The Swerve: How the World Became Modern Part 7

Why did it matter? As More's Utopia had made clear, divine providence and the soul's postmortem rewards and punishments were non-negotiable beliefs, even in playful fantasies about non-Christian peoples at the edge of the known world. But the Utopians did not base their doctrinal insistence on their understanding of physics. Why would the Jesuits, at once the most militant and the most intellectually sophisticated Catholic order in this period, commit themselves to the thankless task of trying to eradicate atoms? After all, the notion of the invisible seeds of things had never completely vanished during the Middle Ages. The core idea of the universe's basic material building blocks-atoms-had survived the loss of the ancient texts. Atoms could even be spoken of without substantial risk, provided that they were said to be set in motion and ordered by divine providence. And there remained within the highest reaches of the Catholic Church daring speculative minds eager to grapple with the new science. Why should atoms in the High Renaissance have come to seem, in some quarters at least, so threatening?

The short answer is that the recovery and recirculation of Lucretius' On the Nature of Things had succeeded in linking the very idea of atoms, as the ultimate substrate of all that exists, with a host of other, dangerous claims. Detached from any context, the idea that all things might consist of innumerable invisible particles did not seem particularly disturbing. After all, the world had to consist of something. But Lucretius' poem restored to atoms their missing context, and the implications-for morality, politics, ethics, and theology-were deeply upsetting.

Those implications were not immediately apparent to everyone. Savonarola may have mocked the pointy-headed intellectuals who thought the world was made up out of invisible particles, but on this issue at least he was playing for laughs, not yet calling for an auto-da-fe. Catholics like Erasmus and More could, as we have seen, think seriously about how to integrate elements of Epicureanism with the Christian faith. And in 1509, when Raphael painted the School of Athens in the Vatican-his magnificent vision of Greek philosophy-he seems to have been sublimely confident that the whole cla.s.sical inheritance, not simply the work of a select few, could live in harmony with the Christian doctrine being earnestly debated by the theologians depicted on the opposite wall. Plato and Aristotle have pride of place in Raphael's luminous scene, but there is room under the capacious arch for all of the major thinkers, including-if traditional identifications are correct-Hypatia of Alexandria and Epicurus.

But by midcentury, this confidence was no longer possible. In 1551 the theologians at the Council of Trent had, to their satisfaction at least, resolved once and for all the debates that had swirled around the precise nature of the central Christian mystery. They had confirmed as Church dogma the subtle arguments with which Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, drawing on Aristotle, had attempted to reconcile transubstantiation-the metamorphosis of the consecrated water and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ-with the laws of physics. Aristotle's distinction between the "accidents" and the "substance" of matter made it possible to explain how something that looked and smelled and tasted exactly like a piece of bread could actually (and not merely symbolically) be Christ's flesh. What the human senses experienced was merely the accidents of bread; the substance of the consecrated wafer was G.o.d.

The theologians at Trent presented these ingenious arguments not as a theory but as the truth, a truth utterly incompatible with Epicurus and Lucretius. The problem with Epicurus and Lucretius was not their paganism-after all, Aristotle too was a pagan-but rather their physics. Atomism absolutely denied the key distinction between substance and accidents, and therefore threatened the whole magnificent intellectual edifice resting on Aristotelian foundations. And this threat came at exactly the moment when Protestants had mounted their most serious a.s.sault on Catholic doctrine. That a.s.sault did not depend on atomism-Luther and Zwingli and Calvin were not Epicureans, any more than Wycliffe and Hus had been-but for the militant, embattled forces of the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church, it was as if the resurgence of ancient materialism had opened a dangerous second front. Indeed, atomism seemed to offer the Reformers access to an intellectual weapon of ma.s.s destruction. The Church was determined not to allow anyone to lay hands on this weapon, and its ideological arm, the Inquisition, was alerted to detect the telltale signs of proliferation.

"Faith must take first place among all the other laws of philosophy," declared a Jesuit spokesman in 1624, "so that what, by established authority, is the word of G.o.d may not be exposed to falsity." The words were a clear warning to curb unacceptable speculation: "The only thing necessary to the Philosopher, in order to know the truth, which is one and simple, is to oppose whatever is contrary to Faith and to accept that which is contained in Faith." The Jesuit did not specify a specific target of this warning, but contemporaries would have easily understood that his words were particularly directed at the writer of a recently published scientific work called The a.s.sayer. That writer was Galileo Galilei.

