In the winter of 1417, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late
thirties plucked a very old manuscript off a dusty shelf in a remote
monastery, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that
it be copied. He was Poggio Bracciolini, the greatest book hunter of the
Renaissance. His discovery, Lucretius' ancient poem On the Nature of
Things, had been almost entirely lost to history for more than a
thousand years.
It was a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe
functions without the aid of gods, that religious fear is damaging to
human life, that pleasure and virtue are not opposites but intertwined,
and that matter is made up of very small material particles in eternal
motion, randomly colliding and swerving in new directions. Its return to
circulation changed the course of history. The poem's vision would shape
the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein, and--in the hands
of Thomas Jefferson--leave its trace on the Declaration of
Independence.
From the gardens of the ancient philosophers to the dark chambers of
monastic scriptoria during the Middle Ages to the cynical, competitive
court of a corrupt and dangerous pope, Greenblatt brings Poggio's search
and discovery to life in a way that deepens our understanding of the
world we live in now.
"An intellectually invigorating, nonfiction version of a Dan Brown-like
mystery-in-the-archives thriller." --Boston Globe
