psmv6: The Swerve

[Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ gets pride of place at the front of the book, painted a few decades after the death of the hero of the book. Now in the Uffizi. A symbol for the book’s theme]

Contents

• Introduction

• The discoverer

• The discovery

• The discovered

• Diffusion

• Some odds and ends

• Conclusions

• References

Introduction

This post being about a fictionalised version of the discovery and subsequent life of a long-lost poem in Latin, ‘De rerum natura’, written shortly before the start of the Christian era. A heretical poem, the heresy of which was mitigated by its predating the coming of our Lord, a poem which managed to survive to appear in the A-level curricula of my school days.

One might also say a sexed-up version, containing as it does, lots of sex; rather too much to my mind. A pot-boiler knocked out by an academic eminence in semi-retirement to eke out his pension? An eminence to be found at reference 1. To be fair, a pot-boiler which contained plenty to interest me, even if I did flag a bit from time to time.

It, reference 2, came to my attention quite by chance when seeking to replace my culled version of the well-known book at reference 3, which I had owned for some years without managing to read much of it. And I bought the present book blind, without knowing what it was about.

In his telling, Greenblatt makes the discovery of the poem the pivot on which Europe swung from the medieval world to the modern world. From the certainties of the world of Christ to the uncertainties of the world of science, a move which terrified the Catholic Church of the time - to the point that it was burning alive people who stuck their necks out about it and its teaching. Giving them a taste of the hell-fires to come.

The discoverer

Poggio Bracciolini, aka Poggio, spent a good part of his life as a papal civil servant and his later life as a civil servant of Florence. He also made a late marriage to a young Florentine of good family, a marriage which appears to have worked well.

He was perhaps a craftsman rather than a creative, with both exceptionally good handwriting, important in the days when there was neither printing nor photocopying, and a very good knowledge of Latin – and of the Latin classics which were already available in 14th century Italy. This knowledge stood him in good stead for the hunting of lost classics for which he is now remembered, in particular the discovery of a copy of ‘De rerum natura’, at the time only known by more or less cryptic references in other books.

More about Poggio is to be found at reference 4.

The discovery

The discovery took place while Poggio was between papal posts, around 1417 and probably in the library of the Abbey of Fulda, in the middle of what is now Germany. Not long after we were fighting the Battle of Agincourt against the French – although to be fair, Henry V’s son, Henry VI, despite his delicate mental health, went on to found Eton College, King's College Cambridge and All Souls College Oxford. We English were not barbarians, not complete illiterates.

Monastery libraries were, during those troubled times, good places for old books and manuscripts; they might survive. For Poggio’s purposes – classical Latin rather than religious texts of the Christian era – Germany was a much better place for a hunt than England. And given that books and manuscripts do not last for ever, much of this survival was down to more or less careful copying by the monks. So you might not have a contemporary record of an important speech by Marcus Tullius Cicero, but you did have a tenth century copy. And in the case, which often happened, that you had several copies, from different places, antiquarians and scholars could collate and correct, which was even better.

On the other hand, monastery librarians, at least in Poggio’s time, could be tricky people to deal with. They might be susceptible to money, although, as it happens, Poggio did not have much of that. In any event, they were likely to be suspicious of some learned stranger turning up out of the blue and wanting one of their treasures, although they might go so far as to let him copy it. On the other hand, they might suspect him of heretical or worse motives. What decent reason could he have for wanting to read this pagan stuff in the privacy of his own home? And anyway, they had been on the point of recycling the valuable parchment for something else.

One tactic available to the Poggios was flattery. Spend quality time – perhaps weeks of it – studying the work of the monastery’s favourite – perhaps their very own saint – and maybe you could discretely work your way towards the real target. And, in Poggio’s case, he could cite papal connections, albeit to a pope who was tainted, and perhaps not held in high regard by the librarian or abbot he was trying to impress.

The above image, turned up by Bing, is of the Baroque library of Admont Abbey in Austria. So a different time and place, but it serves to give an idea of the scale and wealth of these libraries.

We are not given many details about the actual discovery, although this is thought to have been made in the celebrated library at Fulda – reference 10 – with Greenblatt giving us little idea of the considerable scale and reputation of the place. It seems that Poggio was not allowed to borrow the book and he did not sit down to copy it himself either. Rather he repaired to Constance, where he may have had business, and sat down to wait while a hired scribe made a copy and sent it down to him at Constance, a journey today of around 250 miles by road. Poggio also sent a letter to a correspondent in Venice, so there must have been postal arrangements of some sort.

Greenblatt tells us that Poggio was short of money at this time and travelled very light, with perhaps just one companion, more serving man than fellow humanist. This at a time when my understanding is that travellers in England travelled in convoy if they possibly could, to provide some protection against bandits (and Robin Hoods).

