Jeffrey Greenblatt

The Swerve

 

Professor Stephen Greenblatt offers a startling proposition in this engaging work of nonfiction: the worldview of the European Christian Middle Ages was simply a “swerve” away from an earlier paradigm, namely Greek Epicurean atomism, or the belief that the universe is made from elemental particles. Greenblatt makes the case that with the 1417 rediscovery of a poem by Roman philosopher Lucretius, the Western world circled back around to the idea of atomism, which influenced a number of early modern thinkers.