The swerve
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. - Publisher.
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8recommend
14mentions
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2013–2026years
64% recommend29% neutral7% critical
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What Hacker News says
- If you're interested in the history of science and lost knowledge, you may enjoy the book entitled "The Swerve" by Greenblatt which is about similar discoveries of ancient codices in Europe--in particular "de Rerum Natura" by Lucretius.
- I'm reading "The Swerve", Stephen Greenblatt's marvelous book on the discovery of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things"), a Roman-era scroll on Epicurus' philosophy, by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417. The work was copied by hand repeatedly since 50 BCE by monks and other scripturae, despite its essential refutation of both faith and religion.
In his day, Poggio, like Petrarch, was famous for the elegant beauty of his penmanship. Like the best of his craft, Poggio wrote not for speed but for beauty and timeless legibility.
While I have no plans to write in latin, this has convinced me that I want to learn how to write (and print) with style. (My cursive has always been horrific.) Since reading-to-learn is best done by taking notes by hand of whatever you want to remember, I'm hoping this pursuit will not only improve my retention but also my attention to detail since it will give me time to think out more fully what I think is important and how best to say it.
- That's not necessarily bad news.
Everyone interested in this story should read Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve (https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/stephen-greenblatt).
It traces the story of a Renaissance humanist who tracked down and translated the Epicurean philosopher/poet Lucretius' De Rerem Natura, which Greenblatt describes as portraying a strikingly modern way of seeing the world.
In particular Lucretius and the Epicureans denied the existence of supernatural causes, were opposed to religious fear, and posited the ideas of atomism and biological evolution. Of course they're better known for their approach to living life, which Greenblatt shows is more sophisticated than sometimes caricatured, and which he portrays as a breath of fresh air compared to the oppressive moralism and hypocrisy of the Church at the time. (Jefferson and many of the American Founders described themselves as Epicureans.)
He goes on to imply that Epicureanism was influential and widespread in the ancient world but suppressed by the early Church, so that we now know little of it.
Anyone, one of the tantalizing parts of the book is where he describes the carbonized and unreadable Herculaneum scrolls, since they were the private library of a wealthy patron of the Epicureans. I think he thinks being able to read the scrolls will really change our understanding of the ancient world.
And remember: if they hadn't been carbonized, they would have crumbled to dust. That's why we only have the texts that managed to get copied. (Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land is a novel about the survival and 21st century rediscovery of an imaginary Greek play, and ... I'll let you read it yourself - https://www.anthonydoerr.com/books/cloud-cuckoo-land)
(Apologies for any errors above, as basically all I know about this subject is what I read in the book!)
- > Everyone interested in this story should read Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve (https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/stephen-greenblatt).
It's interesting reading for a layperson, but as with any other pop-history book, one should read this with a heaping plate of salt at hand. (I'm... not sure what that metaphor actually means or if this is an appropriate way to extend it.)
Things are always more nuanced than can be laid out in a sweeping narrative format and the compression required can lose some critical information, even with the best of intentions. There's also just getting things wrong, which most non-historians do and many historians will do on topics that aren't their expertise.
I'd read this criticism from AskHistorians (not infallible, I know)
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ejfxe5/comme...
- Those interested in this topic may also want to read Stephen Greenblatt‘s The Swerve.
- Christianity:
The Swerve - Greenblatt
The Kingdom - Carrére
Both very much in the sense of historical development of the religion.
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