Lucretius and the renaissance.

Lucretius and the renaissance. by Thomas Joseph Flavin Download PDF EPUB FB2

Greenblatt subtitles his book, “How the World Became Modern” to reflect how deeply the rediscovery of Lucretius affected the Renaissance world. To be fair, the Renaissance was a revolution in many areas; art, culture, religion, science, philosophy, politics, medicine – no one work sparked it.

Book Reviews: Review of Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (link requires JSTOR Access), Reid Barbour, Renaissance Quarterly (Vol. 68, No. 3 (Fall ), pp. ), September ; Review of Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, Quinn Radziszewski, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, May 6   Ada Palmer explores how Renaissance poets and philologists, not scientists, rescued Lucretius and his atomism theory.

This heterodoxy circulated in the premodern world, not on the conspicuous stage of heresy trials and public debates but in the classrooms, libraries, studies, and bookshops where quiet scholars met transformative ideas.

In this first comprehensive study of the effect of Lucretius's De rerum natura on Florentine thought in the Renaissance, Alison Brown demonstrates how Lucretius was used by Florentine thinkers―earlier and more widely than has been supposed―to provide a radical critique of prevailing orthodoxies.

To answer the question of why ordinary Florentines were drawn to this recently discovered text Cited by: Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (I Tatti studies in Italian Renaissance history Book 16) - Kindle edition by Palmer, Ada.

Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Lucretius and the renaissance. book features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (I Tatti studies in Italian Renaissance history Book 16).5/5(4).

In his new book, The Swerve, Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt tells the story of an ancient poem and a manuscript explorer, and resurrects a time when people truly loved books.

Get this from a library. Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance. [Ada Palmer] -- "After its rediscovery inLucretius's Epicurean didactic poem De Rerum Natura threatened to supply radicals and atheists with the one weapon unbelief had lacked in the Middle Ages: good. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (paperback edition: The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began) is a book by Stephen Greenblatt and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and National Book Award for Nonfiction.

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 Author: Stephen Greenblatt.

In an abbey in Germany he came across a manuscript of a long-lost classical poem, Lucretius's De Rerum Natura ("On the Nature of the Universe"). This event is Author: Colin Burrow. The great atomist poet has finally attracted the attention that students of modern culture should have given him long ago.

Seeing so much new Lucretius and the renaissance. book innovative work on offer, readers with questions about Lucretius in the Renaissance will take Ada Palmer’s book as the new standard: Reading Lucretius is our best guide to a thinker whose ideas lit the flames of : Harvard.

The book is really dry but does exhibit sound research on how scholars had to tip toe around the Catholic Church as they tried to read, edit, comment, and circulate Lucretius poem. It discusses how readers in the 15th and 16th centuries perceived this unorthodox text that denied the immortality of the soul/5.

“I didn’t want to write a book whose central concern is a technical analysis of Lucretius’s poem or the detailed reception history of that poem in later literary works,” he says.

“I wanted to tell a story about its power—how it helped inspire the Renaissance and remade our whole culture.”. Free Online Library: The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence.('The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence' and 'The Swerve: How the World Became Modern', Book review) by "Philological Quarterly"; Literature, writing, book reviews Languages and linguistics Books Book reviews.

Renaissance Studies Vol. 27 No. 5 DOI: /rest.l BOOK REVIEW ESSAY Lucretius ' Renaissance Stuart Gillespie Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began.

London: Bodley Head, pp. £ ISBN: (hb). Gerard Passannante, The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition.

Book Description: Ada Palmer explores how Renaissance poets and philologists, not scientists, rescued Lucretius and his atomism theory. This heterodoxy circulated in the premodern world, not on the conspicuous stage of heresy trials and public debates but in the classrooms, libraries, studies, and bookshops where quiet scholars met transformative ideas.

'The Swerve': The Ideas That Rooted The Renaissance Stephen Greenblatt chronicles the unlikely discovery of Lucretius' poem "On the Nature of. * Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance. By Ada Palmer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp.

$ Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance is the latest in a recent outpouring of scholarly contributions to the reception of Lucretius in early modern Europe. The Renaissance reception of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things follows two stages: the first of repair, when the rediscovered text was put back together, and the second of interpretation, when readers moved beyond language and tried to understand the materialist message.

Palmer’s book is a welcome and much-needed foundation for studies on Author: Anthony D’Elia. Ada Palmer is an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, and the author of “Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance,” as well as a science fiction novel, “Too Like the.

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.

"a defining text for renaissance humanism, influencing botticelli, da vinci, galileo, machiavelli, montaigne and shakespeare": very rare edition of thomas creech's pioneering translation in english of lucretius' on the nature of things, the work that inspired jefferson to proclaim, in the declaration of independence, americans' vital right to "the pursuit of happiness".

Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, by Ada Palmer There has been a flurry of interest in Lucretius recently, and Ada Palmer’s book looks at first sight like yet another to be added to the growing pile. But it deserves attention, and is indeed a striking and intellectually challenging work.

The book arises from Dr Palmer’s Ph.D. thesis Author: David Wootton. When Lucretius was rediscovered—ironically enough, in a monastery library—inby the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini, Greenblatt imagines the moment as the birth of the Renaissance.

Renaissance readers—poets and philologists rather than scientists—were moved by their love of classical literature to rescue Lucretius and his atomism, thereby injecting his theories back into scientific employs a new quantitative method for analyzing marginalia in manuscripts and printed books, exposing how changes in.

In this first comprehensive study of the effect of Lucretius's De rerum natura on Florentine thought in the Renaissance, Alison Brown demonstrates how Lucretius was used by Florentine thinkers—earlier and more widely than has been supposed—to provide a radical critique of prevailing answer the question of why ordinary Florentines were drawn to this recently discovered text.

It was a missing celebrity of the kind Renaissance book-hunters dreamed of finding. The rediscovery of Lucretius, it is suggested, was a kind of "swerve" which helped to create the new.

Historians have argued that it is the discovery of this book, this poem of Lucretius, that is most responsible for the Renaissance and thus all modern thinking. Lost for a millennia untilit certainly had a profound impact on some of the greatest Renaissance and "modern" thinkers, including Thomas Jefferson, who owned eight copies: “I.

The full text of this article hosted at is unavailable due to technical difficulties. The book, a prose translation of Lucretius’ two-thousand-year-old poem “On the Nature of Things” (“De Rerum Natura”), was marked down to ten cents, and I bought it as much for the cover.

In this first comprehensive study of the effect of Lucretius's De rerum natura on Florentine thought in the Renaissance, Alison Brown demonstrates how Lucretius was used by Florentine thinkers—earlier and more widely than has been supposed—to provide a radical critique of prevailing orthodoxies.

To answer the question of why ordinary Florentines were drawn to this recently Author: Alison Brown. PREFACE No one can set about tnnslating Lucretius into English without finding his head full of the great work of H.

Munro. Itia not only that certain striking phrases ring in one's ears-dtai claustra, • the Iastnesses of life,' olu UrminuJ baerms, •the deepset boundary-mark,' &c.- but one is possessed with a atrong feeling that he has.

Lucretius was not mad, as the prevaricating St. Jerome claimed. His great work resonates with the force of reason and sanity that confronted and pushed back against an insane and delusional culture.

As I mentioned earlier, we have about fifty surviving copies of Lucretius from that. The part of Book 5 of DRN that Alison Brown uses to trace Lucretius in Machiavelli and Hobbes crops up repeatedly in the volume. William Poole, David Norbrook, and Catherine Wilson all show this to be a compelling intertext for early modern writers thinking about the origins of human societies, the workings of natural law, the relationship.

With The Lucretian Renaissance, Gerard Passannante offers a radical rethinking of a familiar narrative: the rise of materialism in early modern nante begins by taking up the ancient philosophical notion that the world is composed of two fundamental opposites: atoms, as the philosopher Epicurus theorized, intrinsically unchangeable and moving about the void; and the void itself, or.

Lucretius’ espousal of materialism, personal extinction, and ungodly gods earned him the enmity of the Christian church. He was roundly stigmatized. Embellishing unsubstantiated rumors, St. Jerome prated that the poet "was driven mad by a love potion, composed books in the intervals of insanity, and committed suicide in his forty-fourth year.".

Ada Palmer explores how Renaissance poets and philologists, not scientists, rescued Lucretius and his atomism theory. This heterodoxy circulated in the premodern world, not on the conspicuous stage of heresy trials and public debates but in the classrooms, libraries, studies, and bookshops where quiet scholars met transformative ideas.

Religion trampled underfoot: Epicurus, Atomism, and atheism in the Renaissance -- Unchristian opinion: Lucretius' first Renaissance readers -- Between fits of madness: ancient sources for Lucretius' biography -- The lofty madness of wise Lucretius: the Renaissance biographies -- The poverty of the language: the Lucretian print tradition -- Deceived but not betrayed.

Ada Palmer explores how Renaissance poets and philologists, not scientists, rescued Lucretius and his atomism theory. This heterodoxy circulated in the premodern world, not on the conspicuous stage of heresy trials and public debates but in the classrooms, libraries, studies, and bookshops where quiet scholars met transformative : Harvard University Press.