The Swerve - Stephen Greenblatt

In the throes of the dark ages, the intellectual world must have felt like an extremely narrow place. The power and priority of the Catholic Church was largely unquestioned and, seemingly, there was little in the ways of diverse thinking about the world and people's place within it. The staggering conceptual achievements of the ancient world - primarily Greece and Rome - were all but forgotten. Into such a world stepped the Italian humanists, led by Poggio Braciolinni, who were to, Greenblatt contends, so fundamentally alter the manner in which people conceived of the world, that the seeds of modernity could be attributed to these men. But it must be clear, Braciolinni and his contemporaries wrote little of lasting significance. Rather, it was their belief in the superiority of classical texts, and through their tireless efforts to rediscover such works for the world's benefit, that these men helped to lift Europe out of the dark ages and foster much of the intellectual growth since.

Greenblatt's narrative seamlessly integrates the life and times of Poggio with a rich cultural history of the development of western thought into what would become the Renaissance. The reader can feel Poggio's longing to discover a forgotten world and bridles at the narrow-mindedness of his situation. Greenblatt has accomplished much in coherently interweaving a plethora of historical information in a fairly compact work; the plaudits for his work seem endless.

What is left unclear is how the ideas - Greenblatt focuses largely on Lucretius' De Rarum Natura (On the Nature of Things) - Poggio revealed to the West led to more modern thinking. While the Renaissance certainly relied heavily on access to ancient texts and ways of thinking, it was, of course, transcended by the modern era. Such a shortcoming speaks, not necessarily to the strengths and weaknesses of Greenblatt's text, but the claims made about what the text accomplishes. This is a highly readable work concerned with how the Middle Ages would give way to the Renaissance, but falls short as true critique of intellectual history. To read The Swerve one might think that Poggio, his contemporaries and their disciples, adopted ancient philosophy and understandings uncritically, and whole-cloth. If such is the case then the clinamen, or the swerve, comes after the fact, in how such ideas became adapted to, and subsequently transformed a modern world. If the swerve - that which is unexpected and changes the composition of things - is the result of the rediscovery of such texts, then it is not really a random event within a known system; but rather a new variable, previously unaccounted for. In comparing the evolution of history to the falling of atoms, Greenblatt overreaches in his analogy. While it may be said that the western world took an unaccounted for turn, as the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, the conceptual lineage at work remains unclear; if thinkers minds had not been prepared for such conceptual revolutions the rediscovered works may have fallen upon deaf ears. How was it that the intellectual world required new (old) ways of thinking, and how did such reinventions interact with the status quo?

Greenblatt has achieved much in the way of thought-provoking history. He has written adroitly on what risks being a very dry, distant topic. Surely any reader will find much to learn and ponder over. But the work requires a deeper intellectual engagement with how this cultural-conceptual history was situated with, interacted with, and helped to transform the world.