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Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 73, Number 3, July 2012, pp.395-416 (Article)

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Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance

Ada Palmer

Atomism, the theory that matter consists of tiny, indivisible atoms whosevaried combinations form the different substances around us, existed inEurope for more than two thousand years before its modern popularity.Equally ancient are the scientific theories of vacuum, of multiple Earth-likeworlds, and of creation from chaos, the theory that in the beginning atomsfloating in the void clumped together randomly to form substances. On theNature of Things (De Rerum Natura) by Titus Lucretius Carus (94–55/51bce) is the most complete surviving record of these ancient atomic theories,and even tells us that Earth originally produced a wide variety of creatures,but that only those suited to their environments survived to the present.1

These doctrines were all taught by Epicurus (341–270 bce), and if his theo-ries sound suspiciously like those of the twentieth century ce, one criticalquestion is how these ideas were preserved and transmitted over the longperiod before their broad modern acceptance, particularly in the Renais-sance.

Few of Epicurus’s writings survive,2 but in the late first century bce a

I am greatly indebted in this project to the guidance of James Hankins, the aid of AnnBlair, Alison Brown, Brian Copenhaver, Craig Kallendorf, Stephen Greenblatt, andMichael Reeve, and the support of the Villa I Tatti Harvard University Center for ItalianRenaissance Studies, the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at TexasA & M University, and the Fulbright Program. A monographic version of this study isforthcoming.1 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 5.837–877.2 James Hankins and Ada Palmer, The Recovery of Classical Philosophy in the Renais-

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JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JULY 2012

Roman follower, Lucretius, laid out his key doctrines in Latin verse in thesix-book didactic poem De Rerum Natura. The poem, and the bulk ofclassical atomism with it, disappeared after the ninth century, but was redis-covered in 1417 by the Renaissance book-hunter Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459). Humanists produced more than fifty manuscripts within a centuryand thirty print editions by 1600.3 Lucretius was taught in schools in Franceand Italy in the early sixteenth century, frequently enough for the Florentineregional Church council to ban teaching him in 1517,4 and for PetrusNannius (1500–1557) at Louvain to complain of the absence of a suitableclassroom edition in 1543.5 Despite this extensive circulation, and the com-paratively broad appearance of Lucretian poetic themes in art and literatureof the sixteenth century, atomism remained extremely rare in scientificcircles until the seventeenth century, when Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655)hybridized Epicureanism, Skepticism, and Christianity.6 The question ishow and why the text was used and multiplied so broadly while its coredoctrines remained conspicuously absent from scientific discourse. I haveapproached this question through a systematic examination of marginaliain surviving Renaissance copies of the De Rerum Natura, a new techniquewhich exposes how the reading practices of Renaissance humanists affectedthe transmission of ideas.

The scholars we call humanists worked to restore classical civilizationin the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by creating a new educational systemfounded on the study of classical texts. Humanism was supposed to pro-duce virtuous men, who would imbibe in childhood the loyalty, nobility,courage, and patriotism which made ancient Rome strong, and withoutwhich the modern world was wracked by corruption, petty ambition, andcowardly self-interest. The beauty of ancient rhetoric was supposed to armauthors and orators to inspire virtue in others, especially princes. Thishumanism did not value learning only for learning’s sake but had a very

sance, a Brief Guide (Florence: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 2008),62–63.3 Cosmo Gordon, A Bibliography of Lucretius (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962).4 J. D. Mansi ed., Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissa collectio (Paris: H. Welter,1901–1927), 35: 270.5 Dirk Sacre, ‘‘Nannius’s Somnia,’’ in La satire humaniste: Actes du Colloque interna-tional des 31 mars, 1er et 2 avril 1993, ed. Rudolf De Smet (Louvain: Peeters Press,1994), 77–93.6 The persecution of Giordano Bruno testifies to atomism’s hostile reception, see PaulHenri Michel, The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno (Ithaca, N.Y.: 1973); Hilary Gatti,Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science (Ithaca, N.Y.: 2002), especially ch. 8, andEssays on Giordano Bruno (Princeton: 2011), ch. 3.

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Palmer ✦ Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance

practical agenda, to repair Europe through the education of its elite. As myfindings demonstrate, the specific methods of reading taught by this human-ist agenda, with its focus on moral concerns and repairing Europe alongclassical lines, preserved and circulated the radical content of classical texts,even while only a tiny sliver of the humanists responsible for this transmis-sion were demonstrably interested in the radical content.7 Humanist apolo-gists, most comparatively orthodox, sheltered these texts, and enduredgreat dangers to do so, as the tense relationship between science and heresyflared in the Renaissance as never before.

From 1417 to 1600, while Epicureanism remained conspicuouslyabsent from discourse on physics and natural philosophy, it was conspicu-ously present in discourse on heresy and atheism. The ancient atomists,Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius, appear universally in the lists ofFamous Atheists which were a popular genre across Europe in the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries.8 The association between atomism and atheismderives mainly from three points. First, by explaining physical phenomenathrough the natural properties of atoms, atomism eliminates divine gover-nance of nature. While Lucretius insists that the gods exist, they are remotefrom the world and not responsible for its ordering or continuation. Thissystematic model of nature without divine participation made it possiblefor an atheist to have a coherent physics, and to finally answer such ques-tions as ‘‘How do the planets move without angels to push them?’’ withsomething stronger than ‘‘I don’t know.’’9 Second, the Epicurean story of

7 On the classics and Renaissance science see Gianna Pomata and Nancy Siraisi eds.,Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: MITPress, 2005); William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton eds., Secrets of Nature: Astrol-ogy and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001); NancySiraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge andPractice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 1–16, 123–33; John Shirley andDavid Hoeniger eds., Science and the Arts in the Renaissance (Washington, D.C.: FolgerShakespeare Library, 1985) especially the title chapter by Alistair Crombie, 15–26;George Sarton, The Appreciation of Ancient and Medieval Science during the Renaissance(1450–1600) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1955); Nancy Siraisi, ‘‘LifeSciences and Medicine in the Renaissance World,’’ in Rome Reborn: the Vatican Libraryand Renaissance Culture (Washington D.C.: Library of Congress, 1993), 169–98.8 Alan Kors, Atheism in France, 1650–1729 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1990), 29–30; C. J. Betts, Early Deism in France, From the so-called ‘deistes’ of Lyon(1564) to Voltaire’s ‘Lettres philosophiques’ (1734) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Pub-lishers, 1984), 263–65; Nicholas Davidson, ‘‘Atheism in Italy 1500–1700,’’ in Atheismfrom the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. Michael Hunter and David Wootton(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 55–86 especially 56 n. 7; Catherine Wilson,Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).9 Davidson, ‘‘Atheism in Italy 1500–1700,’’ 61–62.