Galileo had already been in trouble for using his astronomical observations to support the Copernican claim that the earth was in orbit around the sun. Under pressure from the Inquisition, he had pledged not to continue to advance this claim. But The a.s.sayer, published in 1623, demonstrated that the scientist was continuing to tread on extremely dangerous ground. Like Lucretius, Galileo defended the oneness of the celestial and terrestrial world: there was no essential difference, he claimed, between the nature of the sun and the planets and the nature of the earth and its inhabitants. Like Lucretius, he believed that everything in the universe could be understood through the same disciplined use of observation and reason. Like Lucretius, he insisted on the testimony of the senses, against, if necessary, the orthodox claims of authority. Like Lucretius, he sought to work through this testimony toward a rational comprehension of the hidden structures of all things. And like Lucretius, he was convinced that these structures were by nature const.i.tuted by what he called "minims" or minimal particles, that is, const.i.tuted by a limited repertory of atoms combined in innumerable ways.

Galileo had friends in the highest places: The a.s.sayer was dedicated to none other than the enlightened new pope, Urban VIII, who as Cardinal Maffeo Barbarini had warmly supported the great scientist's research. As long as the pope was willing to protect him, Galileo could hope to get away with the expression of his views and with the scientific investigations that they helped to generate. But the pope himself was under growing pressure to suppress what many in the Church, the Jesuits above all, regarded as particularly noxious heresies. On August 1, 1632, the Society of Jesus strictly prohibited and condemned the doctrine of atoms. That prohibition in itself could not have precipitated a move against Galileo, since The a.s.sayer had been cleared eight years earlier for publication. But Galileo's publication, also in 1632, of the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems gave his enemies the opportunity that they had been looking for: they promptly denounced him to the Congregation of the Holy Office, as the Inquisition was called.

On June 22, 1633, the Inquisition delivered its verdict: "We say, sentence, and declare that you, Galileo, by reason of the evidence arrived at in the trial, and by you confessed as above, have rendered yourself in the judgment of this Holy Office vehemently suspected of heresy." Still protected by powerful friends and hence spared torture and execution, the convicted scientist was sentenced to life imprisonment, under house arrest. The heresy officially specified in the verdict was "having believed and held the doctrine, false and contrary to sacred and divine Scripture, that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west and that the Earth moves and is not the center of the world." But in 1982 an Italian scholar, Pietro Redondi, uncovered a doc.u.ment in the archives of the Holy Office that altered the picture. The doc.u.ment was a memorandum detailing heresies found in The a.s.sayer. Specifically, the inquisitor found evidence of atomism. Atomism, explained the inquisitor, is incompatible with the second canon of the thirteenth session of the Council of Trent, the session that spelled out the dogma of the Eucharist. If you accept Signor Galileo Galilei's theory, the doc.u.ment observes, then when you find in the Most Holy Sacrament "the objects of touch, sight, taste, etc.," characteristic of bread and wine, you will also have to say, according to the same theory, that these characteristics are produced on our senses by "very tiny particles." And from this you will have to conclude "that in the Sacrament there must be substantial parts of bread and wine," a conclusion that is flat-out heresy. Thirty-three years after the execution of Bruno, atomism remained a belief that the vigilant forces of orthodoxy were determined to suppress.

If complete suppression proved impossible, there was some consolation for the enemies of Lucretius in the fact that most printed editions carried disclaimers. One of the most interesting of these is in the text used by Montaigne, the 1563 edition annotated by Denys Lambin. It is true, Lambin concedes, that Lucretius denies the immortality of the soul, rejects divine providence, and claims that pleasure is the highest good. But "even though the poem itself is alien to our religion because of its beliefs," Lambin writes, "it is no less a poem." Once the distinction has been drawn between the work's beliefs and its artistic merit, the full force of that merit can be safely acknowledged: "Merely a poem? Rather it is an elegant poem, a magnificent poem, a poem highlighted, recognized and praised by all wise men." What about the content of the poem, "these insane and frenzied ideas of Epicurus, those absurdities about a fortuitous conjunction of atoms, about innumerable worlds, and so on"? Secure in their faith, Lambin writes, good Christians do not have to worry: "neither is it difficult for us to refute them, nor indeed is it necessary, certainly when they are most easily disproved by the voice of truth itself or by everyone remaining silent about them." Disavowal shades into a rea.s.surance subtly conjoined with a warning: sing the praises of the poem, but remain silent about its ideas.

The aesthetic appreciation of Lucretius depended on the possession of very good Latin, and hence the poem's circulation was limited to a relatively small, elite group. Everyone grasped that any attempt to make it more broadly accessible to the literate public would arouse the deepest suspicion and hostility from the authorities. More than two hundred years apparently pa.s.sed, after Poggio's discovery in 1417, before an attempt was actually made.

