The Swerve

In the winter of 1417, an unemployed papal secretary named Poggio Bracciolini rode into a German monastery hunting old manuscripts and found a copy of De rerum natura, On the Nature of Things, the Roman poet Lucretius's seven thousand line exposition of Epicurean philosophy, a poem that had all but vanished from circulation: a universe made of atoms and void, swerving randomly, without design, without providence, without an afterlife, in which the point of existence is the wise enjoyment of life itself. The Swerve is Stephen Greenblatt's account of that recovery and of what he argues followed from it, the poem's ideas seeping through the Renaissance into Montaigne, Giordano Bruno, Galileo's world, and eventually Jefferson, who owned five copies and answered a correspondent's question about his philosophy with I am an Epicurean. Greenblatt, the Harvard Shakespearean who helped invent new historicism, is wonderful on the physical chain of survival, the ancient book culture, the copyists, the worms, the fire and neglect that ate nearly everything, and the papal court hustlers and obsessive book hunters of whom Poggio was king; the manuscript chapters are as gripping as book history gets. The larger thesis, that the poem's return gave modernity its decisive push, and the book's dark rendering of the Middle Ages as a thousand years of repression, drew sharp fire from medievalists, who called the caricature unworthy of the scholarship around it; readers should enjoy the story and hold the thesis loosely. The book won the 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.