The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began
Stephen Greenblatt
A riveting, exemplary tale of the great cultural "swerve" known as the Renaissance.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2012
Almost six hundred years ago, a short, genial man took a very old manuscript off a library shelf. With excitement, he saw what he had discovered and ordered it copied. The book was a miraculously surviving copy of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things by Lucretius and it changed the course of history.
He found 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. These ideas fuelled the Renaissance, inspiring Botticelli, shaping the thoughts of Montaigne, Darwin, and Einstein.
An innovative work of history by one of the world’s most celebrated scholars and a thrilling story of discovery, The Swerve details how one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, made possible the world as we know it.
‘Superbly readable... An exciting story, and Greenblatt tells it with his customary clarity and verve’ Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Daily Telegraph
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About Stephen Greenblatt
Reviews for The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Daily Telegraph
Superb history ... this concise, learned and fluently written book tells a remarkable story
Charles Nicholl
Observer
Dazzling
Guardian
In this outstandingly constructed assessment of the birth of philosophical modernity, renowned Shakespeare scholar Greenblatt deftly transports reader to the dawn of the Renaissance...Readers from across the humanities will find this enthralling account irresistible
Library Journal
More wonderfully illuminating Renaissance history from a master scholar and historian (starred review)
Kirkus Reviews
In this gloriously learned page-turner, both biography and intellectual history, Harvard Shakespearean scholar Greenblatt turns his attention to the front end of the Renaissance as the origin of Western culture's foundation: the free questioning of truth (starred review)
Publishers Weekly