![]() ![]() He thus echoes Burckhardt’s equally sincere caricature of the poor benighted medievals as incapable of conceiving of themselves other than as part of some corporate structure (as opposed to us liberated modern individualists). 14–6, ending: ‘Identity came with a precise, well-understood place in a chain of command and obedience’. This is nicely illustrated inter alia by Greenblatt’s description of the medieval mentality on pp. The questionable premise is his full-throated Burckhardtian, or, perhaps more accurately, Voltairean view of the Renaissance as an outburst of light after a long medieval darkness. As best as I can tell, a dubious premise and an unwarranted assumption underlie Greenblatt’s strange procedure. More oddly still, the subject which supplies the very title of the book, the swerve, the physical phenomenon excogitated by Epicurus to explain why atoms act randomly and differently from each other, plays no significant role in the story. As its subtitle states, it purports to tell us how the Renaissance began. ![]() ![]() ![]() With grace and learning it tells the story of the discovery in Germany in 1417 of the masterpiece of Epicureanism – Lucretius’ poem De Rerum Natura of more than 7,000 lines distributed across six books – by the Italian Renaissance humanist Poggio Bracciolini with engrossing excursions into sundry topics here and there for entertainment and instruction. ![]()
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