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the creation of the world from chance associations of atoms eliminates thePrime Mover, again reducing the necessity of the divine; this makes atom-ism critically different from the Aristotelian and Platonic systems whichboth posit a central creative force which Christians could equate with God.Finally, Epicurus’s denial of the afterlife, which he intended to free menfrom fear of imagined torments after death, was associated in the Renais-sance with a long-standing European paranoia that atheists, without fearof divine punishment, would have no reason to refrain from rape, murder,and other crimes, making it impossible for them to be good citizens.10 Thus,while Lucretius is not an atheist in the modern sense, his materialism anddenial of the soul provide arguments which will prove essential to the latergrowth of atheism, as well as deism, skepticism and other radical hetero-doxies. For this group of radical Lucretian concepts, those associated, inthe Renaissance and now, with atheism, but which do not themselves attackthe existence of the divine, I shall employ the label ‘‘proto-atheism.’’Renaissance heresy-hunters drew no such subtle distinction between poten-tial and actuality. Epicurean denial of the afterlife was infamous in themedieval world; indeed, well before 1517, Dante used Epicurean as thegeneral label for those who believe the soul is mortal, who are punished inthe sixth circle of Hell by being sealed forever in coffins—just as theyexpected to be—but on fire.11 Such doctrines would not, like Plato’s andCicero’s, rear virtuous men. Or so humanists thought.

While these doctrines explain the Renaissance association of atomismwith atheism, use of the term ‘‘Epicureanism’’ in discourse on heresy rarelyhad anything to do with doctrine. Catholics called Martin Luther an Epicu-rean, and allies refuted the charge in pamphlets which use the term con-stantly yet are practically without reference to Epicurean theory.12 Erasmuswas called an atheist and Epicurean by his enemies,13 while at the siege ofBourges in 1562 pastors encouraged the Huguenots to call their Catholic

10 Kors, Atheism in France, 48, 241–44, 257–61; Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘‘The Myth ofRenaissance Atheism and the French Tradition of Free Thought,’’ Journal of the Historyof Philosophy 6 (1968): 240–42.11 Inferno 10.13–15.12 See Albert Hunger’s Orationes Duae, una, de Fide ac Religione Magni Illius AthanasiiAlexandrini . . . altera de Homologia sive Consensu Concentuque Theologiae Luthericum Philosophia Epicuri . . . (Ingolstadt, 1582), and the opposing pamphlet Oratio deVocatione et Doctrina Martini Lutheri . . . & Opposita Epicureae Prationi Alberti Hun-geri . . . de homologia, sive consensu doctrinae Lutheri cum Philosophia Epicuri (Ingol-stadt, 1583).13 Brian Copenhaver and Charles B. Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1992), 242.

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attackers ‘‘epicoriens.’’14 The Protestant propaganda piece Le Reveille-Matin des Francois describes the favorites who traveled with the king’sbrothers as including Catholic lords, courtesans, atheists, Epicureans, blas-phemers, and sodomites,15 while Nicholas Davidson has cited the sixteenth-century case of a group of friars in Verona accused of living ‘‘as sons ofiniquity . . . as Epicureans and Lutherans.’’16 Here Epicureanism functionsas a generic term of abuse, interchangeable with atheism, blasphemy, evensodomy. The Florentine edict banning Lucretius from the classroom tar-geted ‘‘lascivious and impious works,’’ perpetuating this association of Epi-cureanism, and heresy in general, with wantonness, since flagrant sinnersmust not fear God.17 If in the sixteenth century Lucretius’s presence in class-rooms and printing houses neither injected atomism into scientific circlesnor reduced the use of Epicureanism as a generic synonym for heresy, thequestion becomes what circles Lucretius did penetrate, and how the thou-sands who did read him used the text.

Formal writings like essays and commentaries show us only the pol-ished reactions of early modern authors, written after they have evaluatedancient texts and often self-censored in anticipation of the censor and theInquisition.18 Marginalia are not the only indicator of Epicurean interestwe may seek, but they are particularly useful because they make it possibleto directly compare the reactions of readers who did and who did not moveon to use Epicureanism in their own works. Marginalia record the realmoment of first contact between a Christian reader and pagan thought.19

Such a moment is recorded in the Neapolitanus, annotated by the distin-

14 Monica Barsi ed., L’Enigme de la Chronique de Pierre Belon (Milan: LED, 2001), 264.15 Nicolas Barnaud, Le Reveille-matin des Francois, et de leurs voisins (Edimbourg: Del’imprimerie de Iaques Iames Barnaud, 1574), 130.16 Davidson, ‘‘Atheism in Italy 1500–1700,’’ 57.17 Kors, Atheism in France, 28.18 Commentaries, such as those of Francus (1504), Pius (1511), Capece (1535), Lambin(1563), Gifanius (1565–6), Palmerius (1580), Frachetta (1589), and the youthful workFicino burnt, if indeed it was a commentary, will be treated in a forthcoming fuller versionof this study.19 On marginalia, see Craig Kallendorf, ‘‘Marginalia and the Rise of Early Modern Sub-jectivity,’’ in On Renaissance Commentaries, ed. Marianne Pade (Hildesheim; New York:Olms, 2005), 111–28; William H. Sherman, ‘‘What did Renaissance Readers Write intheir Books?’’ in Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, ed.Jennifer Anderson and Elizabeth Saure (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,2002), 119–37; Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities:Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); Vincenzo Fera, Giacomo Ferrau and Silvia Rizzoeds., Talking to the Text: Marginalia from Papyri to Print: proceedings of a conferenceheld at Erice (Messina, 2002).

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guished philologist Pomponio Leto (1425–98), which, when Lucretiusargues that the soul perishes at death, bears the rubricated legend: ‘‘opinionon Christiana.’’20 Lucretius’s attack on the immortality of the soul isindeed incompatible with orthodox Christianity, but what is striking is lessthe fact that Leto found this passage notable, than that in the fifty-twomanuscripts in this study, none except Leto’s Neapolitanus and three cop-ied from it note this central attack on Christian doctrine.21 Our task is toset aside our modern expectations of what elements of Lucretius’s textshould be most striking, and to interrogate the marginalia for a portrait ofwhat actually caught the eyes of the first scholars to examine the book insix hundred years.

I have surveyed fifty-two of the fifty-four known Renaissance Lucretiusmanuscripts.22 My technique for analyzing marginalia is largely quantita-tive. In a long text like the De Rerum Natura, notes are typically sparse insome sections and common in others, indicating areas of varying readerinterest. An annotator may mark a line because it strikes him, because hewants to find it easily, as an aid to memory, to help other users of themanuscript, or to correct a textual error. All but the last indicate an interestin the subject matter of the line in question, and even corrections are oftenmore frequent in one section of a manuscript, indicating more careful read-ing. When notes cluster around the same lines in multiple, independent cop-ies it is possible to map the interests of a typical Renaissance reader, and toidentify individuals whose interests are unusual. Changes over time, partic-ularly in the transition from manuscript to print, clearly demonstrate thetransformation of scholarly reading practices over the fifteenth and six-teenth centuries.

