The Swerve

Three stars doesn't totally capture this for me: I loved the subject matter, and the narrative arc Greenblatt traced through thousands of years of history. I discovered that I'm an Epicurean, pretty much, and it's astonishing how successfully the Catholic Church manipulated the connotations of that philosophy. So overall, it's great, but I found myself wishing that Greenblatt had spent a little less time on Poggio Bracciolini specifically, and more on the general sociocultural millieu. And it won a Pulitzer, so what the hell do I know.

I found this book to be fascinating and it has inspired me to read further, in particular to read a translation of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things. I enjoyed the mystery of Poggio's manuscript hunting–who hasn't browsed a used bookstore in search of a lost gem?–and some of the intrigue in the 15th Century Catholic Church that played a role both in his discovery of the Lucretius poem and the suppression of its implications. Not to everyone's taste, I'm sure, but it drew me in and never lost me.

I listened to the audio version of the book, and I have mixed feelings about the narrator. I think his breathy style is more suited to romantic fiction than to serious non-fiction. On the other hand, his pronunciation of countless Italian names was flawless (at least to my ear).

The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt

The setup for this book is a story about how the last copy of a poem written in the first century B.C. was snatched from destruction by a humanist in the early 15th century and became the trigger that “changed the course of history” by re-introducing Europe to Epicurean philosophy. This is an exciting setup but it isn't accurate in several ways. First, the poem - ”On the Nature of Things” (De Rerum Natura) by Lucretius - did not change the course of history. As author Stephen Greenblatt concedes, some Epicurean ideas were reintroduced and had some influence on some thinkers, but there was no wholesale conversion to Epicurean philosophy. Second, the text that was discovered by Poggio Bracciolini was probably not the only text of De Rerum Natura floating around Europe. Greenblatt notes other sightings of De Rerum Natura prior to Bracciolini's discovery. Nonetheless, we don't know what happened to those other texts. It was an era when precious writings from antiquity depended on a single text; lose that and the thing was gone forever.

The era fascinates me. Monastics had been painstakingly preserving texts for centuries, copying a text before it was rendered unreadable by time. These monastics knew what they had on their shelves. They undoubtedly circulated information about their holdings to other monasteries, although this is not mentioned by Greenblatt. To the outside world, though, these texts had disappeared. The last remaining copy of some book by Cicero might have made its way to an obscure German monastery, but to the rest of the world that book was lost.
Of course, the rest of the world probably didn't know the book was lost. It would take the emergence of collectors, antiquarians, and scholars interested in the past to start pulling the existing texts together in a single place and noting what was missing. By the early 14th century a culture had developed in Northern Italy that could support this project. Furthermore, this culture was keenly interested in its imperial past, in its Golden Age, that it knew from all the monuments around it existed beyond the “dark ages.”

This book has three threads. The first thread is the culture of the 14th century, including Poggio Bracciolini. The second is Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. The third is the effect of Bracciolini's discovery on his culture. 

In all these threads, Greenblatt provides some insights, but for the most part, I thought his presentation had more promise than substance. For example, his description of Poggio's world was a traditionally anti-Catholic/anti-religious sketch. Greenblatt brings up chestnuts like Giordano Bruni and Hypatia. He tells readers that “curiosity had long been rigorously condemned as a mortal sin” without mentioning that this “curiosity” was not the desire to know the truth, which was what Christianity is all about, but a morbid interest in unedifying things, like corpses. Likewise, sure, Catholic monks preserved the texts of ancient thinkers - even “atheists” like Lucretius - but they didn't know what they were doing. Reading was coerced and every effort was made to prevent monks from actually thinking about what they read. Greenblatt explains:

“But the actual interest of the scribes in the books they copied (or their distaste for those books) was strictly irrelevant. Indeed, insofar as the copying was a form of discipline - an exercise in humility and a willing embrace of pain - distaste or simple incomprehension might be preferable to engagement. Curiosity was to be avoided at all costs. The complete subordination of the monastic scribe to the text - the erasure, in the interest of crushing the monk's spirit, of his intellect and sensibility - could not have been further from Poggio's own avid curiosity and egotism. But he understood that his passionate hope of recovering reasonably accurate traces of the ancient past depended heavily on this subordination. An engaged reader, Poggio knew, was prone to alter his text in order to get it to make sense, but such alterations, over centuries, inevitably led to wholesale corruptions. It was better that monastic scribes had been forced to copy everything exactly at it appeared before their eyes, even those things that made no sense at all.

Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern . W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

And:

“The Benedictine Rule had called for manual labor, as well as prayer and reading, and it was always assumed that this labor could include writing. The early founders of monastic orders did not regard copying manuscripts as an exalted activity; on the contrary, as they were highly aware, most of the copying in the ancient world had been done by educated slaves. The task was therefore inherently humiliating as well as tedious, a perfect combination for the ascetic project of disciplining the spirit.

Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern . W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Is all of this true? Greenblatt is notorious for including his own speculations to tell his story. This part of Greenblatt's book has no footnotes. It doesn't seem implausible, and there is something to be said about these practices and attitudes as a way to ensure quality control, but Greenblatt manages to turn the quintessential intellectual practice of the Catholic past into anti-intellectual torture.

Greenblatt is less moralistic when it comes to the copyist slaves of antiquity:

“Though the book trade in the ancient world was entirely about copying, little information has survived about how the enterprise was organized. There were scribes in Athens, as in other cities of the Greek and Hellenistic world, but it is not clear whether they received training in special schools or were apprenticed to master scribes or simply set up on their own. Some were evidently paid for the beauty of their calligraphy; others were paid by the total number of lines written (there are line numbers recorded at the end of some surviving manuscripts). In neither case is the payment likely to have gone directly to the scribe: many, perhaps most, Greek scribes must have been slaves working for a publisher who owned or rented them. (An inventory of the property of a wealthy Roman citizen with an estate in Egypt lists, among his fifty-nine slaves, five notaries, two amanuenses, one scribe, and a book repairer, along with a cook and a barber.) But we do not know whether these scribes generally sat in large groups, writing from dictation, or worked individually from a master copy. And if the author of the work was alive, we do not know if he was involved in checking or correcting the finished copy.

Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern . W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

And:

“Large numbers of men and women - for there are records of female as well as male copyists - spent their lives bent over paper, with an inkwell, ruler, and hard split-reed pen, satisfying the demand for books. The invention of movable type in the fifteenth century changed the scale of production exponentially, but the book in the ancient world was not a rare commodity: a well-trained slave reading a manuscript aloud to a roomful of well-trained scribes could produce masses of text. Over the course of centuries, tens of thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of copies, were made and sold.

Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern . W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Notice how Greenblatt spares us from gratuitous insights about crushing spirits who might be prone to curiosity when it does not involve Catholicism? That's pretty much the tone that comes through the book.

Subtract that, though, and correct for speculation, and Greenblatt offers some insights into Poggio's world.

I have similar problems with Greenblatt's approach to Lucretius and De Rerum Natura. Since I didn't know anything about Lucretius, everything Greenblatt provided was “value-added.” To be fair, not a lot is known about Lucretius. It is fascinating to see him mentioned in Cicero's letters. 
Concerning De Rerum Natura, Greenblatt does not provide a survey of the poem. De Rerum Natura is one of the weirdest texts in history. It is a long poem that presents philosophical arguments supporting Epicureanism in verse form. Epicureanism's peculiar doctrines included a belief in “atomism.” The idea of atomism was that the stuff underlying everything was not an element but tiny material particles that came in different shapes that combined together in different patterns to form different sorts of matter. For Epicureans, materialism allowed for randomness in the fact that atoms could move in unpredictable ways - or “swerve.” 

Another doctrine was that the gods were indifferent to the plight or supplications of believers. This gave Epicureanism its reputation for atheism.

Yet another doctrine was that the aim of life was to obtain pleasure - not in the sense of subordinating everything to pleasure, which really leads to pain, but, rather, in the sense of a life of moderation. Framed this way, Epicureanism is not dissimilar from Aristotelianism which teaches that happiness can be found through virtue.

Nonetheless, I don't think I got a clear fix on De Rerum Natura from Greenblatt's text. It may be that he was always “selling the sizzle.” Exaggerating the differences between De Rerum Natura and 15th-century Christian culture in order to give his book more significance.

Greenblatt's final piece about the impact of Epicureanism suffers the same problem. It is interesting to see that Shakespeare used the term “atom” in a play, but does this mean that Shakespeare was influenced by De Rerum Natura or incorporated Epicureanism into his view of the world? The examples that Greenblatt gives where Epicurean ideas pop up in this writer or this text are interesting but I wasn't sold on the idea that modernity became Epicurean to the degree that Greenblatt was proposing.

This is an interesting book about a little-known bit of history. Greenblatt is a good writer and tells an interesting story. I think that he may sacrifice history for the story, but I would recommend this book as a way of getting an introduction to the subject.