Lucretius Renaissance Thought

Abstract

Even before its celebrated rediscovery by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417, Lucretius’s didactic Epicurean epic De rerum natura was famous as a Roman masterpiece celebrated by Virgil and Ovid, and infamous as a capsule of dangerous, irreligious paganism ferociously denounced by Arnobius and other Christian apologists. The manuscript remained in the sole possession of Niccolò Niccoli until his death in 1437 when his library was acquired by Cosimo de Medici and numerous copies began to circulate in Florence and, soon thereafter, in Venice and the Veneto region, then Rome, Naples, and Iberia. A total of fifty-four manuscripts survive from the Renaissance, and thirty editions of the poem were printed by 1600, including commentaries by Albertus Pius (1512), Denys Lambin (1563), and Hubert van Giffen (Gifanius, 1565–1566). The diversity of subjects treated in the De rerum natura has invited a broad range of scholarly approaches. Philological study of the text’s transmission has been extensive, and for many years work on the stemma of Lucretius manuscripts served as a model for transmission studies in general. Historians of science frequently examine Lucretius’s influence on atomism, materialism, corpuscular theory, and ideas of generation, especially from the 17th century on. Scholarship on his influence on poetry, literature, language, and art has concentrated on Italian and English contexts, though his influence in France and Iberia is also extensive. Others have concentrated on Lucretius’s influence on ethics and political thought; his Epicurean celebration of pleasure and his account of how human society and government developed gradually out of a less complicated primitive state greatly influenced Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Thomas Hobbes. Lucretius is also a lynchpin in current debates over the modernity of the Renaissance and is often invoked in narratives that portray Renaissance humanism as a modernizing, secularizing force, characterized by a turn toward rationalism and away from Christian orthodoxy—such narratives are common but also controversial, and much scholarship has been devoted to advancing and to refuting such readings of the Renaissance Lucretius. Other figures often examined in a Lucretian context include Pomponio Leto, Marsilio Ficino, Poliziano, Bartolomeo Scala, Botticelli, Pierre Gassendi, Edmund Spenser, Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish, John Dryden, and Girolamo Fracastoro.