtually obsessive storyteller."

"Though I have spent much of my adult life thinking about Shakespeare, my first encounter with Shakespeare was a disaster. In junior high school, I found As You Like It quite possibly the most tedious and annoying thing I had ever read."

"I have interests and hobbies outside my work, of course, but the crucial thing to say is that I don't experience a great divide between my work and my pleasure. On the contrary."

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The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

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