The Great Turn: How the World Entered the Modern Age
by J
About This Novel
In January 1417, book hunter Poggio Bracciolini took down an extremely old manuscript from a dusty bookshelf in a remote monastery, and inadvertently awakened a work that had been hidden for thousands of years - Lucretius's On the Nature of Things. This long Latin poem with extremely beautiful writing sparked huge discussions and deeply influenced artists, thinkers, writers, and scientists such as Botticelli, Bruno, Galileo, Freud, Darwin, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Einstein. It also left its traces in the Declaration of Independence by Jefferson. Stephen Greenblatt tells this fascinating but little-known Renaissance adventure in The Big Turn. He believed that it was the reappearance of "On the Nature of Things" that opened the door for Western civilization to move toward modernity, and thus changed the history of all mankind.
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