El giro : De cómo un manuscrito olvidado contribuyó a crear el mundo moderno

Nearly six hundred years ago, in 1417, an Italian humanist set out to visit German monasteries in search of ancient manuscripts. In one of them, he discovered the only surviving copy of a work written in the first century BC: *De rerum natura* (On the Nature of Things), a philosophical poem by Titus Lucretius Carus that expounded a materialist view of the world, intended to liberate humanity from the fear of the gods. He copied the text and brought it back to Italy, where the dissemination of its "dangerous ideas" helped spark the cultural shift of the Renaissance—a shift that would lead to the ideological transformation from which the modern world emerged. That once-neglected book, which might easily have been lost forever, exerted considerable influence on a lineage of thinkers ranging from Giordano Bruno and Montaigne to Freud and Einstein. Stephen Greenblatt—who combines the skills of a researcher with those of a brilliant writer—offers a gripping account of this intellectual adventure in a book that won both the prestigious National Book Award (2011) and the Pulitzer Prize (2012).