Tim Recommends

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
by Stephen Greenblatt
In 1417, Poggio Bracciolini, in between appointments as papal secretary, discovered perhaps the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, “On the Nature of Things” (De Rerum Natura), by Lucretius. That poem contained the heretical ideas that everything was made up of very small particles, that religious fear was detrimental to humanity, and that the cosmos existed and functioned without the aid of any gods. It argues, Stephen Greenblatt writes, that “there is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design.”
Greenblatt tells the story of not only Bracciolini’s finding, copying, and recirculating of Lucretius’ poem but of the incendiary effect it had, fanning the fires of the Renaissance and influencing writers and thinkers since such as Galileo, Freud, Darwin, Santayana, Einstein, Montaigne, and Jefferson.