By Bob Tedder • Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard’s John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, is a highly adept practitioner of the literary criticism movement styled “New Historicism.” His 2011 book “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern” won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Now, before we bow and pray to the literary gods someone else made, let us take pause. Even though I think this book’s major thesis is somewhat flawed, let us stop and consider why I nonetheless give this book a solid recommendation.
Perhaps the pause should be predicated upon an operational definition of New Historicism – a school of literary thought pioneered by Greenblatt which seeks to explore literature by scrutinizing a particular work’s culture and times. The resulting analysis provides the reader with a contextual understanding of cultural moments surrounding the works considered. When successful, a New Historicism author provides the reader with every reason to read and furthermore enjoy a book, even one with more than 70 pages of reference material.
In this case, Greenblatt uses those formidable pages of research to reconstruct the intriguing story of Poggio Bracciolini, a 15th century book hunter, and his discovery of the sole remaining copy of Roman philosopher- poet Lucretius’ master work “On The Nature Of Things.” Whether your reading leaves you convinced – as Greenblatt’s argument suggests – that this book’s return to circulation “changed the course of history” is, of course, a matter of personal taste. Influenced? Yes. Greenblatt has me convinced. Solely “swerving” the scandal-ridden Papal Renaissance into the ages of enlightenment and reason? Not so much.The book does, however, make for an exciting tale and Greenblatt’s writing style is by no means the inaccessible nattering of an intellectual nabob.
His story is laced with a bevy of scintillating observations. Whether you delightfully discover the Medieval version of “White Out” was a mixture of milk, cheese and lime, or join in Bracciolini’s Holmesian search for manuscripts “uncontaminated by the mental universe of the lowly scribe who copied them,” this book is a quick and enjoyable introduction to both its subject and a school of literary criticism.