The swerve, how the world became modern, Stephen Greenblatt
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Classification
1
Creator
1
Subject
6
Content
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Mapped to
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Label
The swerve, how the world became modern, Stephen Greenblatt
Language
eng
Bibliography note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [267]-335) and index
Illustrations
illustrationsplates
Index
index present
Literary form
non fiction
Main title
The swerve
Nature of contents
bibliography
Oclc number
711051785
Responsibility statement
Stephen Greenblatt
Sub title
how the world became modern
Summary
In this work, the author has crafted both a work of history and a 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
Table of contents
The book hunter -- The moment of discovery -- In search of Lucretius -- The teeth of time -- Birth and rebirth -- In the lie factory -- A pit to catch foxes -- The way things are -- The return -- Swerves -- Afterlives
Incoming Resources
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