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This book is a study of how Lucretian doctrines emerged during the European Renaissance due to the contingent discovery; and subsequent circulation, by Poggio Bracciolini, of an ancient manuscript on atomic physics by the Roman poet Lucretius titled On the Nature of Things in the fifteenth century. This contingent discovery not only reshaped cognitive patterns during the early modern period, but also mediated the ideological conflicts between materialism and spiritualism during the Renaissance. The discovery of this book by Lucretius also became important for the Renaissance because it set out a theory of the swerve that depicts how atoms fall. Lucretius’ theory of the subject is modelled on the fall of these atoms which don’t just fall, but swerve in their trajectories when they do so. It is this swerve then within the trajectory of the atom that makes it possible to envisage the existence of free will since a deterministic model of the world cannot explain all physical and psychological phenomena given that the trajectory of the swerve is not mechanical but probabilistic. The relationship between theories of historical determination and theories of free will in the history of ideas therefore had to be thought through by invoking the notion of the Lucretian swerve. Greenblatt’s book however is not reducible to the Lucretian swerve per se, but is also about how the contingent emergence of this idea in Renaissance Europe forces us to rethink the relationship between the realms of what is historically necessary and what is historically contingent; and explains how the contingent then passes into the realm of historical necessity.

Stephen Greenblatt (2011). The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company), pp. 356, ISBN 978-0-34340-3