ABSTRACT
Testifying to the neoepicureanism that Richard Kroll, for one, has found central to mid-seventeenth-century intellectual life, the letter proceeds to declare that there is nothing of value in De rerum natura—“the whole worke being one fault”; she labels Lucretius a lunatic and his work impious, a demonstration of how “carnall reason” leads to atheism. As Reid Barbour summarizes the situation succinctly in the first of his two essays on her translation, “[N]o two writers could seem more at odds than the puritan Lucy Hutchinson and the pagan Lucretius.” This reiterates the message of Hutchinson’s letter. Barbour’s solution to the dilemma is to attempt to generalize from a potential contradiction the possibility of endemic contradiction. To some extent bound to be persuasive, yet it is also less than explanatory, since it does assume that Hutchinson’s religious beliefs and Lucretian philosophy are antithetical and that for Hutchinson to be drawn to Lucretius must mean some kind of conflict with her Christianity.
