Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Swerve | 2011 | Stephen Greenblatt | Buy |
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011) won both the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Award. Greenblatt follows Poggio Bracciolini through the monasteries of Europe as he searches for lost classical texts in the winter of 1417. When Poggio finds a copy of Lucretius’s poem On the Nature of Things on a dusty shelf in a remote monastery, he recovers a text that had almost vanished from Western culture for more than a millennium.
Lucretius’s poem contained ideas that challenged medieval Christian orthodoxy. It argued that the universe functions without divine intervention, that matter consists of atoms in constant motion, that humans should pursue pleasure rather than fear death, and that religious fear damages human life. These concepts had been suppressed but returned to circulation at a crucial moment in European intellectual history. Greenblatt shows how the poem’s recovery influenced Renaissance artists, philosophers, and scientists, contributing to the shift from medieval to modern ways of thinking about nature, mortality, and human purpose.