The Swerve: How the World Became Modern Part 1

THE.

SWERVE.

How the World Became Modern.

STEPHEN.

GREENBLATT.

This portrait of the young Poggio Bracciolini appears in the preface to his Latin translation of Xenophon's account of the education of the ideal ruler, the Cyropaedia.

Proudly noting that he is the secretary to Pope Martin V, Poggio signs his characteristically elegant transcription of Cicero, made in 1425, and wishes the reader farewell. Poggio's handwriting was prized in his own lifetime and was one of the keys to his advancement.

This bronze Seated Hermes was found in fragments in 1758 at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. A pair of winged sandals reveals his ident.i.ty as the messenger G.o.d Hermes. To an Epicurean the figure's elegant repose might have suggested that the G.o.ds had no messages to deliver to mankind.

The enemies of Epicureanism a.s.sociated it not with the thoughtful pose of the Seated Hermes but with the drunken abandonment of this Silenus, sprawled on a wineskin draped over a lion's pelt, found near the Hermes sculpture at the Villa of the Papyri.

The small bust of Epicurus, which retains its original base with the philosopher's name inscribed in Greek, was one of three such busts that adorned the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. In his Natural History (chap. 35), the Roman author Pliny the Elder (2379 CE) noted a vogue in his time for portrait busts of Epicurus.

"Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged" (John 19:1). The biblical text inspired images like this painting by the Austrian Michael Pacher and helped promote not only sympathy for the cruelly mistreated Messiah and rage at his tormentors but also a fervent desire to emulate his suffering.

The heretic Hus, forced to wear a mock paper crown declaring his misdeeds, is burned at the stake. Afterwards, to prevent any sympathetic bystander from collecting a relic of the martyr, his ashes are shoveled into the Rhine.

This portrait of Poggio appears in a ma.n.u.script of his work De varietate fortunae. The work, written when Poggio was sixty-eight years old, eloquently surveys the ruins of ancient Roman greatness.

Poggio's friend Niccoli here brings his long-awaited transcription of On the Nature of Things to a close with the customary word "Explicit" (from the Latin for "unrolled"). He enjoins the reader to "read happily" ("Lege feliciter") and adds-in some tension with the spirit of Lucretius' poem-a pious "Amen."

At the center of Botticelli's painting stands Venus, surrounded by the ancient G.o.ds of the spring. The complex ch.o.r.eography derives from Lucretius' description of the great seasonal renewal of the earth: "Spring comes and Venus, preceded by Venus' winged harbinger, and mother Flora, following hard on the heels of Zephyr, prepares the way for them, strewing all their path with a profusion of exquisite hues and scents" (5:73740).

Montaigne's signature on the t.i.tle page of his heavily annotated Lucretius-the great edition pub-lished in 1563 and edited by Denis Lambin-was written over by a subsequent owner-"Despagnet"-and hence not identified for what it is until the twentieth century.

A bronze statue of Bruno, sculpted by Ettore Ferrari, was erected in 1889 in Rome's Campo de' Fiori on the spot where he was burned at the stake. In the monument, on the base of which are plaques devoted to other philosophers persecuted by the Catholic Church, the larger-than-life Bruno looks broodingly in the direction of the Vatican.

PREFACE.

WHEN I WAS a student, I used to go at the end of the school year to the Yale Coop to see what I could find to read over the summer. I had very little pocket money, but the bookstore would routinely sell its unwanted t.i.tles for ridiculously small sums. They would be jumbled together in bins through which I would rummage, with nothing much in mind, waiting for something to catch my eye. On one of my forays, I was struck by an extremely odd paperback cover, a detail from a painting by the surrealist Max Ernst. Under a crescent moon, high above the earth, two pairs of legs-the bodies were missing-were engaged in what appeared to be an act of celestial coition. The book-a prose translation of Lucretius' two-thousand-year-old poem On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura)-was marked down to ten cents, and I bought it, I confess, as much for the cover as for the cla.s.sical account of the material universe.

Ancient physics is not a particularly promising subject for vacation reading, but sometime over the summer I idly picked up the book and began to read. I immediately encountered ample justification for the erotic cover. Lucretius begins with an ardent hymn to Venus, the G.o.ddess of love, whose coming in the spring has scattered the clouds, flooded the sky with light, and filled the entire world with frenzied s.e.xual desire: First, G.o.ddess, the birds of the air, pierced to the heart with your powerful shafts, signal your entry. Next wild creatures and cattle bound over rich pastures and swim rushing rivers: so surely are they all captivated by your charm, and eagerly follow your lead. Then you inject seductive love into the heart of every creature that lives in the seas and mountains and river torrents and bird-haunted thickets, implanting in it the pa.s.sionate urge to reproduce its kind.

Startled by the intensity of this opening, I continued on, past a vision of Mars asleep on Venus' lap-"vanquished by the never-healing wound of love, throwing back his handsome neck and gazing up at you"; a prayer for peace; a tribute to the wisdom of the philosopher Epicurus; and a resolute condemnation of superst.i.tious fears. When I reached the beginning of a lengthy exposition of philosophical first principles, I fully expected to lose interest: no one had a.s.signed the book to me, my only object was pleasure, and I had already gotten far more than my ten cents' worth. But to my surprise, I continued to find the book thrilling.

