Uncovering the Roots of Modernity: A Look Into The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt

Iggy: This is an informative book. Some may argue that there are a lot of unanswered questions, but this isn't necessarily bad. Opened up many avenues for research. A whole new world.

United Kingdom on Oct 22, 2023

Dominika: Almost perfect.

Poland on Feb 16, 2023

Sphex: In the early 15th century, Poggio Bracciolini, who had been a cynical papal secretary in the service of a famously corrupt pope, followed his true passion of book hunting and rediscovered an ancient Latin poem in a German monastery. His exploits earned him the admiration of his humanist friends: he was "a culture hero, a magical healer who reassembled and reanimated the torn and mangled body of antiquity." To us, his achievement was to rescue from obscurity and from possible destruction the one surviving copy of De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), written by Lucretius in the first century BCE. Poggio himself is now at least as obscure as Lucretius, and so, in this tremendous account of a philosophical idea, Stephen Greenblatt must invigorate two remote periods in order to tell a fascinating story, which turns out to be as much about our modern selves as it is about long-dead historical figures.

For Lucretius, the stuff of the universe was "an infinite number of atoms moving randomly through space" and not the handiwork of the gods. He did not believe in miracles, and thought that nothing could violate the laws of nature. Instead of divine agency animating the...

United Kingdom on Jul 25, 2013

Roo Bookaroo: "The Swerve" is a magnificent scholarly celebration of Poggio's role in recovering this famous manuscript of Lucretius.

There are only two full-scale biographies of Poggio Bracciolini. The only English one is William Shepherd's  The Life of Poggio Bracciolini  (1837). [See my own Amazon review.] It shows its age. Some of the language can strike us as quaint. Many turns of phrase seem too long in coming to the point and flowery, in the 19th-century rhetorical style. On another hand, some formulations are sharp and strikingly concise. Long quotations in Latin (in the notes at the bottom of pages) are shown without translation. The lack of an initial table of contents and the lack of any kind of index are particularly irksome. In addition there are some errors in the text. For instance, Pope John XXIII is mislabeled XXII, following the renumbering of Gibbon, (as John XXI skipped the XX numbering, there had been no Pope John XX).

It is helpful to check details and dates against the superior biography by the German scholar Ernst Walser,  Poggius Florentinus, Leben Und Werke  (German Edition, Berlin, 1914; Reprints: Georg Olms,1974; Nabu Press, 2011),...

United States on Mar 08, 2013

Milo di Thernan: Ever felt so aroused that you don't know where to put your hands? Ever felt so dejected that you saw no possibility of happiness? Perhaps the way we feel is finite, while the way we deal with those feelings is infinite - reflection is never exhausted by its environment in the way that activity is. Where does this capacity to reflect - imagination - get us? Frustration. Perfect sex is always tomorrow's dish, never yesterday's; the same goes for redemption from pain. What do we do with this frustration? We worship its cousin, extremity (since frustration always wants more). Varieties of religious experience salve the pain; varieties of carnal experience - Caligula, de Sade, Hannibal Lecter - nourish the pleasure. But both forms of worship are followed by a kind of self loathing borne of frustration, as infinite, hopeful, possibility perpetually eludes finite experience. This frustration induces the piety of a Savonarola, a Gandhi, perhaps even a Pol Pot, all of whom valued tomorrow's hope more highly than today's reality. Or it encourages sensual indulgence, as we chase higher and higher highs. In neither case does the striving get us any closer to fulfilment. So, how about...

United Kingdom on Jul 28, 2012

Caliban: Dieses gut geschriebene Buch hat gerade in den Vereinigten Staaten das Werk von Lukrez "De rerum natura"  De rerum natura /Welt aus Atomen: Lat. /Dt.  in breiten Kreisen sehr populär gemacht. Lukrez führt darin vor allem die Philosophie des Epikur in sehr kunstvoller Weise aus. So erklärt sich auch der Titel "Swerve", der eine englische Übersetzung des zentralen Begriffs der Lehren Epikur darstellt, des clinamen (Ablenkung):

Nach Epikur müssen nämlich sämtliche Atome im All der gleichen Fließrichtung (von "oben nach unten") folgen und könnten sich nie zu Materie zusammenfinden, wenn sie nicht durch einen Zufall von ihrer Bahn abgelenkt würden und aufeinanderprallten. Dieser Zufall ist für Epiker und Lukrez bekanntlich die naturwissenschaftliche Grundlage menschlicher Freiheit. Das vorliegende Buch erzählt sehr anschaulich, wie der Autor selbst als Student durch eine Billigausgabe auf Lukrez aufmerksam wurde, wie aber auch der Humanist Poggio im 15. Jahrhundert eine der letzten erhaltenen Lukrezmanuskripte in einer klösterlichen Bibliothek aufspürte, herausgab und übersetzte. Jeder Lateinschüler mit fortgerücktem Wissen weiß gerade die...

Germany on Jan 04, 2012

M. A Newman: Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt received many honors and acclimations since it was published earlier this year and these accolades are justly deserved. This is one of the best, most erudite books to be published in years. If anyone wants to understand the differences between Blue staters and Red staters, this is the book that does it. Along with making a credible claim that Botticelli, Descartes, Shakespeare, Newton, Galileo, Thomas Jefferson, Montaigne, the philosophes, Greenblatt demonstrates how Lucretius created the secular culture that is behind the development of human liberty that came with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

The Middle Ages, with its focus on religion and viewing things through a "spiritual lens," probably was about as intellectually stimulating for the average person as life in Mao's China during the cultural revolution only it lasted for 1,000 years.. One viewed nature and the natural world as re-enforcing the rules of Bible and that there were no laws or science that could mitigate man's life on earth. There are a number of factors that lifted western man out of this abyss-Kenneth Clark viewed the advancement of civilization as something that...

United States on Nov 30, 2011