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Every English professor and grad student, it seems, knows the closing pages of his “Renaissance Self-Fashioning” (1980) and the opening pages of his “Shakespearean Negotiations” (1989), both of which contain important statements on the power of an author’s cultural context. It would be difficult to overstate Greenblatt’s influence on the world of literary studies.

And now, after building his academic reputation by tearing down the claim that one person’s ideas can change the world, Greenblatt has written a mass-market book with a more optimistic message: They can. Even a genius like Shakespeare struggled to break free from the culture that produced him. Greenblatt’s influence as a scholar came from developing an influential - and controversial - school of criticism known as New Historicism, which argued that literary texts matter less as works of original genius than as reflections of their historical environment. Followers of Greenblatt’s career, though, might notice that this narrative represents a different kind of swerve for its author. “The Swerve” has already received lots of attention for its appealing historical narrative: one nearly lost manuscript that helped launch a revolution in thinking. For Lucretius, life followed a set of physical laws he explained chance events (and free will) through shifts at the atomic level that led to new combinations and recombinations. This added up to a startling rebuke of medieval views about God and nature.

If the world really worked the way Lucretius said it did, then it worked without order, without afterlives, without a divine plan. In the 1400s, this idea held not only scientific meaning, but philosophical and existential ones as well. The text he had found - the only copy of Lucretius’s only surviving work - made an astonishing argument: The entire universe was composed of tiny atoms, atoms which came in infinite numbers and ricocheted randomly through space.

In pulling this forgotten manuscript off a dusty abbey shelf, Poggio started a process that would unleash some radical ideas on Western culture.

And on that day in 1417, Poggio discovered just such a text: Lucretius’s “On the Nature of Things,” a long Latin poem that had sat unread for nearly 1,000 years. Poggio had served as the private secretary to the pope, until the church deposed his employer for living a “detestable and unseemly life.” Now free, Poggio had decided to scour Europe for lost texts from antiquity. One day in 1417, almost 600 years ago, a man named Poggio Bracciolini rode through southern Germany, hunting for books.