The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt (Review)
Before I review The Swerve, I would like to note that The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson is one of the most gripping books I have read. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but some stores wrongly classify it as “non-fiction” or “history” rather than “historical fiction.” I realize I tend to care about words more deeply than many people, but the distinction is important. Similarly, I was annoyed as I worked through Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, which was similarly a similarly engaging and enjoyable story with many historical foundations. I purchased The Swerve during an Audible.com sale because the book is well regarded and—according to Audible—it is a history book. This classification, however, is not quite accurate.
The Swerve and its story is accessible, and Greenblatt writes with a narrative that you hope to find in a history book. Yet unlike a history book, Greenblatt presented a narrow and at times inaccurate picture of the Middle Ages. Since I am not a historian, Greenblatt’s presentation prompted me to read how other historians classified his book. A quick search reveals that I am not the first to express wariness at how Greenblatt cherrypicked his history (see www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/why-s..., www.vox.com/2016/7/20/12216712/harvar..., and www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/23...). Perhaps the most simplistic manner to express my concern with “The Swerve” is that historians long ago eschewed “The Dark Ages” in favor of “The Middle Ages” to describe the period between the Classical Era and the Renaissance.
Scholars disfavor the dark-age label because it inaccurately represents the time as culturally and educationally inept. This is not to say those tendencies did not exist—Greenblatt properly captures these ills. But his writing and occasionally tendency to write with his protagonist’s first-person voice presents the era as not only a comprehensively dark period but a dark period almost exclusively due to religion. Unfortunately, this approach to the history undermines a great story and an opportunity to unpack and explore important and interesting philosophical discussions. I love historians who can lift historical facts from bygone eras to present an engaging narrative of what happened in the past. But I’ll take a dry point-by-point account that is accurate rather than a thrilling story that claims to be history. This distinction is essential and the reason I mark The Swerve lower than it would otherwise be.
As for the story itself, The Swerve tells how Poggio Bracciolini, a 15th-century papal emissary saved the last copy of the Roman poet Lucretius’s, “On the Nature of Things” from destruction as it wasted away in a German monastery. This discovery led to the spread of important ideas that influenced significantly the modern world. Poggio was the apostolic secretary who recorded the pope’s words. When The Swerve begins, Poggio had ended his term as secretary after Pope John the 23 had been stripped of his title.
Poggio then took on the form of a post-college millennial enjoying a gap year—traveling Europe to read literature. He went exploring as a book hunter looking for ancient texts. Paggio searched in monasteries because the monastic orders withdrew to remote locations to avoid temptations. The monks became the keepers of books as there was little to no market for readers after the Great Plague wiped out 30-60% of Europe’s population. For this reason, Poggio had a daunting trip to find the monks in Switzerland and Germany. Yet the hope of rare manuscripts and preserving ancient texts made the journey worthwhile, and Greenblatt captures Poggio’s joy in the hunt.
As part of Poggio’s hunt for ancient texts, Greenblatt looked at how Ancient Rome valued discourse. He mentioned how dialogues often left inconclusive finishes. Greenblatt showed how the people of the day wanted to exchange ideas and leave room for alternative views. Each participant in the conversations was to have a position—be it in agreement or disagreement. Greenblatt contrasted this approach with the Benedictine orders, which barred questioning the reading of the scripture. Greenblatt notes that debate and questions were not part of the culture.
As the story unfolds, he builds toward an embrace of secularism and more specifically Epicureanism, which Greenblatt recasts as a more moderate philosophy than its reputation typically presents. He then made a strong connection between why early Christians recast Epicurus—the philosophy’s progenitor—as a fool and an indulgent pig to bury the anti-religious element of his philosophy. In turn, Lucretius, a follower of Epicurus, suffered a similar loss of reputation, which then buried his writing for many years. Greenblatt then explores the role Poggio plays in reintroducing the ideas from “On the Nature of Things,” which contributed to the Renaissance.
All of this makes for an interesting story. As I noted above, there were historical elements I would have preferred Greenblatt more richly explored. Instead, it seemed like Greenblatt took the middle-school approach of writing a thesis, outlining his book, and then ignoring the resources and citations that undercut his thesis. Doing so kept the story tight and engaging, but it faltered in historical accuracy. Still, if you already have a foundation in the Middle Ages and church history, it is a fun and quick read. It just should not be the foundation for understanding the era.
Beyond this assessment, here are a few of the notes I took while reading:
Poggio’s friend and mentor, Nikkoli, reintroduced the idea of the public library hundreds of years after the last Roman library had closed. And it was not a monastic library but one for any learned individual.
Poggio’s writing on hypocrisy is a biting critique against the church, and it criticized many of the condemnations Jesus gave against the Pharisees of his day.
It is ironic that Poggio claimed to have discovered the secret to happiness in Lucretius’s, “On the Nature of Things.” Yet his writings reveal a great dissatisfaction—particularly during his years in England—that suggest his conclusion was not the secret to happiness.
The connection from “On the Nature of Things” to Thomas Moore’s reading of the poem as the impetus for “Utopia” and similarly Thomas Jefferson’s appreciation for the poem as an inspiration for “the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence is a delightful connection and a great representation as to how the books we read shape the people we become. As Greenblatt noted when citing Thomas Aquinas, the consequences of reading and its shaping of philosophy should not prompt censorship. Instead, we should be discerning and aware that what we read saturates our minds and—if I might add antagonistically toward Greenblatt—souls. Thus, we should remain vigilant when reading works to both explore the ideas and explore the unwritten opposition to them. Such an approach safeguards against letting literature either swing us in the direction we already wanted to tread or veering in an opposite direction simply due to novelty. Awareness as we read is critical.
As Dr. Laura Saetveit Miles noted in her above-cited critique of The Swerve, “Scholars have spent the past several decades upending the old myths that the Middle Ages were intellectual stagnant, emotionally repressed, and merely masochistic. Unfortunately, The Swerve heartily embraces those myths…It represents the importation of Malcolm Gladwell–esque yarn-spinning into the academy.” So long as you know what you are getting with The Swerve, it is an enjoyable read. But you will need to seek out other books to meaningfully explore the interesting and worthwhile transition of philosophy and science in the Middle Ages.
