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I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History
Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance
After its rediscovery in 1417, Lucretius'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 answers. Scholars could now challenge Christian patterns of thought by employing the theory of atomistic physics, a sophisticated system that explained natural phenomena without appeal to divine participation, and argued powerfully against the immortality of the soul, the afterlife, and a creator God.
Ada Palmer explores how Renaissance readers, such as Machiavelli, Pomponio Leto, and Montaigne, actually ingested and disseminated Lucretius, and the ways in which this process of reading transformed modern thought. She uncovers humanist methods for reconciling Christian and pagan philosophy, and shows how ideas of emergent order and natural selection, so critical to our current thinking, became embedded in Europe s intellectual landscape before the seventeenth century. 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 the ideas that would soon transform the world. 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 discourse.
Palmer employs a new quantitative method for analyzing marginalia in manuscripts and printed books, exposing how changes in scholarly reading practices over the course of the sixteenth century gradually expanded Europe's receptivity to radical science, setting the stage for the scientific revolution.
Ada Palmer explores how Renaissance readers, such as Machiavelli, Pomponio Leto, and Montaigne, actually ingested and disseminated Lucretius, and the ways in which this process of reading transformed modern thought. She uncovers humanist methods for reconciling Christian and pagan philosophy, and shows how ideas of emergent order and natural selection, so critical to our current thinking, became embedded in Europe s intellectual landscape before the seventeenth century. 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 the ideas that would soon transform the world. 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 discourse.
Palmer employs a new quantitative method for analyzing marginalia in manuscripts and printed books, exposing how changes in scholarly reading practices over the course of the sixteenth century gradually expanded Europe's receptivity to radical science, setting the stage for the scientific revolution.
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First published October 13, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 27, 2021
Servius tells us that a commentary should consist of: the poet’s life, then the work’s title, the quality of the poetry, the purpose of writing, the number of books, the order of books, and finally the content.
Ada Palmer is a tenured professor at the University of Chicago, specializing in intellectual history and the Italian Renaissance. She's a giant science fiction nerd (crediting the Harvard-Radcliffe SF Society in the acknowledgements) and was a Hugo finalist for Too Like The Lightning.
This is not a work of science fiction. It is a close study of the how people read the poem "De Rerum Natura" by Lucretius in the Renaissance. It's an extremely important poem, because it was a sustained detailed exposition of Epicurean philosophy, including the first non-theistic cosmology to reach European intellectual circles. It is not an analysis of Lucretius, nor a history of the reconstruction of Lucretius's text -- it is an analysis of the reading experience.
It is a remarkably readable book. I might be the only person who found it easier going than the author's Perhaps the Stars; certainly it's much more readable than the usual first-academic-book. There is blessedly little of the heavyweight scaffolding and cringing acknowledgement of prior work that too many academics are cursed with. There are a few choice turns of phrase; I particularly liked her reference to "one of the great dead horses of Lucretius scholarship, then a lively foal." No deep knowledge of Renaissance history or of Lucretius is required.
That said, this is an academic book. It looks at a narrow question, "the reading experience around one poem, in roughly one century." And it pursues that topic with considerable thoroughness and determination. Palmer looked at hundreds of manuscripts and early print editions to catalogue the marginal notes, and the paratexts (introductions, indexes, etc) that frame the text for readers. This is impressive as a technical exercise, but, happily, does actually lead to interesting conclusions.
The structure is typical for such a work; we have an introductory chapter, then four "content" chapters looking at various topics: we have the manuscript annotations, we have the editorial choice of quotations about Lucretius (a sort of Renaissance back-cover blurb, only it's by Quintilian), we have the history of print editions and included Lucretius biographies, and we have the early print annotation tradition.
All this detailed pedantic scholarship is justified by the interesting and sparkling nuggets Palmer finds bound up in the dross. For instance, we learn that while most readers like the moral passages and the dirty bits, there was exactly one 15th century manuscript where the reader marked up the bits about atomic physics and seems to have read them closely. It’s Codex Vaticanus Rossianus 884, and there is a note on the manuscript that it was written by “Nicholo Machiavegli” in Florence in 1497. By the print era, this passage was meeting more general interest, but the reader who seems to have read it most closely was Michel de Montaigne. Some of the most interesting people in Europe seem to have also been uniquely engaged readers of Lucretius.