20 f. 62r of Naples Naz. IV E 51, ‘‘opinio non christiana’’ at 3.417.21 The three copies are Bodl. Can. Lat. 32, f. 54r, Berlin, Lat. f. 43r, and Basel F.VIII.14,f. 48v.22 Two, former Bishop mss. 43 de Ricci and one from the Abbey collection, are in anony-mous private collections. See Gordon, A Bibliography of Lucretius, 279–92; Reeve, ‘‘TheItalian Tradition of Lucretius,’’ Italia Medioevale e Umanistica 23: 27–48 (Padua: 1980);Reeve, ‘‘The Italian Tradition of Lucretius Revisited,’’ Aevum 79: 115–64 (Milan: 2005);Reeve, ‘‘Lucretius from the 1460s to the 17th Century: Seven Questions of Attribution,’’Aevum 80: 166–184 (Milan, 2006); Wolfgang Fleischmann, ‘‘Lucretius Carus, Titus,’’ inPaul Oskar Kristeller and Edward Cranz ed., Catalogus Translationum et Commentari-orum, (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1960) 2: 349–365; Paul OskarKristeller, Iter Italicum: a Finding List of Uncatalogued or Incompletely CataloguedHumanistic Manuscripts of the Renaissance in Italian and Other Libraries (London: War-burg Institute, 1963–92) 1: 332, 399, 2: 5, 69, 304; Giuseppe Mazzatinti, Inventari deimanoscritti delle biblioteche d’Italia (Forli: 1891), 1: 100–101, 13: 47. For informationabout Valencia Univ. 733 and Madrid BN 2885 I am indebted to Michael Reeve, and forinformation about Zaragoza Biblioteca Capitolar Ms. 11–36 to Angel Traver Vera.

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Quantitative analysis of marginalia can be applied to any text forwhich sufficient annotated copies survive. It applies particularly well toLucretius because the work covers such a range of subjects. Only a smallportion of the text, concentrated in Books II and III, directly treats atomictheory. The rest ranges from summaries of pre-Socratic thinkers likeDemocritus and Heraclitus, to a sex scene, to how to avoid falling in love,to the plague—always of interest to Renaissance readers for whom plaguewas a constant neighbor. This diverse content means that a great range ofmotives beyond interest in Epicureanism might bring a reader to the text.Notes expose these idiosyncratic interests. For example, one Florentinecopy contains only two notes, one on a line with unusual meter and anothermarking a parallel to Virgil, clearly made by a reader interested primarilyin poetry.23

The creation and use of the manuscripts is partly, though far from fully,traceable. Those whose cities of production can be established were for themost part produced in Florence, Rome, or Naples. Half the surviving copiesare on vellum, often illuminated, and the other half on less expensive paper.Many vellum copies contain coats of arms, indicating such prominentpatrons as the Medici and Pazzi families, the Florentine banker FrancescoSassetti, Jacopo Zeno Bishop of Padua, Popes Sixtus IV and Pius II, Ferdi-nand I and Andrea Matteo III Aquaviva of Aragon, and John Tiptoft Earlof Worcester.24 Other copies were owned or used by Niccolo Niccoli, Polizi-ano, Pier Vettori, Francesco Marescalchi of Ferrara, Fulvio Orsini, Pom-ponio Leto and his circle, and Machiavelli. These owners establish the textas one welcome in the libraries of intellectually ambitious princes, but morecommonly used by humanists, primarily in Italy. This variety in size andexpense provides a good cross-section of the range of forms typically takenby Italian manuscripts of the classics.

As for the creation of the annotation, the notes are overwhelmingly theproduct of scholars’ private reading, or occasionally small groups of schol-ars, usually engaged in transcribing a single teacher’s thoughts. Extensiveannotation is the norm. Of these fifty-two copies, only 6 percent are with-out annotation. 30 percent contain six or fewer notes; 12 percent containsix to twenty notes; 27 percent average around one note per page; and theremaining 25 percent contain at least two notes per page. Annotation is

23 Laur. Conv. Sopr. 453. At 1.124, f. 3r the annotator writes ‘‘Virg,’’ by a passage imi-tated in Aeneid 2.279, and at 1.212, f. 4v ‘‘Terrai trisyllabum’’ (Terrai with three sylla-bles).24 Gordon, A Bibliography of Lucretius, Appendix I.

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generally more extensive in paper copies than in the more expensive vellumcopies, and all those which lack any annotation are vellum, indicating cop-ies produced for collectors’ libraries, rarely touched by scholars. Some cop-ies, which bear extensive philological annotation, clearly served projects tocorrect the text, and early editions derive from some of them. Repeatedpatterns in annotation produced in multiple copies in the same city andperiod might provide evidence for classroom use, but no such patternsappear in the manuscripts, nor in the one hundred and seventy-two printedexamples I have examined. The majority of annotations are single words,brief marginal comments or pen strokes bringing attention to particularlines. It is common for notes to be duplicated, with some modification,from copy to copy when new manuscripts are made from annotated origi-nals.

Comparison reveals seven recurring subjects of annotation, each repre-senting a distinct type of reader interest. These are: philological corrections;notes about vocabulary; notes on poetry or referencing other poets; notabi-lia marking elements of Roman history and culture; notes of interest toscientific specialties, such as natural history, geology, or medicine; notes onatomism, physics, metaphysics, theology, or soul theory; and finally noteson Epicurean moral philosophy. Most manuscripts have multiple types ofmarginalia. Twenty-nine percent have more extensive annotation in onesection of the book than the rest, another indication of specific interests.

The most common notes in all Renaissance manuscripts of the classicsare corrections, the residue of pioneering philologists who labored to undothe mutilation classics suffered during manuscript transmission.25 Ninetypercent of Lucretius manuscripts contain corrections, and those which donot are those few with practically no notes. Thus, in most readers’ hands,the poem saw precisely the same use as less controversial classics. Everyscholar who annotated Lucretius in the manuscript period did so in part torepair the text, and some left no evidence of any other use of it.

The second most common category is notes recording unusual vocabu-lary, often by copying words into the margin. Some annotators copy a fewwords, others dozens or hundreds. Often the same words appear in multipleindependent copies, revealing words most scholars had not met before theyread Lucretius. For example, the rare verb cluere (to be named or esteemed)is marked in 27 percent of manuscripts and many print copies.26 Only rarely

25 See Avancius’s introduction to the 1500 Aldine Lucretius f. 3v.26 Cluere at 1.119, marked in Ambrosiana P.19 sup.; f. 4v; BM Harleian 2554, f. 3v;Cambridge Univ. Nn.2.40, f. 2v; Laur. 35.25, f. 3r, 35.31, f. 4r, and 35.32, f. 3r; NaplesNaz. IV E 51, f. 11v and in the index of vocabulary on 5r; Rome Nat. O.85, f. 3r; MunichC1–816a, f. 3r.

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does a commentator add a definition or synonym. The aim of these annota-tions is not to define words but to draw attention to new terms to be memo-rized. The Neapolitanus even includes a handwritten list of vocabularyorganized by page number for quick reference.27 Forty-four percent of themanuscripts mark Latin vocabulary, while 31 percent explore Greek, sinceLucretius frequently employs transliterated Greek, and annotators supplythe original in the margin.

In the third category, poetic comments, the passages marked are thosesimilar to, or imitated by, other classical poets. Brackets, pointing hands,or the names ‘‘Virg’’ or ‘‘Ovid’’ appear beside passages imitated by theseauthors.28 The Madrid manuscript follows the poem with a concordance ofLucretian lines in Virgil, Ennius,29 and others.30 Many readers also marklines with defective scansion.31 In sum, twenty-seven manuscripts, 52 per-cent, have poetic notes, of which fifteen explicitly mention Virgil, Ovid,Catullus, or Horace.32

The fourth category is notabilia, historical and cultural informationabout antiquity. Frequently annotators copy proper names into the margin,such as Iphianassa, Homer, Mount Etna, or the Phoeban Pythia.33 Sixteenmanuscripts mark a section in Book III in which Lucretius gives a Who’sWho of the underworld, listing famous sinners: Tantalus, Tytius, Sisyphus;and great men of the past: Xerxes, Scipio, Homer, and Epicurus himself.34

In sum, twenty-six manuscripts mark notabilia, so 50 percent of readers,more than marked vocabulary or poetry, used Lucretius in part as a source-book of general information about the classical world.

