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. (
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