Palmer's history is also illuminating as a case study of what is involved in "reception" of a text. The famous copy that Poggio Bracciolini brings out of the mountains in the early 15th century was hard to read; the text was badly corrupted by scribal errors, the Latin was archaic with an unusual technical vocabulary. It was the work of a century of Humanist scholarship to make the poem readable, it was the concurrent work of popularization and advocacy to get it into the classroom canon and have students read it.
Ada Palmer is a tenured professor at the University of Chicago, specializing in intellectual history and the Italian Renaissance. She's a giant science fiction nerd (crediting the Harvard-Radcliffe SF Society in the acknowledgements) and was a Hugo finalist for Too Like The Lightning.
This is not a work of science fiction. It is a close study of the how people read the poem "De Rerum Natura" by Lucretius in the Renaissance. It's an extremely important poem, because it was a sustained detailed exposition of Epicurean philosophy, including the first non-theistic cosmology to reach European intellectual circles. It is not an analysis of Lucretius, nor a history of the reconstruction of Lucretius's text -- it is an analysis of the reading experience.
It is a remarkably readable book. I might be the only person who found it easier going than the author's Perhaps the Stars; certainly it's much more readable than the usual first-academic-book. There is blessedly little of the heavyweight scaffolding and cringing acknowledgement of prior work that too many academics are cursed with. There are a few choice turns of phrase; I particularly liked her reference to "one of the great dead horses of Lucretius scholarship, then a lively foal." No deep knowledge of Renaissance history or of Lucretius is required.
That said, this is an academic book. It looks at a narrow question, "the reading experience around one poem, in roughly one century." And it pursues that topic with considerable thoroughness and determination. Palmer looked at hundreds of manuscripts and early print editions to catalogue the marginal notes, and the paratexts (introductions, indexes, etc) that frame the text for readers. This is impressive as a technical exercise, but, happily, does actually lead to interesting conclusions.
The structure is typical for such a work; we have an introductory chapter, then four "content" chapters looking at various topics: we have the manuscript annotations, we have the editorial choice of quotations about Lucretius (a sort of Renaissance back-cover blurb, only it's by Quintilian), we have the history of print editions and included Lucretius biographies, and we have the early print annotation tradition.
All this detailed pedantic scholarship is justified by the interesting and sparkling nuggets Palmer finds bound up in the dross. For instance, we learn that while most readers like the moral passages and the dirty bits, there was exactly one 15th century manuscript where the reader marked up the bits about atomic physics and seems to have read them closely. It’s Codex Vaticanus Rossianus 884, and there is a note on the manuscript that it was written by “Nicholo Machiavegli” in Florence in 1497. By the print era, this passage was meeting more general interest, but the reader who seems to have read it most closely was Michel de Montaigne. Some of the most interesting people in Europe seem to have also been uniquely engaged readers of Lucretius.
Palmer's history is also illuminating as a case study of what is involved in "reception" of a text. The famous copy that Poggio Bracciolini brings out of the mountains in the early 15th century was hard to read; the text was badly corrupted by scribal errors, the Latin was archaic with an unusual technical vocabulary. It was the work of a century of Humanist scholarship to make the poem readable, it was the concurrent work of popularization and advocacy to get it into the classroom canon and have students read it.
March 20, 2017
The conclusions were great, but they got pretty bogged down by the author trying to prove herself with how much research she'd done. That being said, I know this was originally a dissertation, and it reads like one. A solid research project, but just not my thing. (literally, it's not my field)
October 13, 2025
This is a very good book. Among other things, it presents a thoughtful and well analyzed of how scholars and book lovers in the Renaissance actually went about reading Lucretius (De rerun natura -“On the Nature of Things”) from the time the volume was first recovered from obscurity by Poggio Bracciolini until Lucretian ideas had fully filtered into the environment of Enlightenment and the rise of modern science in early modern Europe. The broader question appears to have been how the recovery of long lost classics at the close of the Middle Ages transform how intellectual life transformed into secular and scientific modernity. When did the discovery of the classics change from being an exercise in the renewal of Classical Latin and Greek texts to being part of the change in how people thought about the world going forward into the future? This process did not happen all at once but rather involved a change in how scholars read and worked with key texts. Originally, the process was once of understanding and improving long lost and often imperfect classics. But then, once the classics had been improved and corrected, they could provide the basis for educating new generations of scholars and practical people who could apply and improve upon classic ideas to build new models and science and learning and in doing so change the world as had been anticipated by Renaissance pioneers.