27 Naples Naz. IV E 51, inner flyleaf f. 5r.28 On Virgil and Lucretius see Sacre, ‘‘Nannius’s Somnia,’’ 80–84; Joseph Farrell, Vergil’sGeorgics and the Traditions of Ancient Epic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991);Richard Jenkyns, Virgil’s Experience: Nature and History, Times, Names, and Places(Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), especially chs. 5 and 6.29 See Skutsch’s commentary in The Annals of Q. Ennius (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 12and 147–57.30 Madrid Naz. 2995 ff. 154–163.31 See, for example, BM Harleian 2554 f. 34v (II 921).32 On Virgil in humanist education see Craig Kallendorf, The Virgilian Tradition: BookHistory and the History of Reading in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate/Vario-rum, 2007) and A Bibliography of Renaissance Italian Translations of Virgil (Florence:L.S. Olschki, 1994); David Scott Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2010).33 Iphianassa (1.85), Homer (1.124), Mount Etna (1.722), the Pythia (1.739).34 3.978–1045 noted in Cambridge Univ. Nn.11.40 ff. 48v–49v, Laur. 35.28 ff. 62v–63r,BAV Lat. 3276 f. 94v, Pius II’s copy Amb. E 125 Sup (120–122), Amb P.19 ff. 70v–71v,Padua BC C.75, Rome Nat. O.85 ff. 51r–52r, Bodleian Can. Lat. 32 ff. 48v–49v, NaplesNn.2.40 ff. 78r–79r, Marciana Cl. XII cod. 69, f. 49v and Munich Cl. 816a, ff. 68v–69v.

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The final three categories of annotation examine the poem’s philosoph-ical and scientific content. I treat as one category notes on geology, physics,medicine, or natural philosophy, because they do not reflect interest in Epi-cureanism as a functional system, nor in the proto-atheist aspects of Epicu-reanism. For example, four notes on storms in the Cambridge manuscriptdemonstrate an idiosyncratic interest in weather on the part of a readerwho did not mark any other atomistic discussions.35 Other readers markthe sections on magnets,36 wind and waves,37 property and accident,38 orsimulacra,39 but nothing on the basic properties of atoms. Medical issuesare frequently marked, including the plague, the effects of alcohol,40 epi-lepsy,41 and how disease seems to gradually erode the soul, which Lucretiusoffers as proof of the soul’s materiality and destructibility. In the last pas-sage, the lines which address disease are marked twice as often as theaccompanying claim that the soul is mortal. A collection of medical manu-scripts belonging to Galileo’s mentor Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1535–1601)excerpts the sections from Book VI on the Athenian plague, discarding thenon-medical sections of the poem.42 In sum, twenty-nine manuscripts, 58percent, mark non-atomistic natural philosophy, nineteen medical topics.

Of course, for Lucretius, natural philosophy and medicine are notdivorced from atomism or proto-atheist questions, since it was by explain-ing lightning or magnets mechanistically that Epicurus strove to free menfrom fear of oppressive gods. Yet it was possible, in fact easy, for thosereaders who picked through the De Rerum Natura looking for treatmentsof specific physical questions, intending to compare Lucretius to authorsalready in their repertoire, to skim the poem without seriously consideringthe atomist theory, or the notion of a materialist Nature empty of divine

35 Cambridge Univ. Nn.2.40 marks 1.489–497 f. 8r, 6.195–203 f. 93v, 6.239–245 f. 94v

and 6.594–6 f. 99v.36 Laur. 35.28, 6.909 and 911 f. 136r; Munich Cl. 816a f. 139v; Pierpont Morgan Ms.482 f. 130r 6.909–12; Cambridge Univ. Nn.2.40 f. 104r 6.916; also Machiavelli’s BAVRoss. lat. 884 f. 127r though he marks vocabulary, not magnets themselves.37 Munich Cl. 618a writes ‘‘VENTI’’ by 1.271 and ‘‘AQUAE’’ by 1.281 f. 6r–v.38 Marciana Cl. XII cod. 166 brackets I 451–4 10v.39 Rome Nat. O.85, 2.112 f. 19v. Ambros. P.19. sup. f. 89r contrasts Aristotle and Epicu-rus on vision at 4.823 f. 89r.40 3.476–486: marked in BAV Urb. Lat. 640 f. 51r; BAV Ott. lat. 1954, 1 f. 60r; VittorioEmanuelle O85 f. 43r; Naples Naz. IV E 51 ff. 67r–9r; Madrid Naz. 2885 f. 57v. Thepreceding discussion of disease is labeled ‘‘morbus leti fabricator’’ by 3.472 in MunichCl. 816a f. 55r.41 3.487–494: marked in Piacenza Land. Cod. 33 71r; BAV Ott. lat. 1954, 1 60r; Padova,Bib. Cap. C 75; Naples Naz. IV E 51 ff. 68r–9v.42 Ambrosiana G.67. inf.

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action. For example, none of Lucretius’s three suggestions for why thelengths of day and night vary actually mention atoms, merely the thicknessof air or the actions of the winds, which in these few lines could as easilybe gods as streams of matter.43 Excerpted, such a passage does not intro-duce the student of weather and astronomy to any radical Epicurean con-cepts. The strongest evidence of this tendency of readers to segregatesmaller questions from the Epicurean system is provided by the manuscriptat Piacenza, which demonstrates extraordinary scientific interest by illus-trating geometric, geographic, and astronomical discussions. Yet the illus-trations do not actually reflect the text.44 Beside Lucretius’s discussions ofday and night, the illustrator’s diagram demonstrates the traditionalChristian-Aristotelian model of the Earth and spheres, copied from Isidoreof Seville (ca. 560–636), with the elemental spheres of earth, water, air, andfire, a system which bears no relation to Lucretius’s atomism and, in fact,directly contradicts it. Even a reader concerned with science did not con-sider Epicureanism as a system. Picking selectively through Lucretius tofocus on those scientific discussions to which Epicurean physics is not actu-ally essential is not interest in atomism.

