Just Because: 'The Swerve'

I came upon this book by Stephen Greenblatt just the other day, in a little canvas-covered A-frame at 7,800 feet up in the High Sierra. It was raining as we hiked the 11.5 miles in to Bearpaw Meadow, and it continued to rain that evening and the next afternoon. But the tent cabins were dry (if not warm ... ), as were the primitive kitchen and common room, with its covered porch overlooking the Western Divide. Perfect reading weather. We have been there before, and one of the first things I do on arriving is check out the camp library ~ three shelves of donated books, guestbooks, and guides to the local flora and fauna. Skipping the preface (and as the version I held didn't include the first pages of photographs), I didn't realize until I hit the first footnote that the book was about a person who actually existed. (Yes, I admit it: I'd never heard of Poggio Bracciolini.)  Of course, works of history being what they are, it's difficult if not impossible for an author to be completely objective and accurate even about generalities because, really, we weren't there (and even if we had been ...). Indeed, one review I read calls Swerve a polemic. Another states that it places too much blame on the Roman Catholic Church and too much importance on the works of Lucretius. Most, however, have nothing but praise for the book whose subtitle is How the World Became Modern.

CHAPTER ONE 

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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 manuscripts. 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 nobleman 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 nobles, 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 Würzburg. 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 pass, he must in fact have been a baffling figure. Most people at the time signaled their identities, 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. Identity came with a precise, well-understood place in a chain of command and obedience.
   ...