Eventually the copy turned up in Constance, from where Poggio sent it off to a correspondent in Florence, who would make a proper copy. This eventually resulted in around fifty surviving manuscript copies. This including neither the Fulda original nor the copy that Poggio had commissioned – although two more old manuscript copies of the poem did turn up over the years. Printed versions started to appear by the end of the fifteenth century, and then the cat was well and truly out of the bag.

The Discovered

One feature of the poem was that it was wonderful poetry in wonderful Latin, amounting to some 7,400 dactylic hexameters (for which see reference 9), a feature which was used to mitigate the heretical content. This content, Greenblatt attempts to summarise in a number of elements in his Chapter 8. In what follows, I try to follow the spirit if not the letter of his exposition.

Thread 1. Everything is made up of very small, indivisible and indestructible atoms. In the case of something like a human, a very large number of them. These atoms are forever whizzing about, making up new things and new activities. These things are mainly made up of space rather than matter.

Thread 2. The universe is bounded in neither space nor time.

Thread 3. Which results in a cycle of creation and destruction without beginning or end.

From where I associate to the rather earlier words of the minor Hebrew prophet to be found in Ecclesiastes, known as the Preacher. I have no idea whether there is any connection, not in any case relevant here.

Thread 4. The is a modest number of rules which govern all this activity. Greenblatt used the analogy of the rules governing the combination of the letters of the alphabet into words and those words into language. These rules take the place of the Lord God. And while there are rules at a micro level, there is no Divine Plan at a macro level.

All this is, I believe, very much related to what are now called emergent properties, for which see reference 11. Where, quite early on, one finds the example of the tornado: one could, in principle, explain the behaviour of a tornado in the micro-terms of the motions of atoms, or perhaps of the rather larger molecules, but it is far more helpful to explain the behaviour in macro-terms, at a higher level. One can do a lot with tornadoes before one has to resort to explanations at the molecular level, never mind the atomic level.

I associate to the Boyle’s law of school-boy physics, to be found at reference 17, which conveniently summarises the behaviour of a large number of molecules of a gas, in a closed container, in the form of a simple equation. An equation which approximates the truth of the matter, but an approximation which is good enough, most of the time.

Thread 5. Then there is the tricky concept of the swerve. Our atoms whizz about in straight lines, occasionally coming into contact with other atoms. A version of the world of billiard balls bouncing about. But from time to time, at random, for no apparent reason, an atom will change direction. This Greenblatt, and he says Lucretius before him, calls these changes of direction the swerve, which gives his book its title.

One manifestation of the swerve is what we are pleased to call free will.

And I believe a sub-text is the swerve in intellectual life which rapidly followed assimilation of the new-found treasure.

Thread 6. Nature is endlessly experimenting. Most of the experiments are dead ends and die. Some, like the mammals are more successful.

Thread 7. Building on thread 3 above, we have an endless cycle of birth and death. A cycle into which everything is locked: worms, mountains, glaciers, planets and humans. With the twist that things which are alive can reproduce themselves. Humans can do this, glaciers cannot.

Thread 8. Humans are not particularly special. Nor did they come to be in a Garden of Eden. Rather, they came to be in the struggle for existence. From where there is a clear link to Darwin, his evolution and natural selection, which came more than five hundred years later than Poggio. And the Church of England was not much happier about Darwin than the Church of Rome had been about Lucretius – although, in their favour, it can be said that they did not go in for burning people alive. They just denied them preferment.

Thread 9. Souls, in so far as they exist at all, are born more or less with the birth of their host and certainly die with the death of their host. They do not jump from host to host (rebirth) and they do not swan off to either heaven or hell. We have to make the best of the life we have got, rather than betting on the life – or lives – to come.

And so on. All clearly very heretical. And, somewhat unfairly, associated with sensual excess. Unfair not only because that was not where Lucretius takes us, he was all for moderation in all things, but also because the inhabitants of the upper reaches of the Church of Rome went in for a fair bit of excess themselves – excesses which Greenblatt rather dwells upon.

Thread 10. Greenblatt concludes with the idea that, in the end, knowledge gives more satisfaction than the senses. He does not mention the catch that while the senses are democratic, more or less accessible to all, knowledge is not. His humanist project comes across as a bit elitist – not necessarily a bad thing, but it does have to be accommodated somehow.

I have no idea how fair an encapsulation of the poem the foregoing is. Are we reading stuff into it with the benefit of hindsight that is not really there? Was it really as prescient as it might now seem? Or was it just a lucky throw?

Diffusion

Whatever the case, the poem appears to have been enormously influential in the educated part of Christian societies.

Some popes read it, perhaps in lavishly produced manuscript copies, while a little later the Jesuits and the Inquisition went in for collecting up all the copies they could find and burning them. Perhaps burning their owners too if they persisted in their errors.

It was translated into all the major languages and ran to many printed editions, starting from the end of the fifteenth century. Some of these translations were major works in their own right.