It was not Lucretius' exquisite language to which I was responding. Later I worked through De rerum natura in its original Latin hexameters, and I came to understand something of its rich verbal texture, its subtle rhythms, and the cunning precision and poignancy of its imagery. But my first encounter was in Martin Ferguson Smith's workmanlike English prose-clear and unfussy, but hardly remarkable. No, it was something else that reached me, something that lived and moved within the sentences for more than 200 densely packed pages. I am committed by trade to urging people to attend carefully to the verbal surfaces of what they read. Much of the pleasure and interest of poetry depends on such attention. But it is nonetheless possible to have a powerful experience of a work of art even in a modest translation, let alone a brilliant one. That is, after all, how most of the literate world has encountered Genesis or the Iliad or Hamlet, and, though it is certainly preferable to read these works in their original languages, it is misguided to insist that there is no real access to them otherwise.

I can, in any case, testify that, even in a prose translation, On the Nature of Things struck a very deep chord within me. Its power depended to some extent on personal circ.u.mstances-art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life. The core of Lucretius' poem is a profound, therapeutic meditation on the fear of death, and that fear dominated my entire childhood. It was not fear of my own death that so troubled me; I had the ordinary, healthy child's intimation of immortality. It was rather my mother's absolute certainty that she was destined for an early death.

My mother was not afraid of the afterlife: like most Jews she had only a vague and hazy sense of what might lie beyond the grave, and she gave it very little thought. It was death itself-simply ceasing to be-that terrified her. For as far back as I can remember, she brooded obsessively on the imminence of her end, invoking it again and again, especially at moments of parting. My life was full of extended, operatic scenes of farewell. When she went with my father from Boston to New York for the weekend, when I went off to summer camp, even-when things were especially hard for her-when I simply left the house for school, she clung tightly to me, speaking of her fragility and of the distinct possibility that I would never see her again. If we walked somewhere together, she would frequently come to a halt, as if she were about to keel over. Sometimes she would show me a vein pulsing in her neck and, taking my finger, make me feel it for myself, the sign of her heart dangerously racing.

She must have been only in her late thirties when my own memories of her fears begin, and those fears evidently went back much further in time. They seem to have taken root about a decade before my birth, when her younger sister, only sixteen years old, died of strep throat. This event-one all too familiar in the world before the introduction of penicillin-was still for my mother an open wound: she spoke of it constantly, weeping quietly, and making me read and reread the poignant letters that the teenaged girl had written through the course of her fatal illness.

I understood early on that my mother's "heart"-the palpitations that brought her and everyone around her to a halt-was a life strategy. It was a symbolic means to identify with and mourn her dead sister. It was a way to express both anger-"you see how upset you have made me"-and love-"you see how I am still doing everything for you, even though my heart is about to break." It was an acting-out, a rehearsal, of the extinction that she feared. It was above all a way to compel attention and demand love. But this understanding did not make its effect upon my childhood significantly less intense: I loved my mother and dreaded losing her. I had no resources to untangle psychological strategy and dangerous symptom. (I don't imagine that she did either.) And as a child I had no means to gauge the weirdness of this constant harping on impending death and this freighting of every farewell with finality. Only now that I have raised a family of my own do I understand how dire the compulsion must have been that led a loving parent-and she was loving-to lay such a heavy emotional burden on her children. Every day brought a renewal of the dark certainty that her end was very near.

As it turned out, my mother lived to a month shy of her ninetieth birthday. She was still only in her fifties when I encountered On the Nature of Things for the first time. By then my dread of her dying had become entwined with a painful perception that she had blighted much of her life-and cast a shadow on my own-in the service of her obsessive fear. Lucretius' words therefore rang out with a terrible clarity: "Death is nothing to us." To spend your existence in the grip of anxiety about death, he wrote, is mere folly. It is a sure way to let your life slip from you incomplete and unenjoyed. He gave voice as well to a thought I had not yet quite allowed myself, even inwardly, to articulate: to inflict this anxiety on others is manipulative and cruel.

Such was, in my case, the poem's personal point of entry, the immediate source of its power over me. But that power was not only a consequence of my peculiar life history. On the Nature of Things struck me as an astonishingly convincing account of the way things actually are. To be sure, I easily grasped that many features of this ancient account now seem absurd. What else would we expect? How accurate will our account of the universe seem two thousand years from now? Lucretius believed that the sun circled around the earth, and he argued that the sun's heat and size could hardly be much greater than are perceived by our senses. He thought that worms were spontaneously generated from the wet soil, explained lightning as seeds of fire expelled from hollow clouds, and pictured the earth as a menopausal mother exhausted by the effort of so much breeding. But at the core of the poem lay key principles of a modern understanding of the world.

The stuff of the universe, Lucretius proposed, is an infinite number of atoms moving randomly through s.p.a.ce, like dust motes in a sunbeam, colliding, hooking together, forming complex structures, breaking apart again, in a ceaseless process of creation and destruction. There is no escape from this process. When you look up at the night sky and, feeling unaccountably moved, marvel at the numberless stars, you are not seeing the handiwork of the G.o.ds or a crystalline sphere detached from our transient world. You are seeing the same material world of which you are a part and from whose elements you are made. There is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design. All things, including the species to which you belong, have evolved over vast stretches of time. The evolution is random, though in the case of living organisms it involves a principle of natural selection. That is, species that are suited to survive and to reproduce successfully endure, at least for a time; those that are not so well suited die off quickly. But nothing-from our own species to the planet on which we live to the sun that lights our days-lasts forever. Only the atoms are immortal.

