BOOKS AND ARTS
13 October 2011, Review by Brian Morton
On the nature of Lucretius
The Swerve: how the Renaissance began
Stephen GreenblattThe Bodley Head, £20
Tablet bookshop price £18 Tel 01420 592974
The survival of texts from ancient Greece and Rome was a decidedly hit-and-miss affair. As Stephen Greenblatt explains, Aeschylus wrote as many as 90 plays, Sophocles penned something like 120: only 14 works from these two literary giants have come down to us. They were among the lucky ones: the entire corpus of many a classical writer has completely disappeared. The sobering thought is that without the efforts of various early Renaissance manuscript hunters we would have been even more impoverished. Following the mighty Petrarch’s lead, a swarm of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century scholars trawled Europe’s monastic libraries for transcriptions of ancient texts, and they came up trumps.
One such was Poggio Bracciolini, the hero of Greenblatt’s wonderful study. He rescued one of the most beautiful and provocative books ever written – Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things” (De rerum natura) – from oblivion. Bracciolini was a rare bird, possessed of the finest handwriting in fifteenth-century Italy, veteran of an eminent career as a scribe within the papal bureaucracy and, latterly, someone in need of a new obsession. Perhaps you’ll remember the Council of Constance and the effort to rid Christendom of its competing popes. Well, Bracciolini’s boss (Antipope John XXIII) didn’t prosper, so the out-of-work apostolic secretary turned his attention to other matters: the quest for transcriptions of ancient texts. This was the very best way for a learned fifteenth-century scholar to secure his reputation and, in 1417, Bracciolini made his greatest, though entirely accidental discovery: a version of Lucretius’ masterwork, squirrelled away in a German monastery.
Greenblatt identifies this as a momentous cultural event and it is hard to disagree. Bracciolini’s precious discovery intrigued Europe’s intelligentsia and more than 50 manuscript transcriptions of Lucretius’ text
survive
from the fifteenth century: a staggering number. Once print secured its dominance the influence of Bracciolini’s find soared. Greenblatt explains how a host of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers read Lucretius and turned his bold and quirky theorising to advantage.
Greenblatt’s list of luminaries is long and impressive: from Machiavelli to Shakespeare; from Bruno to Newton. In his Essays, Montaigne directly quoted Lucretius almost 100 times. Greenblatt knows that happening upon a single text does not change the world, and he says as much; but he makes a very compelling case that locating Lucretius had a crucial impact.
The puzzling thing is that De rerum natura was not an easy text to embrace. At various points in the past, Christianity had done a decent job of reconciling its nostrums with Aristotle and even Plato, but Lucretius was a tougher proposition. He talked about atomism (that the universe – one that was not created – comprised indestructible particles); he wasn’t an atheist, but he suggested that the gods would not have the slightest interest in the affairs of humanity; he encouraged people to stop worrying about death and the afterlife; he had little time for providence or organised religion and its rituals. As Greenblatt puts it, Bracciolini was unwittingly “unleashing something that threatened his whole mental universe”. But that, I suppose, is why his discovery was so explosive, and the intellectually adventurous Renaissance was a good moment to light the touchpaper.
I mentioned that Bracciolini was a rare bird. Stephen Greenblatt sits on a similar perch. By any reckoning he is one of his generation’s most influential scholars. He has changed the way we look at Shakespeare and he has almost single-handedly transformed the agendas of English Literature departments around the world. This has been a mixed blessing. There are far too many literary scholars pretending to be historians these days and, regrettably, they don’t always exhibit the skill and nuance of their Greenblattian role model.
The man himself is top-notch, however, so we probably shouldn’t blame him for the sins of his intellectual offspring. In this punchy, wide-ranging book Greenblatt is at his best and his ability to write for a broader readership without compromising scholarly rigour is extraordinary.
He tells a fabulous, neglected tale. That’s welcome. He also has his eye on context and his vignettes of monastic scriptoriums, the fifteenth-century papal bureaucracy, and the era’s intellectual landscapes are masterly. Better yet, we spend some time with Poggio Bracciolini: “a short, genial, cannily alert man” and also “an ambitious provincial upstart”. Best of all, we are invited to reconsider the text that Bracciolini unearthed.
The “swerve” of the title of Greenblatt’s book derives from a Lucretian idea related to the unexpected, unpredictable movement of matter. History also swerves from time to time and Bracciolini’s arrival at the gates of that German monastery is an excellent case in point. To talk about “how the Renaissance began” is to over-egg the pudding but, goodness, just imagine not having Lucretius’ brilliant, sometimes bonkers, and endlessly controversial words. Thank you, Poggio.
Greenblatt’s list of luminaries is long and impressive: from Machiavelli to Shakespeare; from Bruno to Newton. In his Essays, Montaigne directly quoted Lucretius almost 100 times. Greenblatt knows that happening upon a single text does not change the world, and he says as much; but he makes a very compelling case that locating Lucretius had a crucial impact.
The puzzling thing is that De rerum natura was not an easy text to embrace. At various points in the past, Christianity had done a decent job of reconciling its nostrums with Aristotle and even Plato, but Lucretius was a tougher proposition. He talked about atomism (that the universe – one that was not created – comprised indestructible particles); he wasn’t an atheist, but he suggested that the gods would not have the slightest interest in the affairs of humanity; he encouraged people to stop worrying about death and the afterlife; he had little time for providence or organised religion and its rituals. As Greenblatt puts it, Bracciolini was unwittingly “unleashing something that threatened his whole mental universe”. But that, I suppose, is why his discovery was so explosive, and the intellectually adventurous Renaissance was a good moment to light the touchpaper.
I mentioned that Bracciolini was a rare bird. Stephen Greenblatt sits on a similar perch. By any reckoning he is one of his generation’s most influential scholars. He has changed the way we look at Shakespeare and he has almost single-handedly transformed the agendas of English Literature departments around the world. This has been a mixed blessing. There are far too many literary scholars pretending to be historians these days and, regrettably, they don’t always exhibit the skill and nuance of their Greenblattian role model.
The man himself is top-notch, however, so we probably shouldn’t blame him for the sins of his intellectual offspring. In this punchy, wide-ranging book Greenblatt is at his best and his ability to write for a broader readership without compromising scholarly rigour is extraordinary.
He tells a fabulous, neglected tale. That’s welcome. He also has his eye on context and his vignettes of monastic scriptoriums, the fifteenth-century papal bureaucracy, and the era’s intellectual landscapes are masterly. Better yet, we spend some time with Poggio Bracciolini: “a short, genial, cannily alert man” and also “an ambitious provincial upstart”. Best of all, we are invited to reconsider the text that Bracciolini unearthed.
The “swerve” of the title of Greenblatt’s book derives from a Lucretian idea related to the unexpected, unpredictable movement of matter. History also swerves from time to time and Bracciolini’s arrival at the gates of that German monastery is an excellent case in point. To talk about “how the Renaissance began” is to over-egg the pudding but, goodness, just imagine not having Lucretius’ brilliant, sometimes bonkers, and endlessly controversial words. Thank you, Poggio.
