Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

For the past 40 years Prof. Stephen Greenblatt has been an influential scholar of Renaissance literature. He truly does know his stuff. However, his influence has not always been seen as beneficial because of an unfortunate tendency towards questionable interpretation. Too often, his books resemble very tall, very unstable houses of cards - impressive, but liable to collapse at the slightest breath of critical analysis. Greenblatt's Hot New Book is The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. "Modern," in his view, means "Non-Religious" and the swerve came when a 15th century Italian scholar, on a book-hunting tour through old German monasteries, stumbled across a copy of On the Nature of Things, a philosophic Latin poem written by Lucretius shortly before the birth of Christ. With the rediscovery of this one ancient manuscript, Greenblatt believes, the Western mind was able to liberate itself from religious dogma, rediscover the joy of living for this life (rather than the After-life), and create the Modern World we know today. This narrative is more than a little over-the-top. It is also simply wrong, on two fundamental counts Greenblatt believes that Lucretius' philosophy had been a dominant school of thought in the ancient world, but was stifled in the early centuries AD because it contradicted the doctrine of the Christian Church. He also believes that this same philosophy - rediscovered in the early 15th century - was the great Game-Changer in Renaissance thought. Neither belief is true. Any competent historian of ancient philosophy knows that, far from being a dominant force, Epicureanism was actually a minor player in the world of Greco-Roman thought - much less popular and influential than its principle rivals, Stoicism and Platonism. The philosophy of Lucretius failed to catch on not because it was un-Christian, but because pagan Greeks and Romans found its dogma of the Randomness of the Universe so intellectually and spiritually unsatisfying. Stoicism and Platonism were very different, but both schools were convinced that we live in a Cosmos, not a Chaos. Both taught that our world is not an infinite collection of atoms bouncing around randomly and forming temporary - and meaningless - conglomerates of Being. It is the product of Providential Wisdom. The Epicureanism of Lucretius was no more dominant after the Christian Middle Ages than it had been before. Throughout the 15th, 16th and early-17th centuries, Platonism and Stoicism (especially the former) were once again the schools of thought most enthusiastically revived, and most influential. To contradict just one example in Greenblatt's book, Botticelli's art was philosophically informed by the Renaissance Neoplatonism of Marsilio Ficino, not by Lucretius. In the early modern world as in pagan antiquity, Epicureanism occupied a position rather like today's American Libertarian Party - a fringe-movement with a few passionate devotees but no real clout. Many scholars questioned Greenblatt's insights into Shakespeare (as found in his 2005 "speculative biography" of the Bard, Will in the World). I believe even more doubt will be heaped upon this very questionable reading of early modern philosophy.