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The Swerve
2011 book by Stephen Greenblatt
The Swerve
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern is a 2011 book by Stephen Greenblatt and winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction 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 De rerum natura (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 Epicurean atomism which holds that 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...
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