Ed.

Interesting. I am no medievalist, that's for certain, but I find I can't condemn this book in its entirety, as the paper published in VOX does so freely. The author of that paper noted that he wasn't troubled by footnotes in Swerve ,(I don't recollect his exact comments, but it would leave the reader to believe there were few/none) yet I note over 40 pages of notes, and another 25 pages of bibliography in the copy of Swerve in my hand.


The author also questioned Greenblatt's comments about lack of the lack of curiosity in the 1400's. Vladimir Nabokov has an interesting thought about curiosity, and it seems that Galileo was a curious gentleman, and we know how his curiosity was received. (I recognize that Galileo's time was more than 100 years hence.)


At the time my many greats back Grandfather was in Henry V's army at the battle of Agincourt in 1415, the great Catholic/Pope schism was being settled, as noted in Swerve in a way that was rather similar to the battle Richard Eyre was in. I am not knowledgeable about the particulars of this Schism, but there was nothing in Swerve that seemed out of line to my limited knowledge of that time period.



The battle of Agincourt was one of many in the Hundred Years War between England and France. When it was over (1453), it didn't take the French long to start their own internal war, known as the Wars of Religion. The Wars of Religion are significant to me, because another many greats back Grandfather, Michael Michelet, was burned at the stake as he was a Huguenot, and he refused to recant. This, of course, happened much later than the time period in Greenblatt's book, but it gives a taste of the times, and so, in my opinion, does Greenblatt's book.


It turns out that what happened to Michael Michelet is important to at least some US readers. His descendants eventually found their way to Philadelphia in the 1700's, and John Jacob Mickley (Michelet Anglicized) is the guy who smuggled the Liberty Bell out of Philly in 1777, under the nose of the British.