Scholar and author Stephen Greenblatt tells the story of the discovery of Roman poet Lucretius' lost work On The Nature of Things, whose ideas about the inner workings of the universe fueled the Renaissance.

To a modern reader, many of Lucretius' ideas may seem absurd; he believed the sun was a tiny, moderately hot ball orbiting the Earth, that worms were spontaneously bred by it, and that lightning was a release of fire hidden in clouds.

Yet many of Lucretius' ideas were daringly original and ahead of their time; he argued for the existence of atoms, and envisioned a universe without gods.

Stephen Greenblatt, a humanities professor at Harvard University and an award-winning author and critic, examines the effect of Lucretius' thought on Renaissance thinkers, from Sandro Botticelli to Michel de Montaigne.

The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began argues that a single manuscript, and the dangerous ideas it contained, contributed to an explosive cultural movement and paved the way for the emergence of the world we know today.