The copying and translation of this ancient book - the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age - fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson. Rose Lincoln/Harvard University News One day in 1417, almost.

That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius - a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions. Stephen Greenblatt’s critical ‘Swerve’ Maybe one thinker can spark a revolution after all By Craig Fehrman October 1, 2011, 9:11 p.m. Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied.

One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University.Also General Editor of The Norton Shakespeare, he is the author of eleven books, including The Swerve: How the World Became Modern Shakespeare’s Freedom Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Hamlet in Purgatory Practicing New Historicism Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder.

The swerve by stephen greenblatt