SWERVE: HOW THE WORLD BECAME MODERN by Stephen Greenblatt. W. W. Norton, 2011 OUTLINE OF BOOK'S FACTS & IDEAS 1-20-16 PREFACE (1-13) 1) THE BOOK HUNTER (14-22) 2) THE MOMENT OF DISCOVERY (23-50) 3) IN SEARCH OF LUCRETIUS (51-80) 4) THE TEETH OF TIME (81-109) 5) BIRTH AND REBIRTH (110-134) 6) IN THE LIE FACTORY (135-154) Note = Summary of Poggio's achievements to the time he "accepted the most prestigious and most dangerous appointment of his career: the post of apostolic secretary to the sinister, sly, and ruthless Baldassare Cossa, who had been elected pope." (154) 7) A PIT TO CATCH FOXES (155-181) Note = List of "greatest humanists of the time" met in Constance in Fall 1414 (162) Note = Issue of Council in Constance was reform of clergy (ecclesiastical government) and ending the schism between the two main factions of the Church as well as reacting to hypocricy (166) 8) THE WAY THINGS ARE (182-202) 9) THE RETURN (203-218) 10) SWERVES (219-241) 11) AFTERLIVES (242-263) Note = 2 Quotes from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet play (243) "Montaignes's Essays were 1st published in 1580 and translated into English by Florio in 1603. Almost 100 direct quotations from 'On the Nature of Things' by Lucretius! Profound affinity between Lucretius and Montaigne. Both shared a contempt for a morality enforced by nightmares of the afterlife. Montaigne clung to the importance of his own senses and the evidence of the material world. He intensely disliked ascetic self-punishment and violence againstg the flesh. He treasured inward freedom and content. In grappling with the fear of death, he was influenced by Stoicism as well as Lucretian materialism. It was materialism that led him to toward a celebration of bodily pleasure." (244) Note = Montaigne found that he had to abandon altogether one of Lucretius' most cherished dreams: the dream of standing in tranquil security on land and looking down at a shipwreck befalling others. He "shared Lucretius' skepticism about the restless striving for fame, power, and riches, and he cherished his own withdrawal from the world into the privacy of his book-lined study in the tower of his chateau. But the withdrawal seems only to have intensified his awareness of the perpetual motion, the instability of forms, the plurality of worlds, the random swerves to which he himself was as fully prone as everyone else." (245) Note = Copy pages (246-263) and notice references to Newton's attempt to reconcile atomism with Christian faith! (261) Note = Jefferson's installation of "the pursuit of Happiness" in the US Constitution! (263) List all the famous skeptics and Jefferson's tribute to Lucetius' Epicurean philosophy of life! More quotes. "On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need." (263) "I am," Jefferson wrote to a correspondent who wanted to know his philosophy of life, "an Epicurean." (263) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (265-266) Note = Lucretius believed that "life's highest end was pleasure." (265) Credit to many people and the Harvard Library as well as the American Academy in Rome for a quiet place to write and enjoy the material pleasures of life! (266) Notes = (267-308) 278, 279, 280, 283,285, 286, 290, 293, 296, 297 (Nature is not perfect: principle of the prostate for men!), 298 (animal cruelty since the mother cow looks carefully for her stolen calf that was just killed for a religious animal blood sacrifice!), 306, 308 (final quote from Jefferson about his being an Epicurean and wishing that the work of Gassendi concerning the missing translation of the moral philosophy had been translated as well as Lucretius's natural philosophy.) SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY (309-335) PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS (337) INDEX (339-356) Coptics (24-25) Happiness (195-196, 198) Human existence (190-192) Hume, David (262) Hypocrisy (37, 133, 138-139) Immortality Incarnation (98-99) Index of Prohibited Books (227) Individuality (9-10, 16) Infallibility (166) Inferno by Dante (288 and following pages) Infinity (186, 187, 189, 196-197, 237, 239, 244, 256) Inquisition (227, 236, 239-240, 254-256) "Intelligent Design" (187-188, 220, 297 and following pages) Swerve ["clinamen"] principle (7-13, 188-189, 297 and following pages) Find interesting historical references by googling "clinamen definition:" “These atoms are in perpetual motion, but sometimes they swerve, and this swerve — what Lucretius called the "clinamen" — accounts not only for change in general but for the forms that develop in nature.” from The Wall Street Journal: How the Secular World Began “Cicero, Plutarch, and others — that the atom of Epicurus was endowed with a so-called clinamen of his invention.” = Dictionary of the History of Ideas “To reach the highest degree of amazing extravagance, the Epicureans have had the assurance to explain and account for what we call the soul of man and his free-will, by the clinamen, which is so unaccountable and inexplicable itself.” = The Existence of God “The Epicureans, not being able to shut their eyes against this glaring difficulty, that strikes at the very foundation of their whole system, have, for a last shift, invented what Lucretius calls clinamen -- by which is meant a motion somewhat declining or bending from the straight line, and which gives atoms the occasion to meet and encounter.” = The Existence