This is careful and thoughtful history but well worth the time involved in digesting and processing the material. The details of the textual analysis was also fascinating. The author is able to intensively examine a set of the first manuscript versions of Lucretius that were produced following Poggio’s discovery, along with a set of the first printed editions of the work. The idea was to look at the marginal comments added to the different manuscripts and editions by the first readers. This would indicate which parts of Lucretius were of most interest to the first Renaissance readers. As the value of the text to readers changed over time, the location and types of margin comments made would also change to indicate changing reader interests.
I first ran into Lucretius by reading Greenblatt’s book and the Swerve and then going to read the poem directly. I was not sure how to follow up on that. This book, and the study it reported on, was a productive way to do so. This is surely not for everyone but I found it rewarding.
This is careful and thoughtful history but well worth the time involved in digesting and processing the material. The details of the textual analysis was also fascinating. The author is able to intensively examine a set of the first manuscript versions of Lucretius that were produced following Poggio’s discovery, along with a set of the first printed editions of the work. The idea was to look at the marginal comments added to the different manuscripts and editions by the first readers. This would indicate which parts of Lucretius were of most interest to the first Renaissance readers. As the value of the text to readers changed over time, the location and types of margin comments made would also change to indicate changing reader interests.
I first ran into Lucretius by reading Greenblatt’s book and the Swerve and then going to read the poem directly. I was not sure how to follow up on that. This book, and the study it reported on, was a productive way to do so. This is surely not for everyone but I found it rewarding.
Read
November 2, 2025This is a specialist, academic work of intellectual history. Palmer is seemingly incapable of writing turgid prose, but most of this is dense with facts and citations and it assumes a high degree of familiarity with the humanist movement and general renaissance history.
Briefly, Palmer set out to determine how much influence Lucretius' book, rediscovered in 1417, had on the budding intellectual revolution that would eventually result in the materialist worldview of most modern science.
What she found was that the first humanists were almost entirely interested in creating a definitive, correct text from the remaining manuscripts and learning the Latin style of the author. Only a century of more later did writers like Montaigne start to take seriously the book's atomism and dismissal of such things as an active role for deity and the immortality of the soul.
The details of how she did this--close reading of not only the many editions, but of the commentary and margin notes of readers--makes up the bulk of the book. The evidence is interesting if a little overwhelming.
I am not giving it a rating because it was not written for a layman like myself, especially one whose primary historical interests are elsewhere. Nonetheless, the book is readable, especially the introduction and conclusion, and I got a glimpse into just how rich the available primary materials are. It is however, not a popular history like her brilliant "Inventing the Renaissance" and liking that book does not necessarily imply you will like this one.
Briefly, Palmer set out to determine how much influence Lucretius' book, rediscovered in 1417, had on the budding intellectual revolution that would eventually result in the materialist worldview of most modern science.
What she found was that the first humanists were almost entirely interested in creating a definitive, correct text from the remaining manuscripts and learning the Latin style of the author. Only a century of more later did writers like Montaigne start to take seriously the book's atomism and dismissal of such things as an active role for deity and the immortality of the soul.
The details of how she did this--close reading of not only the many editions, but of the commentary and margin notes of readers--makes up the bulk of the book. The evidence is interesting if a little overwhelming.
I am not giving it a rating because it was not written for a layman like myself, especially one whose primary historical interests are elsewhere. Nonetheless, the book is readable, especially the introduction and conclusion, and I got a glimpse into just how rich the available primary materials are. It is however, not a popular history like her brilliant "Inventing the Renaissance" and liking that book does not necessarily imply you will like this one.
August 7, 2018
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.
Want to read
September 29, 2014Reviewed by Open Letters Monthly
Read
November 7, 2022Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance is actually Ada Palmer’s dissertation, so it’s academic and full of charts, and one thing it proves brilliantly is that I’d read a whole book of Machiavelli and Montaigne annotating On the Nature of Things.
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Pairs like a fine wine with The Swerve, and of course the various translations of Lucretius (Lucretii?)
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Pairs like a fine wine with The Swerve, and of course the various translations of Lucretius (Lucretii?)
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews