(P/B) THE SWERVE

Παρουσίαση

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. (From the publisher)

Περιεχόμενα

Preface
CHAPTER ONE: The Book Hunter
CHAPTER TWO: The Moment of Discovery
CHAPTER THREE: In Search of Lucretius
CHAPTER FOUR: The Teeth of Time
CHAPTER FIVE: Birth and Rebirth
CHAPTER SIX: In the Lie Factory
CHAPTER SEVEN: A Pit to Catch Foxes
CHAPTER EIGHT: The Way Things Are
CHAPTER NINE: The Return
CHAPTER TEN: Swerves
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Afterlives
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Photograph Credits
Index