Reality is a mess of conflicting details, and history surges forward like a wave breaking where, at any one time, there are only slightly more elements going forward than are going up and down or even backwards. In other words, we reduce a complex history to cartoon sketches: noble Rome; ignorant Middle Ages; religious Renaissance; until science gave us atomic theory and a way to live that doesn't require a God, people were pious, ignorant, and unquestioning. The difference between historians and ourselves is that historians are familiar with the details, including the eddies and complexities that defy the cartoon.

"The Swerve" gives us a richer and cliche-defying view of history by looking at one moment: the rediscovery of the 1st century BC poem "On The Nature of Things" by Lucretius. Greenblatt tells us about the poem and its context; about the rediscoverer, Paggio Bracciolini; about the mood of humanist scholarship around this time (the early 1400s) in Italy; about his journey and the structure of the monastery; and, magically, also about the ideas of the poem and how they've carried through history.

Lucretius, you see, was an Epicurean. Their philosophy was crudely portrayed as hedonistic "all about pleasure", but it was far more subtle. They have a lot in common with the Stoics I read about before: rejecting the idea of living for an afterlife, or being caught up in material possessions, it was better to distance oneself from such things and enjoy life for what it was. Lucretius's poem reflected these ideas and more. Here's the amazing summary from "The Swerve" of the central ideas in "On The Nature of Things":

•Everything is made of invisible particles.
•The elementary particles of matter—“the seeds of the things”—are eternal.
•The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size.
•All particles are in motion in an infinite void.
•The universe has no creator or designer.
•Everything comes into being as a result of a swerve. [randomness]
•The swerve is the source of free will.
•Nature ceaselessly experiments.
•The universe was not created for or about humans.
•Humans are not unique.
•Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival.
•The soul dies.
•There is no afterlife.
•Death is nothing to us.
•All organized religions are superstitious delusions.
•Religions are invariably cruel.
•There are no angels, demons, or ghosts.
•The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.
•The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
•Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder.

Yes. Wow. The revelation to me was that atomic theory didn't die. It was alive and being talked about after "On The Nature of Things" was rediscovered, talked about and accepted to the point where the Inquisition had to forbid it and trainee Jesuits had to recite a catechism against it. It made sense, people accepted it. The more controversial God-rejecting parts of the poem had to be dealt with cautiously (scholars often praised its literary merits while saying "obviously the pagan thinking shouldn't be spoken of") but still had life, as Greenblatt shows.

I've personally begun a new way of thinking about history. Instead of looking for The Great Men or the Few Key Ideas, I'm amassing a million questions: what kinds of jobs did people have? How did they dress? Why? What education was on offer? Who got to take it up? What did they learn? How? Why? and so on. Learn the full picture of a space, not just the barest facts and broad brush colours. Greenblatt takes the same approach: he picks up the poem and examines it, where it was found, the author, the discoverer, his world, his job, his friends, the consequences of its discovery, how it influenced later thinkers like More and Montaigne.

The essay Against the Hypocrites, for example, has its share of stories of clerical seducers, but the stories are part of a larger, much more serious analysis of an institutional dilemma: why churchmen, and especially monks, are particularly prone to hypocrisy. Is there a relation, Poggio asks, between religious vocation and fraud? A full answer would certainly involve sexual motives, but those motives alone cannot adequately account for the swarms of hypocrites in a place such as the curia, including monks notable for their ostentatious piety and their ascetic pallor who are feverishly seeking benefices, immunities, favors, privileges, positions of power. Nor can sexual intrigues adequately explain the still larger swarms of robed hypocrites in the world outside the curia, charismatic preachers who mint money with their sonorous voices and their terrible threats of hellfire and damnation, Observant friars who claim to adhere strictly to the Order of St. Francis but have the morals of bandits, mendicant friars with their little sacks, their long hair and longer beards, and their fraudulent pretense of living in holy poverty, confessors who pry into the secrets of every man and woman. Why don’t all these models of extravagant religiosity simply shut themselves up in their cells and commit themselves to lives of fasting and prayer? Because their conspicuous professions of piety, humility, and contempt for the world are actually masks for avarice, laziness, and ambition. To be sure, someone in the conversation concedes, there are some good and sincere monks, but very, very few of them, and one may observe even those slowly drawn toward the fatal corruption that is virtually built into their vocation.
“Poggio,” who represents himself as a character in the dialogue, argues that hypocrisy is better at least than open violence, but his friend Aliotti, an abbot, responds that it is worse, since everyone can perceive the horror of a confessed rapist or murderer, but it is more difficult to defend oneself against a sly deceiver. How is it possible then to identify hypocrites? After all, if they are good at their simulations, it is very difficult to distinguish the frauds from genuinely holy figures. The dialogue lists the warning signs. You should be suspicious of anyone who
displays an excessive purity of life;
walks barefoot through the streets, with a dirty face and shabby robes;
shows in public a disdain for money;
always has the name of Jesus Christ on his lips;
wants to be called good, without actually doing anything particularly good;
attracts women to him to satisfy his wishes;
runs here and there outside his monastery, seeking fame and honors;
makes a show of fasting and other ascetic practices;
induces others to get things for himself;
refuses to acknowledge or return what is given to him in trust.
Virtually any priest or monk who is at the curia is a hypocrite, writes Poggio, for it is impossible to fulfill the highest purposes of religion there. And if you happen at the curia to see someone who is particularly abject in his humility, beware: he is not merely a hypocrite but the worst hypocrite of all. In general, you should be wary of people who seem too perfect, and remember that it is actually quite difficult to be good: “Difficile est bonum esse.”
Against the Hypocrites is a work written not in the wake of Martin Luther by a Reformation polemicist but a century earlier, by a papal bureaucrat living and working at the center of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. It indicates that the Church, though it could and did respond violently to what it perceived as doctrinal or institutional challenges, was willing to tolerate extremely sharp critiques from within, including critiques from secular figures like Poggio. And it indicates too that Poggio and his fellow humanists in the curia struggled to channel their anger and disgust into more than obscene laughter and violent quarrels with one another.

How different that is from the view of the Church that I had: uniform, stern, unheeding of its weaknesses. As with every subject Greenblatt covers here, I came away with a more nuanced view. To be alive is to be complex, contradictory, and unresolved, and in those ways and others Greenblatt makes the history come alive.

Once I realized what Greenblatt was doing, I luxuriated in this book. It's well-written, forceful yet able to linger over the right details, and makes me want to both read the poem and learn the penmanship of Paggio Bracciolini. And, of course, yearn to be alive back then when you could travel into the wilds of Germany or Poland and return with a great manuscript that nobody had ever seen before--Paggio found Vitruvius, the incredible Roman architect, among many others.

Absolutely worth every star.