In a universe so const.i.tuted, Lucretius argued, there is no reason to think that the earth or its inhabitants occupy a central place, no reason to set humans apart from all other animals, no hope of bribing or appeasing the G.o.ds, no place for religious fanaticism, no call for ascetic self-denial, no justification for dreams of limitless power or perfect security, no rationale for wars of conquest or self-aggrandizement, no possibility of triumphing over nature, no escape from the constant making and unmaking and remaking of forms. On the other side of anger at those who either peddled false visions of security or incited irrational fears of death, Lucretius offered a feeling of liberation and the power to stare down what had once seemed so menacing. What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world.

I marveled-I continue to marvel-that these perceptions were fully articulated in a work written more than two thousand years ago. The line between this work and modernity is not direct: nothing is ever so simple. There were innumerable forgettings, disappearances, recoveries, dismissals, distortions, challenges, transformations, and renewed forgettings. And yet the vital connection is there. Hidden behind the worldview I recognize as my own is an ancient poem, a poem once lost, apparently irrevocably, and then found.

It is not surprising that the philosophical tradition from which Lucretius' poem derived, so incompatible with the cult of the G.o.ds and the cult of the state, struck some, even in the tolerant culture of the cla.s.sical Mediterranean, as scandalous. The adherents of this tradition were on occasion dismissed as mad or impious or simply stupid. And with the rise of Christianity, their texts were attacked, ridiculed, burned, or-most devastating- ignored and eventually forgotten. What is astonishing is that one magnificent articulation of the whole philosophy-the poem whose recovery is the subject of this book-should have survived. Apart from a few odds and ends and secondhand reports, all that was left of the whole rich tradition was contained in that single work. A random fire, an act of vandalism, a decision to snuff out the last trace of views judged to be heretical, and the course of modernity would have been different.

Of all the ancient masterpieces, this poem is one that should certainly have disappeared, finally and forever, in the company of the lost works that had inspired it. That it did not disappear, that it surfaced after many centuries and began once again to propagate its deeply subversive theses, is something one could be tempted to call a miracle. But the author of the poem in question did not believe in miracles. He thought that nothing could violate the laws of nature. He posited instead what he called a "swerve,"-Lucretius' prinic.i.p.al Latin word for it was clinamen-an unexpected, unpredictable movement of matter. The reappearance of his poem was such a swerve, an unforeseen deviation from the direct trajectory-in this case, toward oblivion-on which that poem and its philosophy seemed to be traveling.

When it returned to full circulation after a millennium, much of what the work said about a universe formed out of the clash of atoms in an infinite void seemed absurd. But those very things that first were deemed both impious and nonsensical turned out to be the basis for the contemporary rational understanding of the entire world. What is at stake is not only the startling recognition of key elements of modernity in antiquity, though it is certainly worth reminding ourselves that Greek and Roman cla.s.sics, largely displaced from our curriculum, have in fact definitively shaped modern consciousness. More surprising, perhaps, is the sense, driven home by every page of On the Nature of Things, that the scientific vision of the world-a vision of atoms randomly moving in an infinite universe-was in its origins imbued with a poet's sense of wonder. Wonder did not depend on G.o.ds and demons and the dream of an afterlife; in Lucretius it welled up out of a recognition that we are made of the same matter as the stars and the oceans and all things else. And this recognition was the basis for the way he thought we should live our lives.

In my view, and by no means mine alone, the culture in the wake of antiquity that best epitomized the Lucretian embrace of beauty and pleasure and propelled it forward as a legitimate and worthy human pursuit was that of the Renaissance. The pursuit was not restricted to the arts. It shaped the dress and the etiquette of courtiers; the language of the liturgy; the design and decoration of everyday objects. It suffused Leonardo da Vinci's scientific and technological explorations, Galileo's vivid dialogues on astronomy, Francis Bacon's ambitious research projects, and Richard Hooker's theology. It was virtually a reflex, so that works that were seemingly far away from any aesthetic ambition at all-Machiavelli's a.n.a.lysis of political strategy, Walter Ralegh's description of Guiana, or Robert Burton's encyclopedic account of mental illness-were crafted in such a way as to produce the most intense pleasure. But the arts of the Renaissance-painting, sculpture, music, architecture, and literature-were the supreme manifestations of the pursuit of beauty.

My own particular love was and is for Shakespeare, but Shakespeare's achievement seemed to me only one spectacular facet of a larger cultural movement that included Alberti, Michelangelo, and Raphael, Ariosto, Montaigne, and Cervantes, along with dozens of other artists and writers. That movement had many intertwining and often conflicting aspects, but coursing through all of them there was a glorious affirmation of vitality. The affirmation extends even to those many works of Renaissance art in which death seems to triumph. Hence the grave at the close of Romeo and Juliet does not so much swallow up the lovers as launch them into the future as the embodiments of love. In the enraptured audiences that have flocked to the play for more than four hundred years, Juliet in effect gets her wish that after death, night should take Romeo and cut him out in little stars.

And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night.

(III.ii.2224).

A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure-an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation-characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet.

Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body. The cultural shift is notoriously difficult to define, and its significance has been fiercely contested. But it can be intuited easily enough when you look in Siena at Duccio's painting of the enthroned Virgin, the Maesta, and then in Florence at Botticelli's Primavera, a painting that, not coincidentally, was influenced by On the Nature of Things. In the princ.i.p.al panel of Duccio's magnificent altarpiece (ca. 1310), the adoration of the angels, saints, and martyrs is focused on a serene center, the heavily robed Mother of G.o.d and her child absorbed in solemn contemplation. In the Primavera (ca. 1482), the ancient G.o.ds of the spring appear together in a verdant wood, all intently engaged in the complex, rhythmic ch.o.r.eography of renewed natural fecundity evoked in Lucretius' poem; "Spring comes and Venus, preceded by Venus' winged harbinger, and mother Flora, following hard on the heels of Zephyr, prepares the way for them, strewing all their path with a profusion of exquisite hues and scents." The key to the shift lies not only in the intense, deeply informed revival of interest in the pagan deities and the rich meanings that once attached to them. It lies also in the whole vision of a world in motion, a world not rendered insignificant but made more beautiful by its transience, its erotic energy, and its ceaseless change.

