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I loved it. Having studied Ancient History and also Medieval and Renaissance Art History, I felt very much at home with what he was writing about. I think it could be harder for people to follow who weren't reasonably at home with the times and the people that Greenblatt was talking about.
It is extraordinary that the text survived: probably because the monk who copied it out wasn't really reading and thinking about what he was copying. I think it's fortunate that book printing started not too much later after its discovery, so that the genie was out of the bottle well and truly.
It would be hard to deny the truth of what Greenblatt wrote about the church - I believe that everything he wrote is historically accurate - though I agree, Synamon, that some Roman Catholics could well be upset by what they read there, if they were not already aware of it.
And finally, I think that Lucretius would have had a huge impact on humanist thinking of the time. To me, what it has to say is astonishingly modern, and it's hard for us to grasp how stunningly different it was from the teachings of the time, whether it was all the hellfire and damnation, or the sun revolving around the earth (and aforesaid hellfire etc if you said that wasn't so), and the right we all have to be happy in our lives rather than being put here to suffer in the hope of a better deal in the hereafter.
I'm really glad to have read The Swerve and hope others enjoyed it too.
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