'The Resurrection, Rejection and Reincorporation of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura in Early Modern Europe’

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• Dr. David Butterfield (Cambridge, Classics).
• Thursday 21 February 2013, 17:15-18:30
• Classics Faculty, Room G.21.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Helen Roche.

When the celebrated Italian humanist and inveterate bookhunter Poggio Bracciolini turned up a copy of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura he could scarcely have known what he had unearthed: not only a copy of one of the great poems of antiquity, which had been unknown across Europe for the last half millennium, but also one of the most controversial, seductive and powerful accounts of philosophy to have survived to the modern age in any language. This paper surveys some of the varied responses, from the extremely positive to the extraordinarily negative, that Lucretius’ poem elicited in the first 300 years of its troubled existence in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe.

This talk is part of the Cambridge Classical Reception Seminar Series series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Cambridge Classical Reception Seminar Series
• Classics Faculty, Room G.21

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