the swerve
there's nothing i like better than a hatchet-job book review...
especially when the book is a Pulitzer Prize winner.
i was led into these waters by looking up de rerum natura, Lucretius' atomist poem, in particular the 'discovery' of a manuscript of this work, in a monastery library, in 1417.
it seems that a book was made out of this event. it's called The Swerve: How the World became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt (published 2012).
the book met with great success. but not everyone thinks it deserves the accolades which it got. these are the links i followed:
Latinists' views of The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt
Armarium Magnum. The Swerve: How the World became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
enjoy -- if you like this sort of thing
as per the second link, i ought to look up The Whig Interpretation of History (first published 1931, but almost ignored until 1950). more relevant than ever today, i suspect, as we go into the technocratic 'singularity', and real history is more and more ignored