What moderns think of as the most essential elements of Epicureanphilosophy are very rarely marked. The few notes present in the portionsof books II, III, and V where Lucretius explains atomistic physics are almostalways corrections, vocabulary or notabilia. Fourteen manuscripts, 27 per-cent of the total, have notes on atomism, but half of these contain only oneor two brief notes on tangential subjects, such as vacuum, perishability, orthe names of Democritus and Heraclitus marked as notabilia. Iterations ofEpicurus’s claim that the universe existed from eternity, opposing the Chris-tian doctrine of creation in time, are marked in five manuscripts, less thanhalf the number which marked the famous men in Tartarus.45 As for Epicu-rean denial of the afterlife—the definition of Epicureanism for critics fromDante to Luther—only Pomponio Leto’s copy and three copied from itmarked the ‘‘opinio non Christiana.’’46 In fact, attention to atomism inmanuscripts is so rare that the three manuscripts which do treat it moreextensively, discussed individually below, are extremely conspicuous. There

43 DRN V.680–704.44 Piacenza, Cod. 33; 1507. Reeve (1980): 31; Barbara Obrist, ‘‘Wind Diagrams andMedieval Cosmology,’’ Speculum 72 (1997): 33–84.45 1.159–204, marked in BAV Ott.lat.1954, BAV Ott.lat.2834 (1.159–204, f. 3v, 4v),Ambros. E.125 Sup. (1.46, p. 2), Laur. 35.32 marks (1.159, 4r), Naples Naz. IV E 51f. 10r.46 Naples Naz. IV E 51; Bodleian Can. Lat. 32, Basel F.VIII.14 and Berlin Lat. Fol. 544.

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is not space here for a thorough treatment of the incunables, which wereproduced and used in the same years as the manuscripts, but in these toothe few with atomist annotation stand out conspicuously against manydominated by the other categories of marginalia.47

While notes on atomism or pseudo-atheist doctrines are rare in manu-scripts, notes on Epicurean moral philosophy are common. The most fre-quently marked passage in the text is a description in Book IV of how toavoid the snares of love, marked in 30 percent of manuscripts. The statedgoal of Epicureanism is to help adherents achieve pleasure and escape pain,and this passage explains one of its key tools, the rejection of romantic lovein favor of temperate, reasoned relations between lovers. Elsewhere in thetext, similar passages of moral philosophy are marked more than twice asoften as passages of natural philosophy. In sum, 56 percent of readersmarked at least one passage of Epicurean moral advice, more than anyother topic except for non-atomist natural philosophy. Most readers sawEpicurean moral advice, more than Epicurean science, as the philosophicalcore of the text.

This moral focus is not exclusive to Lucretius, nor are these larger cate-gories such as philological notes and notabilia. Craig Kallendorf in his workon classroom notes in early editions of Virgil was struck by the frequencyof notes on the poem’s moral character, which he too saw as conspicuouslydifferent from other common notes which focused, as they do in Lucretius,on vocabulary, grammar, mythology, and poetic questions.48 Howevermuch both poets might praise the happiness which comes from knowledgeof nature, these annotators clearly read both Lucretius and Virgil for moralphilosophy, literary and historical information, more often than for scienceor religion.49

Alison Brown and others have highlighted the importance of Lucreti-us’s discussion of primitive man, and its influence on theories of primitivism

47 Girolamo Borgia’s transcription of Pontano’s notes in BL IA.23564; Ambros. INC.186(1495); Marciana Incun. Ven.702 (1495); BL IB.30763 (1486); Bodl. Auct. 2 R 4.50(1500), whose annotations Michael Reeve has helped me identify, on the basis of prove-nance, as likely the work of Donato Giannotti; and Paris M YC 397, V95 (1495) pointedout to me by Alison Brown, see The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 118.48 Kallendorf, ‘‘Marginalia and the Rise of Early Modern Subjectivity,’’ 114; see alsoCraig Kallendorf, Virgil and the Myth of Venice: Books and Readers in the Italian Renais-sance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 31–90.49 Georgics II 490–492, often cited by Renaissance Lucreziani to emphasize Virgil’s debtto Lucretius.

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and incremental development.50 The treatment of the infancy of the Earthhas substantial annotation in six manuscripts,51 and the creation of lan-guage in five,52 while ten mark 5.1105–1140, which describes the miserablefate of those who pursue power and wealth, and promotes Epicurus’s fun-damental doctrine that true happiness comes only with tranquility.53 Whilethe whole discussion of primitivism interested some, greater interest wasreserved for moral issues: fortune, ambition, tranquility, and the virtuesPetrarch’s followers hoped to promote.

The overwhelming majority of notes, over 90 percent, fall into the firstfour categories discussed: philology, literary questions, vocabulary, andnotabilia; categories which document activity unrelated to the poem’s phil-osophical content. This abundance of philological interest in the poem, andthe many copies which contain no philosophical annotation, prove that ahuge portion of the scholarly energy applied to Lucretius in the fifteenthand early sixteenth centuries focused, not on the poem’s message, but ontextual repair. The humanist desire to restore the ancient world through thereconstruction of its libraries was enough by itself to draw scholarly energyto a work. Some scholars were seriously interested in atomism in thisperiod, a well-established fact for which I shall discuss fresh evidencebelow, but these radicals comprised a tiny minority of those responsible forthe repair and multiplication of the poem. Even had no such radicalsexisted, the humanist obsession with textual repair, manifest in this exten-sive non-philosophical annotation, would have ensured the poem’s survivaland multiplication. These annotations document how humanist faith in theinherent value of good Latin, especially poetry, was enough to guaranteethe dissemination of a classical text, even if no one involved supported thetheories explained therein. This interest in form, independent of content,

50 DRN 5.772–1104. Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (2010)especially chs. 2 and 3; Gordon Campbell, Lucretius on Creation and Evolution: A Com-mentary on De rerum natura, Book 5, Lines 772–1104 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2003).51 BL Harl. 2612 f. 94v, BAV Ott. lat. 1954 f. 118r, Walters W.383 f. 98v, Padua, Biblio-teca Capitolare C.75, Naples Naz. IV E 51 ff. 122r–124v, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibli-othek Cod. lat. mon. 816a ff. 110v–111v.52 Laur. 35.28 brackets V 925–975 ff. 108v–109r. Also marked in Verolano’s BAV Ott.lat. 1954 22r, Piacenza Passerini-Landi Cod. 33 f. 152r, Ambrosiana P.19 sup. f. 120v andLaur. 35.27 f. 128v.53 Ambrosiana P.19 sup. pf. 122v, Walters W.383 f. 103r, BAV Urb. Lat. 640 f. 105v,Pierpont Morgan MS 482 f. 107r, Piacenza Passerini-Landi Cod. 33 f. 144r, Verolano’sBAV Ott. lat. 1954f. 103r, BAV Barb. lat. 154 f. 103r, Marciana Cl. XII cod. 69, BaselF.VIII.14, ff. 101v–109r.

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stocked the libraries of later generations with heterodox ideas well beforeinterest in their heterodox potential became widespread.

