The book is an excellent masterpiece where Stephan Greenblatt takes the reader to the fifteenth century Europe. It is a vivid description, so lucid in style, of the times and circumstances of papacy and Poggio Bracciolini, the personal secretary of the pope, leading to accidental discovery of the ancient book- De rerum natura- (On the nature of things) the poem written by Lucretius, which was lost for more than a thousand years. Centering around the life and times of Poggio, the book spans across centuries from the Epicurean masters to the renaissance. The emotional need to preserve the beauty of Latin prose and its hexameters by numerous scholars of medieval world, the poem however in conflict with the christian theology of the times, brought about a change in orthodoxy, paving way for The Renaissance.
This is a compelling, exciting and informative book- a must read.
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