ironically enough, in a monastery library--in 1417, by the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini, [Stephen] Greenblatt imagines the moment as the birth of the Renaissance: "There were no heroic gestures, no observers keenly recording the great event for posterity, no signs in heaven or on earth that everything had changed forever. A short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties reached out one day, took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That was all; but it was enough."In fact, of course, it was not nearly enough. Greenblatt knows that any such claim for De rerum natura is absurdly overblown--"one poem by itself was certainly not responsible for an entire intellectual, moral, and social transformation," he grants early on.
from Adam Kirsch: Slate: The Poem That Changed the World
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