About this book
The Swerve centres on Poggio Bracciolini, an Italian scholar and papal secretary who, in 1417, found a manuscript of On the Nature of Things by the Roman poet Lucretius in a German monastery. The poem set out an Epicurean view of a universe made of atoms, without divine intervention, and devoted to the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of fear.
Stephen Greenblatt, a literary scholar, uses this discovery to explore the world of Renaissance book hunters, the survival and loss of ancient texts, and the papal court of Poggio's day. He then follows the poem's influence on later thinkers. His larger claim that this one recovery helped make the world modern is debated by many historians, and readers should treat it as an argument rather than settled fact.
Even so, the book is a gracefully written portrait of how ideas travel and how fragile the chain of transmission can be. Readers drawn to the Renaissance might continue with Leonardo da Vinci or with Machiavelli's The Prince.
Who it’s for
Suits readers who enjoy the history of ideas and elegant writing; accessible, with a thesis worth reading critically.
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