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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. 16 pages full-color illustrations.

About Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Shakespeare, he is the author of eleven books, including The Swerve: How the World Became Modern; Shakespeare’s Freedom; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Practicing New Historicism; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; and Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. He has edited seven collections of criticism, including Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. His 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 Wilbur Cross Medal from the Yale University Graduate School, the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, the Erasmus Institute Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He was president of the Modern Language Association of America and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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Editorial Reviews

More wonderfully illuminating Renaissance history from a master scholar and historian. (starred review - Kirkus Reviews )

In this outstandingly constructed assessment of the birth of philosophical modernity, renowned Shakespeare scholar Greenblatt deftly transports reader to the dawn of the Renaissance…Readers from across the humanities will find this enthralling account irresistible. (starred review - Library Journal )

In this gloriously learned page-turner, both biography and intellectual history, Harvard Shakespearean scholar Greenblatt turns his attention to the front end of the Renaissance as the origin of Western culture’s foundation: the free questioning of truth. (starred review - Publishers Weekly )

Lucretius, Man Of Modern Mystery

NPR Book Review – September 19, 2011 (Excerpt)

Before he became a Professor of literature at Harvard, and way before he wrote his classic Shakespeare biography, Will in The World, Stephen Greenblatt was an I’ll-read-anything kind of kid. One day, he was standing in the campus book store, and there, in a bin, selling for ten cents, (good price, even in 1961) he noticed a thin, little volume called On the Nature of Things, by a Roman writer named Lucretius.

When he opened it, he found a description of how the universe came to be. Because Lucretius lived a couple of generations before the birth of Jesus, Stephen was expecting a tale of how gods, goddesses, earth, air, fire and water and an assortment of miracles created everything we see, but as he turned the pages, he says “his jaw dropped” and “his head began burst open,” because Lucretius’ creation story doesn’t feel remotely ancient. First of all, it’s a radically secular account, ignoring gods, goddesses, heaven, hell, life after death, and intelligent design, but more surprising, its logic is eerily, almost spookily modern. [Read the full article...]

Stephen Greenblatt’s “The Swerve,” reviewed by Michael Dirda

The Washington Post Book Review – September 21, 2011 (Excerpt)

Years ago, the Yale critic Harold Bloompromulgated “clinamen” — that is, “the swerve,” a term derived from Lucretius’s philosophical poem “On the Nature of Things” — as central to his controversial theory of literary influence. Writers, Bloom speculated, swerve away from the dominion, the overpowering authority, of earlier masters to clear a poetic space for their own work. Since then, other literary theorists — many of them, as you would guess, French — have employed their own notions of “clinamen.”

So it seems odd that Stephen Greenblatt in “The Swerve” never mentions this familiar Bloomian use of “clinamen.” Perhaps Greenblatt, who attended Yale, is himself swerving away from an older anxiety-producing master.

Or has he, in fact, like the later Bloom — the Bloom who churns out theme anthologies of his favorite poems — resolutely entered into the popularizing phase of his career? When young, Greenblatt was the principal founder of the New Historicism, in which texts are examined in close connection to their culture and times, and soon rose to become one of our most noted Shakespeare scholars, the holder of a chair at Harvard and the general editor of that great academic money-maker “The Norton Anthology of English Literature.” [Read the full article...]

‘The Swerve: How the World Became Modern’ by Stephen Greenblatt

The Boston Globe Book Review – September 23, 2011 (Excerpt)

At the center of Stephen Greenblatt’s dazzling new book, “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,’’ is a hero: Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459 CE), “[a] short, genial, cannily alert man [who] reached out one day, took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied.’’ It may not sound heroic, but “behind that one moment was the arrest and imprisonment of a pope, the burning of heretics, and a great culturewide explosion of interest in pagan antiquity . . . if he had had an intimation of the forces he was unleashing, he might have thought twice about drawing so explosive a work out of the darkness in which it slept.’’

The work in question was a remote German monastery’s copy of “On the Nature of Things,’’ the epic philosophical poem written by Lucretius ca. 50 BCE . Extravagant as it sounds, Greenblatt argues that Lucretius’s poem is the forgotten keystone in the foundation of western civilization, helping to inspire an entire culture’s rebellion “against the constraints that centuries had constructed against curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, [and] the claims of the body.’’ Lucretius, in other words, helped create modernity. By the end of this erudite and entertaining book – no, by the second chapter – he will have you convinced that it’s true. [Read the full article...]