Of course, moderate humanists were aware of the danger that Lucre-tius and other classics might spread unorthodoxy. Lucretius himselfoccupies a key position in the history of censorship, specifically in theRenaissance debate over whether the beautiful language of the pagan clas-sics can spread heresy. This issue, recently addressed by Valentina Pros-peri,54 centers on Lucretius’s statement that he chose to explicate Epicureanphilosophy in verse to make it more palatable, as a doctor smears honeyaround the rim of a cup of bitter wormwood to trick a child into drinkingit.55 Recall that Petrarch, one of the founders of humanism, claimed thatclassical rhetoric, the ‘‘words that sting and bite’’ in Plato, Cicero, and oth-ers, drive men toward virtue.56 His successors believed that a classical edu-cation would make men better Christians as well as better citizens. AsVictoria Kahn has pointed out, Petrarch’s claim is founded on the argu-ment, from Aristotle and Cicero, that eloquence is inherently tied to virtue,because only truth and virtue can make words persuasive.57 If rhetoric isonly powerful when combined with truth, then a Christian scholar cansafely circulate Lucretius without fear of weakening Christianity, since theheretical parts will be inherently unconvincing. Petrarch would expect thereader to take away from Lucretius only true ideas and the beautiful lan-guage, useful for promoting Christian values. Lucretius himself disagrees,and by so doing threatens to strengthen opposition to the study of paganclassics. Lucretius’s is hardly the only classical claim that rhetoric canstrengthen otherwise-unconvincing arguments—Cicero and the sophiststreat the question often—but discussions of the moral character of a trueorator in Cicero and Quintilian made it easy to place unscrupulous orators-for-hire in a separate category. Ficino did this when he argued that Platouses rhetorical ornament only to lure men toward Truth (i.e. doctrines com-patible with Christianity). The wormwood simile, on the other hand,implies that not just sophists but philosophers and poets employed decep-

54 Valentina Prosperi, Di soavi licor gli orli del vaso: la fortuna di Lucrezio dall’Umanes-imo alla Controriforma, (Turin: N. Aragno, 2004); also ‘‘Lucretius in the Italian Renais-sance,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2007), 214–26. See also Charlotte Goddard, ‘‘Epicureanism and the Poetry ofLucretius in the Renaissance,’’ (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge,1991).55 1.935–950.56 De Ignorantia 22.57 Rhetoric, Prudence and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1985), 29–35.

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tive rhetoric, and, worse, that Lucretius’s imitator Virgil, whose centralposition in the humanist curriculum required that he remain unimpeach-able, might be similarly deceptive. Lucretius’s wormwood simile is markedin ten manuscripts.58 Literary elements account for some of the interest,since a similar image appears in Plato, Horace, and Ausonius,59 but it wasstill marked by more readers than any other single poetic image.

In view of the manuscript marginalia, Lucretius’s hopes that the per-suasive power of language will perpetuate his work have certainly cometrue. At the same time, the notes suggest that the lure of poetry did notsucceed so well in directing scholarly energy into the avenues Lucretiushoped. Annotation on the systematic, atomist, proto-atheist, and material-ist core of Epicureanism remains a miniscule minority throughout themanuscript period. This pattern holds even for important scholars; NiccoloNiccoli’s notes are exclusively philological,60 and Poliziano’s almost exclu-sively so, though he marks some notabilia and vocabulary.61 The Vaticancopy with the notes of Antonio Panormita (1394–1471), whose Epicureaninterests were sufficient for Valla to cast him as the Epicurean interlocutorfor his De Voluptate (1431/1433), contains corrections, vocabulary, andnotabilia but nothing on philosophy.62 This does not in any sense provethat these scholars and their many anonymous peers did not examine thecontent at all, merely that, during the first contact recorded in this annota-tion, even someone as engaged with Epicureanism as Panormita poured tentimes as much energy into understanding Lucretius’s language as he didinto understanding his materialist theory. Lucretius’s impact and readers’interest were predominantly literary and moral. Fifty-one percent of ourreaders demonstrate interest in Epicurean moral precepts, but forty-sixmanuscripts together have among them fewer than a dozen notes on atom-ism and religion.

I say forty-six because there are six exceptions: Pomponio Leto’s Nea-politanus and its three derivatives at Oxford, Basel, and Berlin, one Lauren-tianus with notes associated with Marcello Adriani, and a delicate littlepaper volume at the Vatican which contains the entire poem transcribed by

58 Cambridge Univ. Nn.2.40 f. 14v, Naples Naz. IV E 51 f. 28v, Padua BC C.75, Bodleian,Can. lat. 32 f. 19r, BAV Ottob. Lat. 2834 f. 17r, BAV Ottob. Lat. 1954 f. 20r, BAV Ross.lat. 884 17v. On rhetorical ornament in Plato and Origen see James Hankins, Plato in theItalian Renaissance (New York: Brill, 1991), 1: 337–38.59 Plato, Laws, 2.659, Horace Satires, 1.1.25, Ausonius, Epistles 17.407.2.60 Laur. 35.30.61 Laur. 35.29; cf. Reeve (1980), 39–40.62 BAV Vat. Lat. 3276, dated 1442.

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Machiavelli. These exceptions deserve special attention. Again, the absenceof such annotation in other copies does not prove the absence of otherinterest in Epicureanism, and recent studies of figures from Valla to Botti-celli prove that Lucretian images touched many in the fifteenth century.63

Yet if out of more than fifty learned readers only these six exceptions—threeif we count the Leto and his derivatives as one64—marked Epicurean coredoctrines, the distinct way these three annotators interacted with the textclearly records something unusual, even within the narrow population thatwas reading Lucretius in the Renaissance.

Pomponio Leto experienced first-hand what was at stake in the associ-ation of the classics with irreligion, suffering imprisonment and torture overallegations that his teaching at the University of Rome promoted paganism,heresy, sodomy, and anti-papal conspiracy. Leto worked extensively onLucretius, annotating multiple copies and composing the oldest survivingbiography of the poet. Leto’s Lucretian interest is not surprising, since hewas the student and successor of Lorenzo Valla (1407–57). Though moreextensive than most annotators’ notes, Leto’s follow the same patterns,exhibiting all of the more common types (corrections, notabilia, etc.) andfocusing on standard passages like Acheron and the snares of Venus. Atypi-cally, however, Leto gives as much attention to the oft-neglected Books IIand III as he does to the remainder of the text, and even inserts originalsubject headings labeling the Epicurean arguments.65 Leto clearly disagreedwith these ideas, even writing ‘‘error’’ beside the Lucretian argument thatthe world was not made for man. Leto’s characterization of Lucretius’sattacks on the soul’s immortality as ‘‘opinio non christiana’’ predate by atleast fifteen years the Apostolici Regiminis, issued at the Fifth LateranCouncil in 1513, which made the soul’s immortality an official de fide doc-trine.

63 For a survey, see Valentina Prosperi, ‘‘Lucretius in the Italian Renaissance,’’ The Cam-bridge Companion to Lucretius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 214–26.Also copied from the Neapolitanus after Leto worked on it are the two copies made byLeto’s colleague Giovanni Sulpizio Verolano (Verulanus) in 1466, BAV Ottob. Lat. 1954and Baltimore Walters 383, but while these two reflect many of Leto’s corrections theydo not duplicate his comments on the ‘‘opinio non christiana’’ or other such analyticcomments. See Reeve (1980), 35.64 There is not space here to thoroughly examine the two derivatives, but they are theanonymous annotation in Bodleian Can. Lat. 32, and the notes in Basel Univ. F viii 14,owned and possibly annotated by Bonifacius Amorbach, both of which duplicate somebut not all of Leto’s philosophical annotation.65 In the Neapolitanus, Leto labels seven sub-arguments against the immortality of thesoul, and marks discussions of first motion (2.134–7, Naples Naz. IV E 51 f. 35r), thepurpose of the world (2.177–9, f. 36r), fear of death (3.59–94, f. 58v), and how philoso-phy frees man from fear (2.52–61, f. 33v).