of God “Lucretius invoked the swerve (clinamen) not only to explain the creation of things but also to account for the freedom of the will.” = The First Quantum Cosmologist “First, it must be the general tendency of atoms to move in straight lines given that the atoms here do not feature the clinamen, or swerve (contrary to the Epicurean tradition, though perhaps as Epicurus himself would say).” = Pierre Gassendi “But as Hogle has demonstrated, Shelley's Lucretianism allows him to imagine a moment of clinamen during which these random vectors might start to be attracted towards one another to form worlds, even ecotopias.” = Queen Mab as Topological Repertoire “This clinamen was designed to temper the basic determinism of physics by an element of inde - terminism; and as a suggestion in physics it was a remarkable adumbration of indeterminacies in the physics of our day.” = Dictionary of the History of Ideas “In addition, the swerve ('clinamen') would be uncaused and unpredictable, and this was the innovation that he thought would allow for free will.” = Dictionary of the History of Ideas “Epicurus, oddly in contrast here with his modern hedonistic followers, advocates free will and modifies the strict determinism of the atomists, whose physics he accepts, by ascribing to the atoms a clinamen, a faculty of random deviation in their movements.” = The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 6: Fathers of the Church-Gregory XI AUTHOR NOTE & BOOK DESCRIPTION AUTHOR NOTE = Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition, he is the author of nine books, including Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Practicing New Historicism; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture; and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. He has edited six collections of criticism, is the co-author (with Charles Mee) of a play, Cardenio, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. He honors include the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize, for Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Vermont. SUMMARY = A riveting tale of the great cultural "swerve" known as the Renaissance. 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. BOOK DESCRIPTION = 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. 16 pages full-color illustrations. PROFESSIONAL BOOK REVIEWS LIBRARY JOURNAL REVIEW = In this outstandingly constructed assessment of the birth of philosophical modernity, renowned Shakespeare scholar Greenblatt (Cogan University Professor of English & American Literature & Language, Harvard; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare) deftly transports readers to the dawn of the Renaissance, when in 1417 bibliophile Poggio Bracciolini uncovered the Roman poet and philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus's Epicurean work, On the Nature of Things, in the dusty confines of a German monastery. After lying dormant for centuries, Lucretius's "atomist philosophy" reemerged, promoting the joys of this world over the punishments and rewards of the next, gradually conquering humanist circles and influencing such luminaries as More, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Newton. At the heart of Lucretius's Latin verse lies the core argument that by understanding the world around us, abandoning superstitious delusions, and coming to grips with humanity's insignificance, we begin to take ownership of our lives and set out on the pursuit of happiness. VERDICT Greenblatt's masterful account transcends Poggio's significant discovery to encompass a diversity of topics including the Roman book trade, Renaissance Florence, and the Catholic Church's attempts to deal with heresy and schism. Students and general readers from across the humanities will find this enthralling account irresistible. [See Prepub Alert, 3/21/11.]-Brian Odom Pelham P.L., AL (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journal LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEW = In this gloriously learned page-turner, both biography and intellectual history, Harvard Shakespearean scholar Greenblatt (Will in the World) turns his attention to the front end of the Renaissance as the origin of Western culture's foundation: the free questioning of truth. It hinges on the recovery of an ancient philosophical Latin text that had been neglected for a thousand years. In the winter of 1417 Italian oddball humanist, smutty humorist, and apostolic secretary Poggio Bracciolini stumbled on Lucretius' De rerum natura. In an obscure monastery in southern Germany lay the recovery of a philosophy free of superstition and dogma. Lucretius' "On the Nature of Things" harked back to the mostly lost works of Greek philosophers known as atomists. Lucretius himself was essentially an Epicurean who saw the restrained seeking of pleasure as the highest good. Poggio's chance finding lay what Greenblatt, following Lucretius himself, terms a historic swerve of massive proportions, propagated by such seminal and often heretical truth tellers as Machiavelli, Giordano Bruno, and Montaigne. We even learn the history of the "bookworm" --- a real entity and one of the enemies of ancient written-cultural transmission. Nearly 70 pages of notes and bibliography do nothing to spoil the fun of Greenblatt's marvelous tale. 16 pages of color illus. Instantly return to: ALPHABETIZED BRAIN BOOK LIST