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De rerum natura, Epicurus, Francis Bacon, Lucretius, Margaret Cavendish, Stephen Greenblatt, Thomas More, Utopia
The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt is an excellent book. It offers an engaging narrative about how Poggio Bracciolini rediscovered De rerum natura by Lucretius in a German monastery in the winter of 1417, and how the Epicurean ideas espoused in that poem then disseminated among European humanists. These ideas provided a direct challenge to the philosophical hegemony of the Catholic church just at a point when the church was starting to come under threat on both the theological and the political front. (The reason Poggio was free to hunt for old manuscripts was that he was a papal secretary, and his master, who was one of three rival claimants to the throne of St Peter at that point, had just been forced to resign and was now imprisoned. This political disarray within the papacy allowed Europe’s secular rulers increasingly to flex their muscles. Meanwhile, the theological rule of the church was being challenged by groups like the Hussites of Bohemia whose radical thinking would, within the century, feed into the Protestant Reformation.) Continue reading
Through the dark labyrinth 