The swerve [electronic resource] : how the world became modern / Stephen Greenblatt.

Author
Greenblatt, Stephen, 1943- [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Εdition
Kindle ed.
Published/​Created
New York : W.W. Norton, c2011.
Description
1 electronic book (368 p., [8] p. of plates) : col. ill.

Availability

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        Details

        Subject(s)
        Summary note
        "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. 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. 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. 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."
        Notes
        Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
        Bibliographic references
        Includes bibliographical references (p. [309]-335) and index.
        Awards
        Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Non-Fiction
        Source of description
        Description based on print version record.
        Contents
        • The book hunter
        • The moment of discovery
        • In search of Lucretius
        • The teeth of time
        • Birth and rebirth
        • In the lie factory
        • A pit to catch foxes
        • The way things are
        • The return
        • Swerves
        • Afterlives.
        Statement on language in description
        Princeton University Library aims to describe library materials in a manner that is respectful to the individuals and communities who create, use, and are represented in the collections we manage. Read more...
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