Book of the week: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

According to Greenblatt, Western culture would have been very different if the last surviving copy of On the Nature of Things by the Roman poet Lucretius had never been discovered.

(Norton, $27)

“Poggio Bracciolini is the most important man you’ve never heard of,” said Maria Popova in TheAtlantic.com. A 15th-century book hunter, the onetime papal secretary was perhaps the most adept of a small group of Renaissance-era scholars who devoted themselves to locating copies of lost ancient Greek and Roman works. One of Poggio’s finds just may have “changed the course of human thought.” Having used his guile to talk his way into a Benedictine abbey in southern Germany, he came upon the sole surviving copy of On the Nature of Things, a 7,500-line work by the Roman poet Lucretius. In Stephen Greenblatt’s “utterly absorbing” new book, that discovery seems to mark the very birth of modernity.

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“Greenblatt is no stranger to finessing the historical record,” said Laura Miller in Salon.com. His previous popular history, Will in the World, was openly a work of speculation, spinning the few known facts about William Shakespeare into a “charming meditation” on the playwright’s life. Greenblatt here is not “as forthright about the liberties he’s taken” in making it appear as if Poggio’s eureka moment shaped the entire Renaissance. The more important story, though, is how a nearly extinct school of ancient thought—Epicureanism—managed to weave itself into Western culture “despite being antithetical to the dominant beliefs of that culture.” The Swerve doesn’t just relate that tale concisely; it makes the journey “pretty darn scenic.”