Choice Reviews Online· 2012
The swerve: how the world became modern
- 655citations
- 2012year
Short summary
The rediscovery and copying of Lucretius's ancient Roman philosophical epic, 'On the Nature of Things,' by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417, is presented as a pivotal event that fueled the Renaissance and shaped modern thought.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Poggio Bracciolini rediscovered and ordered the copying of Lucretius's 'On the Nature of Things' in 1417.
- The manuscript contained radical ideas: a universe without gods, the harm of religious fear, and atomic theory.
- Its dissemination fueled the Renaissance, influencing artists like Botticelli and thinkers such as Galileo, Freud, Darwin, and Einstein.
- The book's ideas are credited with shaping modern thought and making the world as we know it possible.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
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.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Choice Reviews Online, 2012 · DOI ↗
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Field: History
HistoryArts and Humanities