ABSTRACT
Stephen Greenblatt’s latest essay, The Swerve (2012), is a salutary reminder of the immense influence exerted by Titus Carus Lucretius, a Latin poet from the first century B.C., upon Renaissance culture. Greenblatt relates how Poggio Bracciolini, a former papal secretary, discovered a manuscript of Lucretius’s philosophical poem De rerum natura in an Alsatian monastery in 1417, and sent a copy to his friend Niccolò Niccoli in Florence, who had other copies made. The poem was first printed in Brescia in 1473, then in Bologna in 1511, and in Paris in 1514. The most authoritative scholarly edition was published in Paris in 1564 by Denis Lambin, Professor of Greek Literature at the Collège Royal; it was this edition that circulated throughout Europe and spawned a great number of pirated copies. Inasmuch as the poem argues forcibly against all forms of religious dogma – in particular the beliefs in teleological creation, divine providence and the immortality of the soul – Greenblatt sees its ‘rediscovery’ as playing a seminal role in the escape from Scholastic dogmatism and the renewal of intellectual endeavour at the Renaissance. Greenblatt’s view of the Middle Ages has caused controversy, but there is no denying the impact that the De rerum natura must have had on minds shaped by a ‘world picture’ largely determined by theological ideas. Moreover, its impact was not only doctrinal: however shocking its philosophy, De rerum natura stands alongside Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a summit of the Latin language, and it is the sheer poetical force of Lucretius’s writing which explains how he managed to influence even the most religiously committed writers, Milton being a case in point (Pollock 2010, 125–6).
