The Swerve: How the World Became Modern | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: wikipedia tts
Date: 2019-06-13

This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swerve


00:01:45 Reception



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"I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think."
- Socrates


SUMMARY
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The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (UK title: The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began) is a book by Stephen Greenblatt and winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction.Greenblatt tells the story of how Poggio Bracciolini, a 15th-century papal emissary and obsessive book hunter, saved the last copy of the Roman poet Lucretius's On the Nature of Things from near-terminal neglect in a German monastery, thus reintroducing important ideas that sparked the modern age.The title and the subtitle of the book are explained in the author's preface. "The Swerve" refers to a key conception in the ancient atomistic theories according to which atoms moving through the void are subject to clinamen: while falling straight through the void, they are sometimes subject to a slight, unpredictable swerve. Greenblatt uses it to  describe the history of Lucretius' own book: "The reappearance of his poem was such a swerve, an unforeseen deviation from the direct trajectory—in this case, toward oblivion—on which that poem and its philosophy seemed to be traveling." The recovery of the ancient text is seen as its rebirth, i.e. a "renaissance". Greenblatt's claim is that it was a 'key moment' in a larger "story.. of how the world swerved in a new direction".