[2][3] Greenblatt tells the story of how Poggio Bracciolini, a 15th-century papal emissary and obsessive book hunter, saved the last copy of the Roman poet Lucretius's De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) from near-terminal neglect in a German monastery, thus reintroducing important ideas that sparked the modern age.

[9] It was included in the 2011 year-end lists of Publishers Weekly,[10] The New York Times,[10] Kirkus Reviews,[11] NPR,[12] The Chicago Tribune,[13] Bloomberg,[14] SFGate,[15] the American Library Association[16] and The Globe and Mail.

"[19] Historian John Monfasani credited the book with "grace and learning" but found Greenblatt's Voltairean and Burckhardtian interpretation of De Rerum Natura and the Renaissance as "eccentric", "questionable" and "unwarranted".

"[22] Michael Dirda, of The Washington Post, wrote that "by no means a bad book, The Swerve simply sets its intellectual bar too low, complacently relying on commonplaces in its historical sections and never engaging in an imaginative or idiosyncratic way".

She argued that the book is an "injustice to the past" and "the mythical invention of modernity is an ethical issue, because it sets a precedent for history that ignores complexity in favor of oversimplification.