The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began

For Stephen Greenblatt, the Renaissance signalled the birth of modernity.

Through the revival of pagan antiquity, there was a shift from God, religion and angels to “things in this world”; a realisation that “humans are made of the same stuff as everything else”; a freedom “to question authorities and challenge received doctrines” and “to imagine that there are others worlds” besides our own; an idea “that the sun is only one star in an infinite universe”; a liberty “to contemplate… the death of the soul”; the ability “to find the mortal world enough”.

The procreator of this birth was the Roman poet Lucretius, who composed a long poem On the Nature of Things in the first century BC; the “midwife to modernity” was the Italian scholar Poggio Bracciolini, who rescued the text in 1417 from a monastery after more than a thousand years of oblivion.

Greenblatt’s book is fluently written, and it provides readers with a clear introduction to the philosophy of Lucretius, but, as history, it is deeply flawed.

The title itself is misleading: as Greenblatt admits, the Renaissance was well under way, with Petrarch, in the century before the recovery of Lucretius and its roots can be traced back even further to north Italian authors in the later 1200s. Lucretius’s influence was modest in the 15th century: only 53 manuscripts and three printed editions; in the 16th century, there were only three printed commentaries.

This compares with thousands of manuscripts, for example, of Aristotle in circulation in the 15th century, followed by virtually countless printed editions before the end of the next century.

The Renaissance did not herald a decline in religion or pose a threat to Christianity. Renaissance learning was embraced by both Protestant reformers such as Luther and Calvin, as well as by the educators and theologians of the Counter Reformation. The power of religion is amply demonstrated by the ferocious religious wars that tore Europe apart in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Greenblatt offers few details of the actual influence of Lucretius’s philosophy on Renaissance intellectuals. He can find no evidence of Lucretian ideas in Poggio’s own voluminous writings, and one has to wait until the 16th century to find desultory signs of Lucretius in isolated thinkers such as More, Giordano Bruno, Galileo and Montaigne.

In fact, most of the book is padding, without relevance to the revival of Lucretius, including long biographical treatments of Poggio’s life and works, accounts of the burning of heretics (1415–16) at the Council of Constance, and narratives of the destruction of ancient libraries. It is curious that so little attention is given to Machiavelli, who is known to have made a transcription of Lucretius in the 1490s.

Professor Greenblatt’s vision of the Renaissance is curiously old-fashioned. It has long been acknowledged that this complex and rich phenomenon was far more than a revival of pagan Greek and Roman antiquity. 

Robert Black is professor of Renaissance history at the University of Leeds
 

See also...

A gallery of Renaissance and Medieval manuscripts