Tag: Lucretius

  • Campus & Community

    Stephen Greenblatt wins Pulitzer Prize

    Stephen Greenblatt, the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.”

  • Arts & Culture

    On the nature of modern thought

    The story of 15th-century book hunter Poggio Bracciolini and his rediscovery of Lucretius’ “On the Nature of Things” was captured by Cogan University Professor Stephen Greenblatt in his National Book Award-winning account, “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.”

  • Arts & Culture

    A key to modernity

    Rummaging through worm-eaten layers of parchment at a monastery in southern Germany in 1417, the scribe Poggio Bracciolini discovered a poem titled “De Rerum Natura,” or “On the Nature of Things,” by the Roman philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus. On that day, according to Professor Stephen Greenblatt, history swerved and modernity began.

  • Arts & Culture

    The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

    In this wave-making book, Cogan University Professor Stephen Greenblatt takes into account “On the Nature of Things,” an eerily modern poem by the ancient Roman writer Lucretius, which helped shape the great thinkers of the Renaissance, even if fewer than three copies of the poem were known to exist at the time.