Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance by Ada Palmer (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance by Ada Palmer Wiep van Bunge Ada Palmer. Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. 416. Cloth, $39.95. This is a truly remarkable first book, based on a Ph.D. thesis (Harvard, 2009). It brilliantly manages to address both the general reader and the experts, is skillfully written and beautifully illustrated. The fate of Epicureanism during the Renaissance has recently drawn considerable attention and produced a series of important monographs by such established authors as Catherine Wilson, Alison Brown, and Stephen Greenblatt. Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance is such a welcome addition to the existing literature because of its special methodology: Palmer concentrates on the marginalia preserved in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts and early editions of De Rerum Natura, a first complete manuscript of which was famously recovered in 1417 by Poggio Bracciolini in southern Germany. After a very confident first chapter on Epicureanism, atomism, and skepticism in the Renaissance, she is ready to deliver a highly impressive account of the way in which Lucretius was actually being read during the Renaissance. Chapter 2 deals with manuscripts and incunabula produced before 1515, concluding that the initial reception of De Rerum Natura appears to have provoked primarily scholarly interaction with the text. Lucretius’s first modern readers were most of all concerned to establish the best possible textual version of Lucretius’s masterpiece. The high quality of the Latin used by Lucretius presented a challenge of its own. In fact, De Rerum Natura would soon come to illustrate what real, classical Latin should look like, although it was not soon before the material effect of having such a stunning philosophical text available would surface. For according to Palmer, most notably Machiavelli’s encounter with De Rerum Natura raises the distinct possibility that the radical moral philosophy expounded in The Prince was not unrelated to its author’s fascination with Lucretius’s physics. Next, there is a wonderful chapter on the way in which Renaissance readers grappled with the details of Lucretius’s biography, which of course continue to haunt the experts. As Renaissance readers were highly susceptible to the idea that the moral character of any author and his or her philosophical outlook were intimately connected, Lucretius’s admirers and his critics embarked on a curious quest either to emphasize his proximity to classical paragons of virtue such as Vergil and Cicero or to highlight the man’s depravity, evidenced, for instance, by alarming reports concerning his homosexuality, the madness he fell prey [End Page 164] to, and his ultimate suicide. After this chapter on the possibility of what Pierre Bayle in the wake of François de La Mothe Le Vayer would come to term as ‘virtuous atheism’ and the huge problems Renaissance readers faced in their effort to reconstruct a reliable Vita of the author of De Rerum Natura, chapter 4 addresses the issue of how Renaissance authors sought to justify the reading of non-Christian and potentially violently anti-Christian classical sources. Palmer demonstrates that it was only in 1570 that Denys Lambin, who lectured on De Rerum Natura at the Collège de France, was bold enough to advocate the reading of Lucretius for the benefit of furthering natural philosophy, arguing that Lucretius’s “mistakes” in reality were due to Epicurus. In chapter 5 Palmer further pursues the printed history of Lucretius during the sixteenth century, and she demonstrates how marginalia by the end of the century became increasingly rare, once the effort to repair the text itself came to an end. Interestingly, however, it would seem that following Lambin’s attempt to exonerate Lucretius from the charge of promoting atomism, several late Renaissance readers actually revealed a growing interest in Lucretius’s physics and his atomism in particular. Finally, Montaigne’s and Gassendi’s annotations to De Rerum Natura are scrutinized. Whereas Montaigne’s reading notes abundantly demonstrate his skeptical interests, Gassendi apparently attempted to align Lucretius with a weak empiricism. Not the least impressive aspect of this great first book is that it shows how the manuscript first unearthed in 1417 through the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was gradually...