Greenblatt picks up a couple of references in Shakespeare, from Romeo and Juliet (I.iv.55-59 and V.iii.108-110). A bit of Googling suggests that there are plenty of others, without turning up any specifics in the public domain.

Then we have the curious case of Lucy Hutchinson, the Puritan wife of a Roundhead regicide, who was also a poetess and who translated this poem into English verse. A lady who had nine children, so presumably knew something of the pleasures of the flesh. A labour of love while, as a devout Puritan, she hated the result and came close to destroying it.

Turning to the present, Lucretian studies are clearly alive and well, with both Bing and Academia turning up all kinds of quite recent work.

Some odds and ends

The swerve, aka the Renaissance, is exemplified for Greenblatt by the shift from Duccio’s 'Maestà' of reference 16, a reconstruction of the front of which is included above, a large altar piece painted in the early fourteenth century, to Botticelli’s 'Primavera' of reference 5, reproduced at the head of this post, a large secular, not to say pagan piece painted in the late fifteenth century, at about the time that the Church was getting around to banning Lucretius.

One of the points made by Greenblatt is that the earlier painting is static while the latter is dynamic, is full of earthly movement. A world on the move, contrasted with the statis of Paradise. With the latter painting being matched, as it were, by the hymn to Venus with which the poem opens. Very ‘Song of Songs’.

The ‘Song of Songs’ being a very short book in the Old Testament, aka ‘The Song of Solomon’, placed just before the much longer book of Isaiah, where, inter alia, we find both Paradise and Hell fire. Solomon is not, however, to be found in the index of the present book.

Much later on, Greenblatt tells us that the librarian of Eton College picked up Montaigne’s copy of the poem for £250 at an auction. He does not tell us that, subsequently, after passing through the library of one Gilbert de Botton, it wound up in Cambridge University Library. The same source says that the librarian bought it from the booksellers Hesketh and Ward, but nothing about an auction. Which suggests to me that Greenblatt’s gloss, while entertaining, is a bit off the mark.

We are told that somebody called Eratosthenes got the circumference of the earth right to within 1% a couple of hundred years before the birth of our Lord. Reference 12 tells us how this was probably done, but the accuracy claim is referred to one C.A. Matthew, where I have not gone.

We are told that Jesus was not portrayed laughing or smiling by early Christians, who, on this telling were far too obsessed with pain, exemplary pain and sacrificial pain, to allow such levity. Pain now to earn the joys of Paradise in due course. But to be fair to the early Christians, there was a lot of pain in their world, some of it down to natural causes, pain which people had to try to learn to live with, to cope with. Morphine was around, but did not become widely available until much later.

When Poggio died in Florence, he was honoured by the city fathers with a statue in the cathedral. A century later, things had moved on and this statue was repurposed as one of the Apostles in a group of same, in another part of the cathedral. He might not have been best pleased.

While it seems likely that the 15th and 16th equivalent of the chattering classes were very into Lucretius and the shift from the joys of the life to come to those of the present, was all this stuff confined to those chattering classes, the courtiers of Renaissance courts and their hangers-on? Did ordinary life just rumble on without paying much attention to all these shifts in fashion and doctrine?

The present book was written in 2011, while reference 3, from where I started was written some thirty years earlier. The index to this last contains just two entries for Lucretius, page 210 and note 36 on page 30, a reference from page 242 of chapter 6. The first of these concerns Marlowe and his Lucretian naturalism, the second St. Augustine and the sex life of Adam & Eve. Violence seems to be the theme of both.

Conclusions

A good read, although probably best not to rely too much on the detail. A bit like Gemini as far as that goes: good on painting in the background, not so strong on specifics.

And I am not yet convinced by the swerve of the title. A rhetorical device yes, but does it help understanding?

My first thought was that maybe the next stop should be the reference 3 which I never read first time around, but it not clear from the inspection of the index reported above that it is going to help much. Nor do I expect that the shortly to arrive Loeb version of the Lucretius is going to add much more than a bit of class to my bookshelf. But see reference 12. There is also a faint echo of an earlier attempt to recover my schoolboy Latin at reference 13, the remnants of which are still to be found on the top shelf. We shall see.

PS: the Texas Mesquite Grill is alive and well, with this image turning up this morning (Wednesday). The original is hidden inside Facebook, so, for once, Google Image Search failed to turn up a decent copy - although it did manage lots of images like it, from other establishments dotted around the US. But see reference 18.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Greenblatt. Now in his early eighties, he would have been around 70 when he wrote this book.

Reference 2: The swerve – Stephen Greenblatt – 2011.

Reference 3: Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare – Stephen Greenblatt – 1980.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poggio_Bracciolini.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primavera_(Botticelli).

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucretius.

Reference 7: De rerum natura – Lucretius – c50BCE. In six books, amounting to some 7,400 dactylic hexameters. Appears to be unfinished.

Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura.

Reference 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dactylic_hexameter.

Reference 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princely_Abbey_of_Fulda.

Reference 11: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/.