Though most evident in works of art, the change from one way of perceiving and living in the world to another was not restricted to aesthetics: it helps to account for the intellectual daring of Copernicus and Vesalius, Giordano Bruno and William Harvey, Hobbes and Spinoza. The transformation was not sudden or once-for-all, but it became increasingly possible to turn away from a preoccupation with angels and demons and immaterial causes and to focus instead on things in this world; to understand that humans are made of the same stuff as everything else and are part of the natural order; to conduct experiments without fearing that one is infringing on G.o.d's jealously guarded secrets; to question authorities and challenge received doctrines; to legitimate the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain; to imagine that there are other worlds beside the one that we inhabit; to entertain the thought that the sun is only one star in an infinite universe; to live an ethical life without reference to postmortem rewards and punishments; to contemplate without trembling the death of the soul. In short, it became possible-never easy, but possible-in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.

There is no single explanation for the emergence of the Renaissance and the release of the forces that have shaped our own world. But I have tried in this book to tell a little known but exemplary Renaissance story, the story of Poggio Bracciolini's recovery of On the Nature of Things. The recovery has the virtue of being true to the term that we use to gesture toward the cultural shift at the origins of modern life and thought: a re-naissance, a rebirth, of antiquity. One poem by itself was certainly not responsible for an entire intellectual, moral, and social transformation-no single work was, let alone one that for centuries could not without danger be spoken about freely in public. But this particular ancient book, suddenly returning to view, made a difference.

This is a story then of how the world swerved in a new direction. The agent of change was not a revolution, an implacable army at the gates, or landfall on an unknown continent. For events of this magnitude, historians and artists have given the popular imagination memorable images: the fall of the Bastille, the Sack of Rome, or the moment when the ragged seamen from the Spanish ships planted their flag in the New World. These emblems of world-historic change can be deceptive-the Bastille had almost no prisoners; Attila's army quickly withdrew from the imperial capital; and, in the Americas, the truly fateful action was not the unfurling of a banner but the first time that an ill and infectious Spanish sailor, surrounded by wondering natives, sneezed or coughed. Still, we can in such cases at least cling to the vivid symbol. But the epochal change with which this book is concerned-though it has affected all of our lives-is not so easily a.s.sociated with a dramatic image.

When it occurred, nearly six hundred years ago, the key moment was m.u.f.fled and almost invisible, tucked away behind walls in a remote place. There were no heroic gestures, no observers keenly recording the great event for posterity, no signs in heaven or on earth that everything had changed forever. A short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties reached out one day, took a very old ma.n.u.script off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That was all; but it was enough.

The finder of the ma.n.u.script could not, of course, have fully grasped the implications of its vision or antic.i.p.ated its influence, which took centuries to unfold. Indeed, if he had had an intimation of the forces he was unleashing, he might have thought twice about drawing so explosive a work out of the darkness in which it slept. The work that the man held in his hands had been laboriously copied by hand for centuries, but it had long rested uncirculated and perhaps uncomprehended even by the solitary souls who copied it. For many generations, no one spoke of it at all. Between the fourth and the ninth centuries, it was cited fleetingly in lists of grammatical and lexicographical examples, that is, as a quarry of correct Latin usage. In the seventh century Isidore of Seville, compiling a vast encyclopedia, used it as an authority on meteorology. It surfaced again briefly, in the time of Charlemagne, when there was a crucial burst of interest in ancient books and a scholarly Irish monk named Dungal carefully corrected a copy. But, neither debated nor disseminated, after each of these fugitive appearances it seemed to sink again beneath the waves. Then, after lying dormant and forgotten for more than a thousand years, it returned to circulation.

The person responsible for this momentous return, Poggio Bracciolini, was an avid letter writer. He penned an account of the event to a friend back in his native Italy, but the letter has been lost. Still, it is possible, on the basis of other letters, both his own and those of his circle, to reconstruct how it came about. For though this particular ma.n.u.script would turn out from our perspective to be his greatest find, it was by no means his only one, and it was no accident. Poggio Bracciolini was a book hunter, perhaps the greatest in an age obsessed with ferreting out and recovering the heritage of the ancient world.

The finding of a lost book does not ordinarily figure as a thrilling event, but behind that one moment was the arrest and imprisonment of a pope, the burning of heretics, and a great culturewide explosion of interest in pagan antiquity. The act of discovery fulfilled the life's pa.s.sion of a brilliant book hunter. And that book hunter, without ever intending or realizing it, became a midwife to modernity.

CHAPTER ONE.

THE BOOK HUNTER.

IN THE WINTER of 1417, Poggio Bracciolini rode through the wooded hills and valleys of southern Germany toward his distant destination, a monastery reputed to have a cache of old ma.n.u.scripts. As must have been immediately apparent to the villagers looking out at him from the doors of their huts, the man was a stranger. Slight of build and clean-shaven, he would probably have been modestly dressed in a well-made but simple tunic and cloak. That he was not country-bred was clear, and yet he did not resemble any of the city and court dwellers whom the locals would have been accustomed to glimpse from time to time. Unarmed and unprotected by a clanging suit of armor, he was certainly not a Teutonic knight-one stout blow from a raw-boned yokel's club would have easily felled him. Though he did not seem to be poor, he had none of the familiar signs of wealth and status: he was not a courtier, with gorgeous clothes and perfumed hair worn in long lovelocks, nor was he a n.o.bleman out hunting and hawking. And, as was plain from his clothes and the cut of his hair, he was not a priest or a monk.

Southern Germany at the time was prosperous. The catastrophic Thirty Years' War that would ravage the countryside and shatter whole cities in the region lay far in the future, as did the horrors of our own time that destroyed much of what had survived from this period. In addition to knights, courtiers, and n.o.bles, other men of substance busily traveled the rutted, hard-packed roads. Ravensburg, near Constance, was involved in the linen trade and had recently begun to produce paper. Ulm, on the left bank of the Danube, was a flourishing center of manufacture and commerce, as were Heidenheim, Aalen, beautiful Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and still more beautiful Wurzburg. Burghers, wool brokers, leather and cloth merchants, vintners and brewers, craftsmen and their apprentices, as well as diplomats, bankers, and tax collectors, all were familiar sights. But Poggio still did not fit.

There were less prosperous figures too-journeymen, tinkers, knife-sharpeners, and others whose trades kept them on the move; pilgrims on their way to shrines where they could worship in the presence of a fragment of a saint's bone or a drop of sacred blood; jugglers, fortune-tellers, hawkers, acrobats and mimes traveling from village to village; runaways, vagabonds, and petty thieves. And there were the Jews, with the conical hats and the yellow badges that the Christian authorities forced them to wear, so that they could be easily identified as objects of contempt and hatred. Poggio was certainly none of these.

To those who watched him pa.s.s, he must in fact have been a baffling figure. Most people at the time signaled their ident.i.ties, their place in the hierarchical social system, in visible signs that everyone could read, like the indelible stains on a dyer's hands. Poggio was barely legible. An isolated individual, considered outside the structures of family and occupation, made very little sense. What mattered was what you belonged to or even whom you belonged to. The little couplet Alexander Pope mockingly wrote in the eighteenth century, to put on one of the queen's little pugs, could have applied in earnest in the world that Poggio inhabited: I am his Highness' dog at Kew; Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?

The household, the kinship network, the guild, the corporation-these were the building blocks of personhood. Independence and self-reliance had no cultural purchase; indeed, they could scarcely be conceived, let alone prized. Ident.i.ty came with a precise, well-understood place in a chain of command and obedience.

To attempt to break the chain was folly. An impertinent gesture-a refusal to bow or kneel or uncover one's head to the appropriate person-could lead to one's nose being slit or one's neck broken. And what, after all, was the point? It was not as if there were any coherent alternatives, certainly not one articulated by the Church or the court or the town oligarchs. The best course was humbly to accept the ident.i.ty to which destiny a.s.signed you: the ploughman needed only to know how to plough, the weaver to weave, the monk to pray. It was possible, of course, to be better or worse at any of these things; the society in which Poggio found himself acknowledged and, to a considerable degree, rewarded unusual skill. But to prize a person for some ineffable individuality or for many-sidedness or for intense curiosity was virtually unheard of. Indeed, curiosity was said by the Church to be a mortal sin. To indulge it was to risk an eternity in h.e.l.l.

Who was Poggio, then? Why did he not proclaim his ident.i.ty on his back, the way decent folks were accustomed to do? He wore no insignia and carried no bundles of merchandise. He had the self-a.s.sured air of someone accustomed to the society of the great, but he himself was evidently a figure of no great consequence. Everyone knew what such an important person looked like, for this was a society of retainers and armed guards and liveried servants. The stranger, simply attired, rode in the company of a single companion. When they paused at inns, the companion, who appeared to be an a.s.sistant or servant, did the ordering; when the master spoke, it became clear that he knew little or no German and that his native language was Italian.

If he had tried to explain to an inquisitive person what he was up to, the mystery of his ident.i.ty would only have deepened. In a culture with very limited literacy, to be interested in books was already an oddity. And how could Poggio have accounted for the still odder nature of his particular interests? He was not in search of books of hours or missals or hymnals whose exquisite illuminations and splendid bindings made manifest their value even to the illiterate. These books, some of them jewel-encrusted and edged with gold, were often locked in special boxes or chained to lecterns and shelves, so that light-fingered readers could not make off with them. But they held no special appeal for Poggio. Nor was he drawn to the theological, medical, or legal tomes that were the prestigious tools of the professional elites. Such books had a power to impress and intimidate even those who could not read them. They had a social magic, of the kind a.s.sociated for the most part with unpleasant events: a lawsuit, a painful swelling in the groin, an accusation of witchcraft or heresy. An ordinary person would have grasped that volumes of this kind had teeth and claws and hence have understood why a clever person might hunt them. But here again Poggio's indifference was baffling.

The stranger was going to a monastery, but he was not a priest or a theologian or an inquisitor, and he was not looking for prayer books. He was after old ma.n.u.scripts, many of them moldy, worm-eaten, and all but indecipherable even to the best-trained readers. If the sheets of parchment on which such books were written were still intact, they had a certain cash value, since they could be carefully sc.r.a.ped clean with knives, smoothed with talc.u.m powder, and written over anew. But Poggio was not in the parchment-buying business, and he actually loathed those who scratched off the old letters. He wanted to see what was written on them, even if the writing was crabbed and difficult, and he was most interested in ma.n.u.scripts that were four or five hundred years old, going back then to the tenth century or even earlier.

To all but a handful of people in Germany, this quest, had Poggio tried to articulate it, would have seemed weird. And it would have seemed weirder still if Poggio had gone on to explain that he was not in fact at all interested in what was written four or five hundred years ago. He despised that time and regarded it as a sink of superst.i.tion and ignorance. What he really hoped to find were words that had nothing to do with the moment in which they were written down on the old parchment, words that were in the best possible case uncontaminated by the mental universe of the lowly scribe who copied them. That scribe, Poggio hoped, was dutifully and accurately copying a still older parchment, one made by yet another scribe whose humble life was equally of no particular consequence to the book hunter except insofar as it left behind this trace. If the nearly miraculous run of good fortune held, the earlier ma.n.u.script, long vanished into dust, was in turn a faithful copy of a more ancient ma.n.u.script, and that ma.n.u.script a copy of yet another. Now at last for Poggio the quarry became exciting, and the hunter's heart in his breast beat faster. The trail was leading him back to Rome, not the contemporary Rome of the corrupt papal court, intrigues, political debility, and periodic outbreaks of bubonic plague, but the Rome of the Forum and the Senate House and a Latin language whose crystalline beauty filled him with wonder and the longing for a lost world.

What could any of this mean to anyone who had his feet on the ground in southern Germany in 1417? Listening to Poggio, a superst.i.tious man might have suspected a particular type of sorcery, bibliomancy; a more sophisticated man might have diagnosed a psychological obsession, bibliomania; a pious man might have wondered why any sound soul would feel a pa.s.sionate attraction for the time before the Saviour brought the promise of redemption to the benighted pagans. And all would have asked the obvious question: whom does this man serve?

Poggio himself might have been hard-pressed for an answer. He had until recently served the pope, as he had served a succession of earlier Roman pontiffs. His occupation was scriptor, that is, a skilled writer of official doc.u.ments in the papal bureaucracy, and, through adroitness and cunning, he had risen to the coveted position of apostolic secretary. He was on hand then to write down the pope's words, record his sovereign decisions, craft in elegant Latin his extensive international correspondence. In a formal court setting, in which physical proximity to the absolute ruler was a key a.s.set, Poggio was a man of importance. He listened while the pope whispered something in his ear; he whispered something back; he knew the meaning of the pope's smiles and frowns. He had access, as the very word "secretary" suggests, to the pope's secrets. And this pope had a great many secrets.

But at the time that Poggio was riding off in search of ancient ma.n.u.scripts, he was no longer apostolic secretary. He had not displeased his master, the pope, and that master was still alive. But everything had changed. The pope Poggio had served and before whom the faithful (and the less than faithful) had trembled was at that moment in the winter of 1417 sitting in an imperial prison in Heidelberg. Stripped of his t.i.tle, his name, his power, and his dignity, he had been publicly disgraced, condemned by the princes of his own church. The "holy and infallible" General Council of Constance declared that by his "detestable and unseemly life" he had brought scandal on the Church and on Christendom, and that he was unfit to remain in his exalted office. Accordingly, the council released all believers from fidelity and obedience to him; indeed, it was now forbidden to call him pope or to obey him. In the long history of the Church, with its impressive share of scandals, little like this had happened before-and nothing like it has happened since.

The deposed pope was not there in person, but Poggio, his erstwhile apostolic secretary, may have been present when the archbishop of Riga handed the papal seal to a goldsmith, who solemnly broke it in pieces, along with the papal arms. All of the ex-pope's servants were formally dismissed, and his correspondence-the correspondence that Poggio had been instrumental in managing-was officially terminated. The pope who had called himself John XXIII no longer existed; the man who had borne that t.i.tle was now once again what he had been christened, Balda.s.sare Cossa. And Poggio was now a masterless man.

To be masterless in the early fifteenth century was for most men an unenviable, even dangerous state. Villages and towns looked with suspicion on itinerants; vagrants were whipped and branded; and on lonely paths in a largely unpoliced world the unprotected were exceedingly vulnerable. Of course, Poggio was hardly a vagrant. Sophisticated and highly skilled, he had long moved in the circles of the great. The armed guards at the Vatican and the Castel St. Angelo let him pa.s.s through the gates without a word of inquiry, and important suitors to the papal court tried to catch his eye. He had direct access to an absolute ruler, the wealthy and cunning master of enormous territories, who also claimed to be the spiritual master of all of Western Christendom. In the private chambers of palaces, as in the papal court itself, the apostolic secretary Poggio was a familiar presence, exchanging jokes with bejeweled cardinals, chatting with amba.s.sadors, and drinking fine wine from cups of crystal and gold. In Florence he had been befriended by some of the most powerful figures in the Signoria, the city's ruling body, and he had a distinguished circle of friends.

But Poggio was not in Rome or Florence. He was in Germany, and the pope he had followed to the city of Constance was in prison. The enemies of John XXIII had triumphed and were now in control. Doors that had once been open to Poggio were firmly shut. And suitors eager for a favor-a dispensation, a legal ruling, a lucrative position for themselves or their relatives-who had paid court to the secretary as a means to pay court to his master were all looking elsewhere. Poggio's income abruptly ceased.

That income had been considerable. Scriptors received no fixed stipend, but they were permitted to charge fees for executing doc.u.ments and obtaining what were called "concessions of grace," that is, legal favors in matters that required some technical correction or exception granted orally or in writing by the pope. And, of course, there were other, less official fees that would privately flow to someone who had the pope's ear. In the mid-fifteenth century, the income for a secretary was 250 to 300 florins annually, and an entrepreneurial spirit could make much more. At the end of a twelve-year period in this office, Poggio's colleague George of Trebizond had salted away over 4,000 florins in Roman banks, along with handsome investments in real estate.

