Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt turns his attention in The Swerve to the front end of the Renaissance as the origin of Western culture’s foundation: the free questioning of truth. In the early 15th century Western Europe was just emerging from a centuries of plague, famine, and conflict. Led by the city states of northern Italy, the Europeans were attempting to find their footing, and to do so they looked back 1500 years or more to the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. Scholarly humanists began to search out and restudy old scrolls and ancient manuscripts in order to relearn much of what had been lost during the Dark Ages. In the winter of 1417 Italian oddball humanist Poggio Bracciolini, a papal secretary whose Pope had been overthrown, and who dealt with his loss of power and income by searching monasteries in Germany and Switzerland for forgotten scripts. Bracciolini‘s greatest discovery was Lucretius’ long poem On The Nature Of Things, which he copied and had distributed, ensuring that it became a seminal document of the emerging Renaissance. The distribution of this ancient book fueled the Renaissance, shaping the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Shakespeare and Thomas Jefferson. This innovative review of the great cultural “swerve” known as the Renaissance received the National Book Award prize for non-fiction. The Swerve was also selected by the editors of Amazon.com as one of the Best Books of 2011.