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To address the question of innocent dissimulation for a moment, I donot believe that, amid so many hundreds of notes, Leto would have labeledthese error just to make himself seem pious to later users of the manuscript.Nor, if that had been his goal, would he have marked these few and notthe dozens of other points where Lucretius contradicts Christian doctrine.Rather, I believe Leto sought to understand and refute these particularattacks on the immortal soul model, a model vital to Christianity as well asto Platonism, Pythagoreanism, and other classical theologies. Leto does notgive special attention to any elements of atomic theory except those whichattack the centrality of man and his soul in the universe. Leto’s focus on thesoul and moral aspects of Epicurean doctrine is consistent with the moralfocus of our other annotators. This also parallels the focus of Leto’s master,Valla’s, De Voluptate, in which Valla’s Epicurean spokesman competeswith a Stoic rival almost exclusively over moral issues, largely avoidingmention of Epicurus’s scientific teachings.

In the search for fifteenth-century atomism, one suspect proposed byrecent scholars is the Florentine teacher and successor to Poliziano, Mar-cello Adriani. The critical Lucretius manuscript, Laurenziana 35.32, doesnot contain Adriani’s hand, but several anonymous notes attributingalternate textual readings to ‘‘Marcellus.’’66 Citing Lucretian passages inAdriani’s surviving lectures, Alison Brown has argued that Adriani usedLucretius in his teaching in Florence between 1494 and 1515, likely spark-ing the 1517 ban.67 Brown argues that Laur. 35.32 was annotated by some-one associated with Adriani, a thesis supported not only by the referencesto ‘‘Marcellus’’ but by the presence of some conspicuous philosophicalnotes. The manuscript contains, along with philological and vocabularynotes, a note on whether anything can arise from nothing,68 notes on saltand evaporation,69 and on Lucretius’s argument that all compound thingsmust be perishable.70 The fact, established by my survey, that such atomistcomments are extraordinarily rare in this period greatly reinforces the sig-nificance of Brown’s discovery. Adriani’s Florentine circle left, in the mar-gins of the poem, records of strong and immediate interest in its atomism,proving that, while Rome and Naples were also significant Lucretian cen-ters, Epicureanism was received and read in Florence in a unique and radi-cal way.

66 Reeve (1980), 45–7.67 Brown (2010), ch. 3.68 1.159; Laur. 35.32, f. 4r.69 1.304; ibid. f. 7r.70 1.792; ibid. f. 16r.

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As for Adriani’s colleague and possible pupil Machiavelli, his notes areeven more distinctive.71 His manuscript, likely completed before 1500 andcertainly before 1512,72 has very few poetic notes, no notabilia, and nocorrections because he corrected as he copied, though the debate over hissources is ongoing.73 His annotation, which is limited, is concentrated inBook II, in which he adds roughly twenty summary headings, some basedon the medieval ones and some original, pointing out the passages whichexplain how an atomistic universe would function.74 Machiavelli’s are thusthe only annotations in which the question of the validity of atomism as aphysical theory stand out as the primary subject. He left few marks in anyother part of the book, except for a textual variant in the section of bookVI on magnets, and duplicating the common interest in the honey andwormwood simile.75 Though his note ‘‘Comp’’ for comparatio is a commonway of marking a beautiful poetic simile, used at this point by several otherannotators, the wormwood passage is particularly Machiavellian in itsassertion that one can do good through careful administration of construc-tive harm, and in the subtle distinction it draws in saying that the child isdeceived but not betrayed. It is striking too that the only poetic passageMachiavelli chose to mark was this, whose statement that rhetoric can beused to trick people into accepting unorthodoxy was so problematic forthose defenders of the classics who liked to claim that the ancients couldnever threaten Christianity.

Machiavelli is famous for his radical contributions to moral philoso-phy, yet the sections on Epicurean moral philosophy, which fifty-nine per-cent of readers marked, he leaves blank. He is not particularly interested inthe Epicurean views on love, virtue and vice, which are, though radical byChristian standards, considerably less radical than the consequentialist eth-ics which Machiavelli is in the process of developing. Yet Machiavelli theradical moral philosopher is present in these notes in his exceptional inter-

71 Sergio Bertelli ‘‘Noterelle machiavelliane: un codice di Lucrezio e di Terenzio,’’ RivistaStorica Italiana 28 (1954): 10–20; W. A. Merrill, ‘‘The Italian Manuscripts of Lucretius,’’Philology 9 (Berkeley: 1926–1929): 347; C. E. Finch, ‘‘Machiavelli’s Copy of Lucretius,’’The Classical Journal 56 (1960–61): 29–32.72 Brown (2010), 58.73 On Machiavelli’s sources in preparing the manuscript see Brown (2010), Appendix,113–22.74 Vat. Ross. Lat. 840 ff. 20v–32r. Since we retain several sources clearly close to thoseused by Machiavelli which contain no comparable marginal labels, I do not find it plausi-ble that these labels are copied from a lost intermediary source; see Brown (2010) 74–5and n. 15.75 ibid. On Magnets 127r–128v, on the wormwood simile f. 17v.

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est in Epicurean science, whose materialism and functionless gods enableone to divorce moral philosophy from divine concerns. Machiavelli himselfwill employ such a divorce in his pioneering utilitarian ethics, which eval-uates actions based on their material consequences rather than theiradherence to the laws of Nature’s God. We have no direct evidence thatMachiavelli was an atomist,76 but if Epicureanism was feared in the Renais-sance because its materialistic physics might facilitate pseudo-atheism, thatdangerous potential seems proved by the fact that atomist materialism wasexceptionally interesting to Machiavelli, whose revolutionary this-worldly,man-centered, consequentialist ethics would earn him titles like ‘‘Arch-Heretic’’ and ‘‘Destroyer of Italy’’ on later lists of famous atheists.Machaivelli’s exceptional notes thus half break with the moral obsessionsof his humanist peers, since he marks science instead of moral philosophy,but the manifestations of this interest in his own work will still be in themoral arena.77

Stepping back again from our three exceptions, the aspects of Epicu-rean moral philosophy which so many chose to annotate were not the radi-cal proto-atheist aspects, but those most similar to the Stoic and Platonicphilosophers, whose systems humanist syncretism liked to present as oneconsistent whole, and as compatible with Christianity. Despite Lucretius’sintent, his moral arguments were, like details of natural philosophy, easilysplintered off from the materialist atomism at the system’s core. Just as thePiacenza manuscript could illustrate Lucretius’s discussions of astronomywith diagrams grounded in Isidore and Aristotle, humanists could readLucretius’s warnings about love and greed in the light of Neoplatonism,Christianity or both. Readers’ tendencies to skim quickly through the atom-ist sections of Books II and III with little annotation, pausing only forfamous names and colorful similes, demonstrates how a discerning readercould easily sup the honey without downing the wormwood. For the fif-teenth and early sixteenth centuries, Petrarch’s claim that an orthodoxreader will find the ‘‘errors’’ of the ancients inherently impotent and uncon-vincing holds true. The elevated status which humanism gave to the threegoals of gaining eloquence, encyclopedic knowledge of all things ancient,and classical virtue, were motive enough to read Lucretius. Protected by themental filter of preconceived models, both of God and Nature and of the

76 Paul Rahe, Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under theEnglish Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), especially chs. 1–2.77 For another interpretation of the question, see Brown (2010), ch. 4; Brown, ‘‘Religionand Philosophy in Machiavelli,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, ed. JohnNajemy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010), 157–72.

