The Catholic Church, Greenblatt informs us, often included men in positions of power who, to put it mildly, 'lacked a religious vocation.' Secretary to several popes, Bracciolini was at the center of a group he called the 'Bugiale,' the Lie Factory.

If a scribe needed a pagan book, he scratched behind his ear, as if warding off fleas to call for a volume deemed offensive, he put two fingers in his mouth, as if gagging. Monks were not permitted to choose the manuscripts they copied or break the reign of silence by requesting aloud a volume that would help them complete the task to which they were assigned. The founders of monastic orders, Greenblatt reveals, regarded copying manuscripts as manual labor, inherently humiliating and tedious, and therefore conductive to discipline, and not as an exalted or important task. In 'The Swerve,' Stephen Greenblatt, a professor of the humanities at Harvard University and the author of 'Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare,' provides a delightfully engaging, informative and provocative account of Bracciolini's discovery and its implications for the emergence of 'modern' culture and philosophy.įilled with spicy and surprising stories about the ancient world, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 'The Swerve' is an Epicurean delight.

In 7,400 lines of Latin verse, divided into six untitled books, the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius laid out the radical philosophy of Epicurus: invisible, indestructible 'atoms' are the building blocks of the universe in constant motion, they collide with each other, forming larger and larger bodies, then come apart, and recombine again there is no purpose to existence, no divine scheme, only creation and destruction, governed by the random 'swerves' of particles therefore, since there is no life after death, the highest goal of human existence should be to enhance pleasure and reduce pain.Īs he plucked the poem from oblivion, Bracciolini probably did not have the slightest idea that he might be detonating an intellectual atom bomb, with the capacity to disrupt and even destroy the world in which he lived. In January 1417, in a monastery in southern Germany, Poggio Bracciolini, a bibliophile who had until recently been secretary to the pope, stumbled upon 'On the Nature of Things,' which had been largely forgotten for more than a thousand years. By Stephen Greenblatt (Norton 356 pages $26.95)

The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt