W W Norton Company</br></br>Product Description</br></br><p><strong>Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction?<br /> Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Non-Fiction</strong></p> One of the world's most celebrated scholars?? Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery?? in which one manuscript?? plucked from a thousand years of neglect?? changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.<br /><br /> Nearly six hundred years ago?? a short?? genial?? cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf?? saw with excitement what he had d