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Community Corner

Lexington Community Education presents: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern - An Evening with Pulitzer Prize Winner Stephen Greenblatt

  • In his most recent book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, celebrated author and scholar Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery. Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius—a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions. The copying and translation of this ancient book fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.                                                   Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, General Editor of The Norton Shakespeare, and the author of eleven books.  He was president of the Modern Language Association of America and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.                                                 The cost of this evening's event is $10.00.  Pre-registration strongly recommended.  Please contact Lexington Community Education at 781 862 8043 to register using a VISA or MasterCard.
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