No more fear of Jove's wrath or of disease or of death. I would have much preferred a historical fiction account of the main character as he searched for old manuscripts (which I found interesting) with some historical facts sprinkled in. in "Theory of the Subject" (1982), trans. In an abbey in Germany he came across a manuscript of a long-lost classical poem, Lucretius's De Rerum Natura ("On the Nature of the Universe"). Please log in using one of these methods to post your comment: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. With the end of his master's career, Poggio also lost his job. And at least half a dozen heretics were burned at the stake for promulgating its ideas. Spontaneity is the wider term, while “chance and what results from chance are appropriate to agents that are capable of good fortune and of moral action generally. It also analyzes reviews to verify trustworthiness. Niccoli kept the manuscript for 12 years, and then finally allowed further copies to be produced. Finally, as to his legacy (subtitle is "How the World Became Modern"), Greenblatt does spend a lot of time about turmoil in the Christian Church and its prosecution of heretics, but too little, I think, in establishing the influence of Lucretius (and thus, Epicurus) on future thinkers (Perhaps the worst example: Shakespeare was a friend of a friend of the philosopher Bruno, and he also probably chatted with Ben Johnson, who owned a copy of On the Nature of Things.). I certainly learned a lot and enjoyed the storytelling for the most part. First, the title is really dumb. Those "classical" currents within Catholic thought are a much more likely source than Lucretius for Thomas More's descriptions of the rational pleasures enjoyed by his Utopians. Ho followed by hum. [25] Nevertheless, he concedes that "if Greenblatt leaves us with more questions than answers, it is ultimately not a grave flaw."[25]. The most complete statement of Epicureanism that has survived is a poem, ON THE NATURE OF THINGS, written by the Roman poet Lucretius. Greenblatt's version of the middle ages is more or less exactly that of the humanists, in which characterless monks and self-flagellating nuns rejoice in the savage discipline of the church. Abstract: In his version of atomism, Lucretius made explicit reference to the concept of an intrinsic declination of the atom, the atomic swerve (clinamen in Latin), stressing that the time and space of the infinitesimal atomic vibration is uncertain. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. This isn't good storytelling. Something we hope you'll especially enjoy: FBA items qualify for FREE Shipping and Amazon Prime. The Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BCE) founded a school of thought that thrived for hundreds of years during the Hellenistic and Roman periods following Plato. This event is vividly described by the renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt in The Swerve. My one issue is that despite teasing out the influence that Lucretius had on Botticelli’s most famous surviving painting Primavera (“Spring”) (he is likely to have destroyed the twin painting Estate (“Summer”) during the dark days of Savonarola’s reign of terror in Florence), G, Interesting book about the history of Roman poet Lucretius’ text On The Nature of Things and its rediscovery by Poggio the Florentine in the 1400s. Even after reading the book and having it explained to me, I still find it off-putting. Fascinating. Their ethical systems could, with some whittling and squeezing, be fitted to Christian doctrine. "If Lucretius offered a moralised and purified version of the Roman pleasure principle, Christianity offered a moralised and purified version of the Roman pain principle," Greenblatt declares. This book doesn't sound very promising--263 pages on an old Roman poem that supposedly helped the world become modern? In many cases humanists found more reliable manuscripts, and they sometimes discovered whole texts. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction • Winner of the National Book Award • New York Times Bestseller Renowned scholar Stephen Greenblatt brings the past to vivid life in what is at once a supreme work of scholarship, a literary page-turner, and a thrilling testament to the power of the written word. It's not hard to imagine why Lucretius was unpopular in the early middle ages. The shameful church history is simply written in this account of how 'the new philosophy calls all in doubt'.The book also explores Epicureanism as a background to it central theme. Much of his book is speculative (if he was here then he probably would have gone to this monastery, and while there, he probably would have done this...), and his thesis is overblown. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. There were many pages of notes in the back which I felt he was using to show how well researched his subject was, but yet he made many leaps from fact to assumption of motivation. Lucretius, with his poem On the Nature of Things written in 200BC, caused the world to swerve in a new direction in the fifteenth century. It's a good telling of unfamiliar history. As they do so they "swerve" from a direct course, and may strike against each other. In modern English it has come more generally to mean an inclination or a bias. According to Lucretius, the unpredictable swerve occurs "at no fixed place or time": When atoms move straight down through the void by their own weight, they deflect a bit in space at a quite uncertain time and in uncertain places, just enough that you could say that their motion has changed. [20] Greenblatt responded to this critique by reiterating his view of the importance of the Renaissance in history. [7], The book attracted considerable critical attention, some positive and some negative. Photograph: Archive Photos/Getty Images, n the winter of 1417 the papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini made a great discovery. We war, still, at rallies, marches and over the internet. Find all the books, read about the author, and more. I jogged along easily, enjoying the scenery, taking in the weather without letting it affect me, swinging the arms, breathing, pacing myself nicely thank you. A book about a poem written over 2,000 years ago by a minor Greek philosopher and discovered by a fifteenth century papal secretary does not sound riveting reading to me. Fortunately, Stephen Greenblatt cannot take away my experience of reading Lucretius. Greenblatt's claim is that it was a 'key moment' in a larger "story ... of how the world swerved in a new direction". [23] Laura Saetveit Miles, of the University of Bergen, criticized the book in explicitly ethical terms, writing that its scholarly and historiographical failings "represent an abuse of power" that "precipitate the decline of the humanities" by lending scholarly authority to the "dire trend of 'truthy' nonfiction books that present One Theory to Explain Everything." Bernard Frechtman; Publisher: Citadel Press. The war of beliefs that rages today is not new, but is merely a continuation of fear versus reason, and belief versus logic. St Jerome even claimed in the fourth century that Lucretius (about whose life we know almost nothing) went mad with love, and then killed himself. In the winter of 1417, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties plucked a very old manuscript off a dusty shelf in a remote monastery, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. The story told by the book – epicureanism flourished at Rome, was lost, and then was suddenly rediscovered and transformed the world – reflects the historical outlook of the humanists themselves.
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