The Swerve
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Swerve: How the World Became Modern is a non-fiction book by Stephen Greenblatt and winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Greenblatt tells the story of how Poggio Bracciolini, a 15th-century papal emissary and obsessive bibliophile, saved the last copy of the Roman poet Lucretius's On the Nature of Things from near-terminal neglect in a German monastery, thus reintroducing important ideas that sparked the modern age.
Greenblatt noted how unpopular the irreligious nature of the poem was even before Christianity spread:
- Once… you start thinking what the implications of a world made of atoms and emptiness and nothing else, lots of things, potentially at least, follow. And the things that follow can be extremely dangerous -- [dangerous to pagan, Jewish] or Christian orthodoxy…
The book mentions Lorenzo Valla, Thomas More, Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne, Giordano Bruno, Aristotle, Christian heretics and the clinamen.
TOC
- The book hunter --
- The moment of discovery --
- In search of Lucretius --
- The teeth of time --
- Birth and rebirth --
- In the lie factory --
- A pit to catch foxes --
- The way things are --
- The return --
- Swerves --
- Afterlives.
See also