The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

by Stephen Greenblatt

Publication Date: 2011

Number of Pages: 356

ISBN: 9780393064476

In this Pulitzer Prize winning nonfiction book, the author argues that one piece of literature, an ancient work called On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, changed the course of history.  When it was penned before the first century, it proposed that the world was made up of millions of atoms that all interact and collide in random fashion, creating the world we see in front of us.  This proposition, in turn, serves as a metaphor for the discovery of the manuscript itself.  When it was rediscovered in 1417 by a humanist scholar and papal secretary named Poggio Bracciolini, it slowly began to be disseminated throughout Renaissance Europe and eventually, changed western civilization. 

This book is a short history, with well-organized chapters that take the reader on a journey alongside Bracciolini as he discovers what will soon be one of the more influential manuscripts of the Renaissance.  It moves along quickly, moving through years and over terrain, making the worlds of both Lucretius and Bracciolini come vividly to life.  These men, through their intellectual endeavors, and the winds of chance, became an important part of western cultural history, and this work is an exciting recovery of that reality. 

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If you enjoyed The Swerve, you might also enjoy these works:

1434 by Gavin Menzies

Another revisionist history, this book argues that it was China’s influence on Europe that sparked the Renaissance.  Though less meticulous in its research than The Swerve, it nonetheless presents a similar argument that previously unconsidered influences caused the huge cultural shift necessary for the European Renaissance. 

From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present by Jacques Barzun

This expansive history book focuses on the cultural shifts in the western world over a five hundred year period, arguing that decadence is a marker of the end of great periods that is always eventually corrected.  Witty and engaging, this book is written by a well-respected scholar who pulls together seemingly unrelated tidbits into a cohesive whole.  

Brunelleschi’s Dome by Ross King

Also set against the backdrop of Renaissance Italy, Brunelleschi’s Dome is a chronicle of the architectural wonder that is the dome in the Florentine cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore.  The achievement was all the more significant given the man who designed it, a clockmaker named Fillippo Brunelleschi.  This easy to read work follows the particular history of an unusual Renaissance man who ultimately achieved great significance in Renaissance culture.