BOOK REVIEW
The Swerve : How the World Became Modern
“ Poets can ’ t change the world ,” I was told as a young and idealistic college student . Too often we learn history through instant revolutionary events : barbarians chomping at the gates , explorers making landfall , or the explosion of a new and disastrous weapon . However , emblems of world-historic changes can be deceptive . In January 1417 , a bookhunting Papal scribe ( lawyer to the Pope ) searching a private library hidden within a German monastery , lifted a leather-bound codex book off a shelf , recognized a few beautiful lines of ancient Latin poetry , and smiled a side-eye Cheshire-like silent grin . The poem , and its ideas , would lead to a revolution . Without the firing of a shot , the poem began the slow but inevitable turn of world change .
Professor Steven Greenblatt captures this moment in his book
The Swerve : How the World Became Modern . A nonfiction account of the re-discovery of ancient ideas , The Swerve describes the small , almost imperceptible changes which inevitably alter the course of world events . Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and sitting dustily on my library shelf since then , I picked up The Swerve during the COVID-19 pandemic , soon after my vaccine shot . And I couldn ’ t put it down . Professor Greenblatt writes about Bracciolini ’ s ( 1417 ) transcript of the poem by Lucretius ( 99 B . C .) which summarizes the ancient Greek philosophy of Epicurus ( 341 B . C .). Not being a student of classical antiquity , I had to read that sentence again . Then , I needed to draw my own map .
Poggio Bracciolini sounds like the name of an Italian chef serving exotic vegetarian foods . Just saying “ Poggio Bracciolini ” makes me hungry . A book-hunting papal scribe ( lawyer ) in the early 1400s , Bracciolini traversed continental Europe on a timeless quest to save ancient Latin texts from the ravages of time . He happened upon a lonely monastery in a small city among the vast farmlands of central Germany . Charming his way into the protected inner sanctum of the monastery ’ s Benedictine library and outsmarting the overly protective , secretive ,
and suspicious monks , Bracciolini surveyed the manuscripts , scrolls and codexes , reached high on a dusty shelf and found the last known copy of an ancient work , by an ancient poet , in an ancient language , about an ancient philosopher . Reading the first few lines , he found more than just a book . He found purpose . Then he began to transcribe the poetic ideas that would begin to swerve western European thinking forever .
A Book Hunter sounds like an overly ambitious reference librarian with a passion for both the first and the second Amendments . But as referenced in The Swerve , it describes the quiet revolutionary in the Humanist movement in the late Middle Ages . Trained as a scribe in the writing of official legal documents , Bracciolini excelled at this high craft . Scribes perfected the ability to memorize , review and edit ancient Latin , to capture oral pronouncements quickly and precisely , and to transcribe ( basically , to paint ) pages and pages and pages of ancient text with incredible speed , precision , and beauty . Braccolini advanced to serve as Apostolic Secretary to Pope Martin V ( 1417-1431 ). He also hunted books , sending copies to as many friends as would listen because his newest find contained a lost philosophy that begged to be shared .
De rerum natura sounds like a too-easy-to-recite legal maxim that everybody says , but no one really knows what it means . Written by a poet in the late Roman Republic , Titus Lucretius Carus , or simply “ Lucretius ,” the poem commemorates the philosophies of an even older ancient Greek philosopher , Epicurus . Six poetic “ books ” totaling 7,400 lines written in standard hexameter and imitating the Homeric tradition , De rerum natura literally translates to “ On the Nature of Things ” or conversationally as “ The Way Things Are .” Bracciolini ’ s rediscovery of ancient ideas accelerated a groundswell in philosophical thought involving elementary particles called “ atoms ,” the ceaseless experimentation ( and evolution ) of nature , humans as part of nature and not separate from it , among many others . With mesmerizing intoxication , the poem rebirths these ancient-and-modern concepts of atomism and the arrangement of the physical world ; the nature of the mind , the soul , superstition , pleasure , death ; the perils and joys of sex and the nature of disease as discussed and debated in the 4th Century B . C .
But , in 1400s continental Europe these were dangerous ideas . Ideas that could get you killed and then erased from history . Yet , these were
16 | THE DOCKET - FEBRUARY 2023