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ancient world, a disinterested eye might skip anything which seemed con-fused or wrong, an action which the authors of introductions to sixteenth-century Lucretius editions overtly encouraged readers to do.78 Those whoseattention did linger on atomist questions formed a tiny, though extremelyimportant, minority of Lucretius’s readership. If only three annotators outof more than fifty commented on the poem’s atomist core, it is not unrea-sonable to estimate that, for each of the Renaissance radicals historianshave identified who detectibly used core elements of Epicureanism in theirown works, there were twenty more scholars who read Lucretius butabsorbed and used only his orthodox content.

Thus Lucretius was read, repaired and copied by the energies of a com-paratively orthodox humanist community largely divorced from the farsmaller radical subsection of humanists who were at the same time inter-ested in the poem’s core doctrines. The same energies printed him. Thirtyeditions of the De Rerum Natura appeared between 1473 and 1600, rang-ing from three massive commentaries to ten cheap pocket editions.79 Theeditors who framed the text for mass-production focus in their paratextson the same three goals humanists had long read for: eloquent language,general information about the ancient world, and moral content. Apolo-getic biographies, frequently inserted as front matter, generally portray aLucretius who is divorced from Epicurus, and sounds as close as possibleto his more palatable Stoic and Neoplatonic peers.80 Thus, throughout thesixteenth century, paratexts repeated overtly the patterns of interest whichhad privately dominated Lucretius’s readers throughout the manuscriptperiod. In the eyes of book-buyer, teacher and censor, the reasons to readLucretius were wholly orthodox. Many moderns would suspect these edi-tors of practicing innocent dissimulation, using these justifications to con-ceal a more radical agenda, but that interpretation is far from necessary.These editors presented in their paratexts precisely the motives for readingLucretius which did indeed dominate among their peers.

The marginalia in print editions show when those motives changed.There is not room here to fully examine print marginalia, but my statistical

78 See, for example, Nicolaus Beraldus’ letter in Pius’ annotated edition of 1511, whichcalls atoms and vacuum foolish dreams, and recommends the poem for its ability toinspire virtue (Paris, 1514), f. Aiv.79 Gordon (1962) provides a list, though the supposed 1596 edition is a ghost; on a possi-ble thirty-first edition see Martin Ferguson Smith and David Butterfield, ‘‘Not a Ghost:the 1496 Brescia Edition of Lucretius,’’ Aevum 84 (Milan: 2010), 683–93.80 All eight humanist biographies of Lucretius are printed in Giuseppe Solaro, Lucrezio:Biografie umanistiche (Bari: Dedalo, 2000).

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sampling of 127 printed copies draws from as diverse a sample as possible,held in libraries in Europe and America and including examples of all thirtyextant editions.81 Despite printed marginal glosses, which appear as early asthe second Lucretius edition of 1486, surviving examples of the six editionsprinted up to 1512 are almost all hand annotated, and it is not until the1550s that the frequency of hand marginalia drops to half or below. Thissupports William Sherman’s findings that sixty to seventy percent of incu-nables contain annotations, dropping to fifty percent at the end of the six-teenth century.82

Hand annotations in Lucretius volumes printed in the early sixteenthcentury largely continue the patterns of manuscript marginalia, markingpoetry, vocabulary, notabilia, and scientific trivia, but notes on atomisticscience crop up with gradually increasing frequency, becoming common inthe 1560s. Philological notes, meanwhile, which so dominated manuscriptmarginalia, decrease in frequency as improved editions reduce the need tocorrect the text. Non-philosophical annotation does not die out, it merelytakes on secondary importance. Montaigne’s famous annotations in hiscopy of the 1563 Lambin edition contain carefully indexed philological cor-rections, but concentrate three times as many notes on philosophical andscientific matters as on philology, and the oft-neglected Book III receivesthe most attention and praise.83 Nor is Montaigne far from the rule here,since, in copies printed in the same decade, serious annotation on atomisticquestions appears in more than half of the substantially annotated copies.This is not the place to discuss the many causes of this reversal of interestin philology and proto-atheist science. This study simply establishes, clearlyand quantifiably, that scholars who read Lucretius in the late sixteenth cen-tury did so in a very different way from their predecessors in the manuscriptperiod. Yet it was thanks to those predecessors that later readers foundLucretius explicated and accessible on their shelves. The humanist hungerfor eloquence, notabilia and classical virtue secured the transmission ofLucretius to later scholars, among whom the appetite for heterodox sciencewas much more common.

81 On debates over changes in hand annotation after the advent of print see Saenger andHeinlen, ‘‘Incunable Description and Its Implication for the Analysis of Fifteenth-CenturyReading Habits’’ in Sandra Hindman ed., Printing the Written Word: the Social Historyof Books, circa 1450–1520 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) 253–4; Sherman(2002); Kallendorf (2005), 111–113.82 Sherman, 124.83 Michael Screech, Montaigne’s Annotated Copy of Lucretius (Geneva: Librairie Droz,1998), especially 111; Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve. How the Renaissance Began(New York: Norton, 2011), 243–249, especially 249.

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While preparing the 1557 edition of the Catholic Index of bannedbooks, the Commissioner General of the Inquisition, Michele Ghislieri,wrote of his fear that overly-strong restrictions might target such nobleauthors as Lucian and Lucretius.84 Ghislieri’s selection of Lucretius as anexample of a good text which might be inappropriately censored by anti-Reformation zeal proves the success of humanist defenses of the poet, andthe classical canon in general. ‘‘Epicurean’’ may be a generic term of abuse,applicable in Catholic eyes to Lutheran and sodomite alike, but Lucretius’sstatus as part of the Latin canon makes him inherently valuable, and assum-edly safe. This comparative amnesty enjoyed by a classical radical is one ofthe great triumphs of humanism. Since so many fifteenth- and early six-teenth-century readers valued form over content, and orthodox moral phi-losophy over radical ideas, the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries werea period in which the radical content of the classics rarely had a seriouseffect even on those who did read the works which contained it. Yet thisvery buffer made scholars and authorities believe the books were safe, mak-ing it easy for texts to penetrate print shops and classrooms across the liter-ate world. While Reformation tensions multiplied fear of heresy on allsides, Lucretius and other classics could diffuse comparatively freelythrough European libraries. As the seventeenth century approached, suchancient sourcebooks were thus easily available to a new generation of read-ers, a far larger proportion of whom was ready to seriously examine andabsorb scientific radicalism. If Lucretius was rediscovered in 1417, he wasrediscovered again in the 1560s, when the act of reading changed.

Texas A & M University.

84 Letter of June 27 1557 to Inquisitor General de Genes, in P. Paschini, ‘‘Letterati edindice nella Riforma cattolica in Italia’’ in Cinquecento romano e riforma cattolica, Later-numum special XXIV (1958), 239. See also Pastor, Histoire des papes (Paris: Plon), XIV,223 n. 3; Jesus Martınez de Bujanda, Index des Livres Interdits (Sherbrooke: Droz, 2002)8:32 n. 14; Prosperi, ch. 2.

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