Summary Of How The World Became Modern By Stephen Greenblatt

In this section of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt tells us more about the revival of ancient Roman and Greek literature by humanists like Petrarch, Salutati, Niccolo Niccoli, and Poggio who found and copied lost works. He also explains that the governance of the Roman Catholic Church was full of hypocritical and corrupt officials. It was because of this corruption and two other people’s claims to the papacy that Pope John XXIII was deposed. Two people, Jon Hus and Jerome of Prague, had decried the hypocrisy of the church which had gotten the Pope deposed and told people to believe in God not the Pope or the church. It was after this that Poggio found On the Nature of Things by Titus Lucretius Carus and started to spread his teachings. His teachings were primarily that everything was made up of atoms and therefore there was no supernatural beings or afterlife and those who say there is are deluded, which is the biggest hindrance to happiness, which for him was pleasure. I don’t personally believe very much of these teachings but they are important because they influenced much of

Once they had copies of these ancient books they started to recirculate them between each other, thereby spreading and retaining the knowledge of the Greeks and the Romans. Literature was one of the few places that Roman culture could be preserved because many of their monuments had already been destroyed so they fought to preserve what they could. They did this because they disliked their current era but loved and respected the old Roman culture. They disliked the time they were in because it was a time of war and violence and nothing was being created, only lost. They loved the Greek and Roman literature because of its excellent grammar and its unique ideas, which had been somewhat lost in their