of parchment, and not even very ancient ones. But for him these were not manuscripts but human voices. What emerged from the obscurity of the library was not a link in a long chain of texts, one copied from the other, but rather the thing itself . . . wrapped in gravecloths and stumbling into the light."The Swerve [by Stephen Greenblatt] pivots on the fateful moment when [Poggio] Bracciolini, exploring the shelves of a monastic library in Germany, happened upon a manuscript of a work that was thought to have disappeared centuries ago: Lucretius' visionary poem, On the Nature of Things. This was by far Bracciolini's greatest discovery, for the poem was to exert a profound influence on the thought of Renaissance Europe. As Greenblatt puts it--borrowing a metaphor, the "swerve," from Lucretius himself--the result of Bracciolini's discovery was that "the world swerved in a new direction."
from Barnes and Noble Review: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
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