The Lucretian renaissance : philology and the afterlife of tradition / Gerard Passannante.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Passannante, Gerard Paul, 1978-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Lucretius Carus, Titus--Influence.

Lucretius Carus, Titus.

Materialism--History.

Materialism.

Philosophy, Ancient.

Philosophy, Renaissance.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (260 p.)

Place of Publication:

Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

With The Lucretian Renaissance, Gerard Passannante offers a radical rethinking of a familiar narrative: the rise of materialism in early modern Europe. Passannante begins by taking up the ancient philosophical notion that the world is composed of two fundamental opposites: atoms, as the philosopher Epicurus theorized, intrinsically unchangeable and moving about the void; and the void itself, or nothingness. Passannante considers the fact that this strain of ancient Greek philosophy survived and was transmitted to the Renaissance primarily by means of a poem that had seemingly been lost-a poem insisting that the letters of the alphabet are like the atoms that make up the universe. By tracing this elemental analogy through the fortunes of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things, Passannante argues that, long before it took on its familiar shape during the Scientific Revolution, the philosophy of atoms and the void reemerged in the Renaissance as a story about reading and letters-a story that materialized in texts, in their physical recomposition, and in their scattering. From the works of Virgil and Macrobius to those of Petrarch, Poliziano, Lambin, Montaigne, Bacon, Spenser, Gassendi, Henry More, and Newton, The Lucretian Renaissance recovers a forgotten history of materialism in humanist thought and scholarly practice and asks us to reconsider one of the most enduring questions of the period: what does it mean for a text, a poem, and philosophy to be "reborn"?

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

1. Extra Destinatum

2. The Philologist and the Epicurean

3. Homer Atomized

4. The Pervasive Influence

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9786613321589

9781283321587

1283321580

9780226648514

0226648516

OCLC:

763158990