In his letters to friends Poggio claimed throughout his life that he was neither ambitious nor greedy. He wrote a celebrated essay attacking avarice as one of the most hateful of human vices, and he excoriated the greed of hypocritical monks, unscrupulous princes, and grasping merchants. It would be foolish, of course, to take such professions at face value: there is ample evidence from later in his career, when he managed to return to the papal court, that Poggio used his office to make money hand over fist. By the 1450s, along with a family palazzo and a country estate, he had managed to acquire several farms, nineteen separate pieces of land, and two houses in Florence, and he had also made very large deposits in banking and business houses.

But this prosperity lay decades in the future. An official inventory (called a catasto) compiled in 1427 by tax officials indicated that Poggio had fairly modest means. And a decade earlier, at the time that John XXIII was deposed, he almost certainly had far less. Indeed, his later acquisitiveness may have been a reaction to the memory of those long months, stretching into several lean years, when he found himself in a strange land without a position or an income and with very few resources on which to fall back. In the winter of 1417, when he rode through the South German countryside, Poggio had little or no idea where his next florins would come from.

It is all the more striking that in this difficult period Poggio did not quickly find a new position or make haste to return to Italy. What he did instead was to go book-hunting.

CHAPTER TWO.

THE MOMENT OF DISCOVERY.

ITALIANS HAD BEEN book-hunting for the better part of a century, ever since the poet and scholar Petrarch brought glory on himself in the 1330s by piecing together Livy's monumental History of Rome and finding forgotten masterpieces by Cicero, Propertius, and others. Petrarch's achievement had inspired others to seek out lost cla.s.sics that had been lying unread, often for centuries. The recovered texts were copied, edited, commented upon, and eagerly exchanged, conferring distinction on those who had found them and forming the basis for what became known as the "study of the humanities."

The "humanists," as those who were devoted to this study were called, knew from carefully poring over the texts that had survived from cla.s.sical Rome that many once famous books or parts of books were still missing. Occasionally, the ancient authors whom Poggio and his fellow humanists eagerly read gave tantalizing quotations from these books, often accompanying extravagant praise or vituperative attacks. Alongside discussions of Virgil and Ovid, for example, the Roman rhetorician Quintilian remarked that "Macer and Lucretius are certainly worth reading," and went on to discuss Varro of Atax, Cornelius Severus, Saleius Ba.s.sus, Gaius Rabirius, Albinova.n.u.s Pedo, Marcus Furius Bibaculus, Lucius Accius, Marcus Pacuvius, and others whose works he greatly admired. The humanists knew that some of these missing works were likely to have been lost forever-as it turned out, with the exception of Lucretius, all of the authors just mentioned have been lost-but they suspected that others, perhaps many others, were hidden away in dark places, not only in Italy but across the Alps. After all, Petrarch had found the ma.n.u.script of Cicero's Pro Archia in Liege, in Belgium, and the Propertius ma.n.u.script in Paris.

The prime hunting grounds for Poggio and his fellow book hunters were the libraries of old monasteries, and for good reason: for long centuries monasteries had been virtually the only inst.i.tutions that cared about books. Even in the stable and prosperous times of the Roman Empire, literacy rates, by our standards at least, were not high. As the empire crumbled, as cities decayed, trade declined, and the increasingly anxious populace scanned the horizon for barbarian armies, the whole Roman system of elementary and higher education fell apart. What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work. There were more important things to worry about than the fate of books.

But all monks were expected to know how to read. In a world increasingly dominated by illiterate warlords, that expectation, formulated early in the history of monasticism, was of incalculable importance. Here is the Rule from the monasteries established in Egypt and throughout the Middle East by the late fourth-century Coptic saint Pachomius. When a candidate for admission to the monastery presents himself to the elders, they shall give him twenty Psalms or two of the Apostles' epistles or some other part of Scripture. And if he is illiterate he shall go at the first, third and sixth hours to someone who can teach and has been appointed for him. He shall stand before him and learn very studiously and with all grat.i.tude. The fundamentals of a syllable, the verbs and nouns shall be written for him and even if he does not want to, he shall be compelled to read. (Rule 139) "He shall be compelled to read." It was this compulsion that, through centuries of chaos, helped to salvage the achievements of ancient thought.

Though in the most influential of all the monastic rules, written in the sixth century, St. Benedict did not similarly specify an explicit literacy requirement, he provided the equivalent of one by including a period each day for reading-"prayerful reading," as he put it-as well as manual labor. "Idleness is the enemy of the soul," the saint wrote, and he made certain that the hours would be filled up. Monks would be permitted to read at certain other times as well, though such voluntary reading would have to be conducted in strict silence. (In Benedict's time, as throughout antiquity, reading was ordinarily performed audibly.) But about the prescribed reading times there was nothing voluntary.

The monks were to read, whether they felt like it or not, and the Rule called for careful supervision: Above all, one or two seniors must surely be deputed to make the rounds of the monastery while the brothers are reading. Their duty is to see that no brother is so acediosus as to waste time or engage in idle talk to the neglect of his reading, and so not only harm himself but also distract others. (49:1718) Acediosus, sometimes translated as "apathetic," refers to an illness, specific to monastic communities, which had already been brilliantly diagnosed in the late fourth century by the Desert Father John Ca.s.sian. The monk in the grip of acedia would find it difficult or impossible to read. Looking away from his book, he might try to distract himself with gossip but would more likely glance in disgust at his surroundings and at his fellow monks. He would feel that things were better somewhere else, that he was wasting his life, that everything was stale and pointless, that he was suffocating.