An Unearthed Treasure That Changed Things

The New York Times Book Review – September 27, 2011 (Excerpt)

The literary critic, theorist and Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s new book, “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” is partly about an obsessive book collector, and it begins, appropriately enough, with a book purchase of the author’s own.

In the mid-1960s, when he was a student at Yale and searching for summer reading, Mr. Greenblatt came upon a prose translation of Lucretius’ 2,000-year-old poem “On the Nature of Things” (“De Rerum Natura”). He plucked it from a Yale Co-op bargain bin for 10 cents, partly because he liked its sexy cover, a pair of disembodied legs floating above the Earth in an apparent act of “celestial coition.”

Mr. Greenblatt read “On the Nature of Things” that golden summer. The book spoke to him for a reason that’s straight out of a Woody Allen movie or a Bruce Friedman novel: because of his own overbearing Jewish mother. “The core of Lucretius’ poem is a profound, therapeutic meditation on the fear of death, and that fear dominated my entire childhood,” Mr. Greenblatt writes. It wasn’t a fear of his own demise that troubled him. It was his mother’s “absolute certainty” that she was going to be stricken at any moment. [Read the full article...]

Book review: ‘The Swerve: How the World Became Modern’ by Stephen Greenblatt

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – November 20, 2011 (Excerpt)

There are plenty of candidates, including Lucretius’ “On the Nature of Things,” and W.W. Norton has reissued Frank O. Copley’s translation of this wondrous poem to coincide with Stephen Greenblatt’s “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” an equally wondrous book about how this classic was nearly lost and why Western civilization would be much poorer if that had happened.

Winner of this year’s National Book Award for nonfiction, which was announced during a Wednesday night ceremony in New York, “The Swerve” triumphed over an impressive field of finalists including several books on major historical figures. Greenblatt’s subject is equally vast, and he examines it by focusing on Lucretius’ marvelous work and the adventures of Poggio Bracciolini.

Bracciolini was a 15th century papal emissary and book hunter who rescued Lucretius’ work from a German monastery shelf where dampness was guaranteed to destroy it if the bookworms — called “the teeth of time” — didn’t feast on it first.

“The prime hunting grounds for Poggio and his fellow book hunters were the libraries of old monasteries, for good reason,” Greenblatt explains. “For long centuries monasteries had been virtually the only institutions that cared about books.” [Read the full article...]

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QUEEN OF MISFORTUNE
A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Almost Shakespearean Dimension!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same ‘stranger’ who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Conservatives Have Lower IQ

The more intelligent people are, the more they are willing to engage into something new. Conservatives and religious people, in turn, do have a lower intelligence quotient. Psychologists believe, the phenomena can be explained through an evolution-biological view.

It is a daily business in the political arena to categorize an opponent as naive, simple, and stupid. A new study conducted by psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa could strengthen the beliefs of lefties and liberals that they are indeed smarter than their conservative counterparts. According to Kanazawa, intelligent people tend more easily to accept social values as well as political and religious convictions new to the human evolution. The preservation of old values is, however, a matter of conservatives, who are supposedly less intelligent.

The scientist, in cooperation with his colleagues at the London School of Economics and Political Science, analyzed a survey of 14,000 US adolescents conducted between the year 2001 and 2002. One question addressed their level of religious beliefs. The options they were given ranged from “not at all religious”, “somewhat religious”, “moderately religious”, and “very religious.” The “not at all religious” group showed the highest IQ (103), while the “very religious” group came up with an average IQ of 97. This is, after all, only a minute but detectable difference. The average IQ of the entire population lies at 100.

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health – used by the London scientists – also inquired the adolescents’ political convictions. As the scientists wrote in Social Psychology Quarterly, those who saw themselves as “very liberal” reached an IQ of 106, while those who characterized themselves as “very conservative” had only an average IQ of 95.

“Intelligence was advantageous for our ancestors when it came to solve new emerging problems for which they had no existing solutions,” says Kanazawa. For the same reason, intelligent people would detect and understand such scenarios sooner. The same is true when it comes to rethinking values and lifestyles. A higher IQ makes it possible to go new ways that are not compliant with values and convictions developed in the course of evolution.

The London scientist also claims, conservatives primarily take care of their family and friends, while lefties and liberals also have a heart for foreigners, people with whom they are in no direct genetical relationship. This may be a new development in evolution.

However, in case you are a lefty or liberal, don’t get too excited about the Kanazawa study. There are some slight side effects. People with higher IQs are often dissatisfied with their lives and make less money than conservatives.

Reference: http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,680956,00.html

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The Bleeding Hills

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.