The Swerve

Download or read book The Swerve written by Stephen Greenblatt and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly six hundred years ago, On the Nature of Things by Lucretius was discovered on a library shelf. The book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, filled with 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. The copying and translation of this ancient book fuelled 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 revolutionary influence on writers from Montaigne to Thomas Jefferson.