He looks about anxiously this way and that, and sighs that none of the brethren come to see him, and often goes in and out of his cell, and frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting, and so a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind takes possession of him like some foul darkness.

Such a monk-and there were evidently many of them-had succ.u.mbed to what we would call a clinical state of depression.

Ca.s.sian called the disease "the noonday demon," and the Benedictine Rule set a careful watch, especially at reading times, to detect anyone manifesting its symptoms.

If such a monk is found-G.o.d forbid-he should be reproved a first and a second time. If he does not amend, he must be subjected to the punishment of the rule so that the others may have fear.

A refusal to read at the prescribed time-whether because of distraction, boredom, or despair-would thus be visited first by public criticism and then, if the refusal continued, by blows. The symptoms of psychic pain would be driven out by physical pain. And, suitably chastened, the distressed monk would return-in principle at least-to his "prayerful reading."

There was yet another time in which the Benedictine Rule called for reading: every day at meals one of the brothers was a.s.signed, on a weekly basis, to read aloud. Benedict was well aware that for at least certain of the monks this a.s.signment would occasion pride, and he therefore tried to suppress the sensation as best he could: "Let the incoming reader ask all to pray for him so that G.o.d may shield him from the feeling of elation." He was aware too that for others the readings would be an occasion for mockery or simply for chat, and here too the Rule made careful provision: "Let there be complete silence. No whispering, no speaking-only the reader's voice should be heard there." But, above all, he wanted to prevent these readings from provoking discussion or debate: "No one should presume to ask a question about the reading or about anything else, lest occasion be given."

"Lest occasion be given": the phrase, in a text normally quite clear, is oddly vague. Occasion to whom or for what? Modern editors sometimes insert the phrase "to the devil" and that indeed may be what is implied here. But why should the Prince of Darkness be excited by a question about the reading? The answer must be that any question, however innocuous, could raise the prospect of a discussion, a discussion that would imply that religious doctrines were open to inquiry and argument.

Benedict did not absolutely prohibit commentary on the sacred texts that were read aloud, but he wanted to restrict its source: "The superior," the Rule allows, "may wish to say a few words of instruction." Those words were not to be questioned or contradicted, and indeed all contention was in principle to be suppressed. As the listing of punishments in the influential rule of the Irish monk Columba.n.u.s (born in the year Benedict died) makes clear, lively debate, intellectual or otherwise, was forbidden. To the monk who has dared to contradict a fellow monk with such words as "It is not as you say," there is a heavy penalty: "an imposition of silence or fifty blows." The high walls that hedged about the mental life of the monks-the imposition of silence, the prohibition of questioning, the punishing of debate with slaps or blows of the whip-were all meant to affirm unambiguously that these pious communities were the opposite of the philosophical academies of Greece or Rome, places that had thrived upon the spirit of contradiction and cultivated a restless, wide-ranging curiosity.

All the same, monastic rules did require reading, and that was enough to set in motion an extraordinary chain of consequences. Reading was not optional or desirable or recommended; in a community that took its obligations with deadly seriousness, reading was obligatory. And reading required books. Books that were opened again and again eventually fell apart, however carefully they were handled. Therefore, almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks repeatedly purchase or acquire books. In the course of the vicious Gothic Wars of the mid-sixth century and their still more miserable aftermath, the last commercial workshops of book production folded, and the vestiges of the book market fell apart. Therefore, again almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks carefully preserve and copy those books that they already possessed. But all trade with the papyrus makers of Egypt had long vanished, and in the absence of a commercial book market, the commercial industry for converting animal skins to writing surfaces had fallen into abeyance. Therefore, once again almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks learn the laborious art of making parchment and salvaging existing parchment. Without wishing to emulate the pagan elites by placing books or writing at the center of society, without affirming the importance of rhetoric or grammar, without prizing either learning or debate, monks nonetheless became the princ.i.p.al readers, librarians, book preservers, and book producers of the Western world.

Poggio and the other humanists on the trail of lost cla.s.sics knew all this. Having already sifted through many of the monastic libraries in Italy and having followed Petrarch's lead in France, they also knew that the great, uncharted territories were Switzerland and Germany. But many of those monasteries were extremely difficult to reach-their founders had built them in deliberately remote places, in order to withdraw from the temptations, distractions, and dangers of the world. And once an eager humanist, having endured the discomforts and risks of travel, managed to reach the distant monasteries, what then? The number of scholars who knew what to look for and who were competent to recognize what they had come to find, if they had the good fortune to stumble across it, was extremely small. There was, moreover, a problem of access: to get through the door a scholar would have to be able to persuade a skeptical abbot and a still more skeptical monastic librarian that he had a legitimate reason to be there. Access to the library was ordinarily denied to any outsider. Petrarch was a cleric; he could at least make his appeal from within the large inst.i.tutional community of the Church. Many of the humanists by contrast were laymen and would have aroused immediate suspicion.

This daunting list did not exhaust the problems. For if a book hunter reached a monastery, got past the heavily barred door, entered the library, and actually found something interesting, he would still need to do something with the ma.n.u.script he had found.

Books were scarce and valuable. They conferred prestige on the monastery that possessed them, and the monks were not inclined to let them out of their sight, particularly if they had any prior experience with light-fingered Italian humanists. On occasion monasteries tried to secure their possession by freighting their precious ma.n.u.scripts with curses. "For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner," one of these curses runs, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of h.e.l.l consume him forever.