But by the seventeenth century the pressure of the new science, growing intellectual speculation, and the lure of the great poem itself became too great to contain. The brilliant French astronomer, philosopher, and priest Pierre Ga.s.sendi (15921655) devoted himself to an ambitious attempt to reconcile Epicureanism and Christianity, and one of his most remarkable students, the playwright Moliere (16221673), undertook to produce a verse translation (which does not, unfortunately, survive) of De rerum natura. Lucretius had already appeared in a prose translation in French by the abbe Michel de Marolles (16001681). Not long afterwards, an Italian translation by the mathematician Alessandro Marchetti (16331714) began to circulate in ma.n.u.script, to the dismay of the Roman Church, which successfully banned it from print for decades. In England, the wealthy diarist John Evelyn (16201706) translated the first book of Lucretius' poem; a complete version in heroic couplets was published in 1682 by the young Oxford-educated scholar Thomas Creech.

Creech's Lucretius was greeted as an astonis.h.i.+ng achievement when it appeared in print, but an English translation of almost the entire poem, also in couplets, was already in very limited circulation, and from a surprising source. This translation, which was not printed until the twentieth century, was by the Puritan Lucy Hutchinson, the wife of Colonel John Hutchinson, parliamentarian and regicide. What is most striking perhaps about this remarkable accomplishment is that, by the time the learned translator presented the text to Arthur Annesley, first Earl of Anglesey, on June 11, 1675, she had come to detest its central principles-or so she claimed-and to hope that they would vanish from the face of the earth.

She would certainly have consigned these verses to the fire, she wrote in her autograph dedicatory letter, "had they not by misfortune been gone out of my hands in one lost copy." This sounds, of course, like the familiar gesture of feminine modesty. It is a gesture she reinforces by refusing to translate several hundred s.e.xually explicit lines in book 4, noting in the margin that "much here was left out for a midwife to translate whose obscene art it would better become than a nicer pen." But in fact Hutchinson made no apology for what she called her "aspiring Muse." Rather, she abhorred "all the atheism and impieties" in Lucretius' work.

The "lunatic" Lucretius, as Hutchinson called him, is no better than the other pagan philosophers and poets routinely commended to pupils by their tutors, an educational practice that is "one great means of debauching the learned world, at least of confirming them in that debauchery of soul, which their first sin led them into, and of hindering their recovery, while they puddle all the streams of Truth, that flow down to them from divine grace, with this pagan mud." It is a lamentation and a horror, Hutchinson wrote, that now, in these days of the Gospel, men should study Lucretius and adhere to his "ridiculous, impious, execrable doctrines, reviving the foppish, casual dance of atoms."

Why, then, when she earnestly hopes that this wickedness will disappear, did she painstakingly prepare a verse translation, pay a professional scribe to write out the first five books, and carefully copy out book 6, along with the Arguments and the marginalia, in her own hand?

Her answer is a revealing one. She had not initially realized, she confessed, how dangerous Lucretius was. She undertook the translation "out of youthful curiosity, to understand things I heard so much discourse of at second hand." We have, through this remark, a glimpse of those quiet conversations, conducted not in the lecture hall or from the pulpit, but away from the prying ears of the authorities, in which Lucretius' ideas were weighed and debated. This gifted, learned woman wanted to know for herself what the men in her world were arguing about.

When her religious convictions matured, Hutchinson wrote, when she "grew in Light and Love," this curiosity and the pride she felt and in some sense continued to feel in her accomplishment began to sour: The little glory I had among some few of my intimate friends, for understanding this crabbed poet, became my shame, and I found I never understood him till I learned to abhor him, and dread a wanton dalliance with impious books.

But why, in that case, should she have wished to make this wanton dalliance available to others?

Hutchinson said that she was simply obeying Anglesey, who had asked to see this book that she now beseeched him to conceal. To conceal, not to destroy. Something restrained her from urging that it be consigned to the fire, something more than the copy that had already gone out of her hands-for why should that have held her back?-and more even than her pride in her own accomplishment. An ardent Puritan, she echoed Milton's principled opposition to censors.h.i.+p. She had, after all, "reaped some profit by it, for it showed me that senseless superst.i.tions drive carnal reason into atheism." That is, she learned from Lucretius that childish "fables" meant to enhance piety have the effect of leading rational intelligence toward disbelief.

Perhaps too Hutchinson found the ma.n.u.script strangely difficult to destroy. "I turned it into English," she wrote, "in a room where my children practiced the several qualities they were taught with their tutors, and I numbered the syllables of my translation by the threads of the canvas I wrought in, and set them down with a pen and ink that stood by me."

Lucretius insisted that those things that seemed completely detached from the material world-thoughts, ideas, fantasies, souls themselves-were nonetheless inseparable from the atoms that const.i.tuted them, including in this instance the pen, the ink, and the threads of the needlework Hutchinson used to count the syllables in her lines of verse. In his theory, even vision, so seemingly immaterial, depended on tiny films of atoms that constantly emanated from all things and, as images or simulacra, floated through the void until they struck the perceiving eye. Thus it was, he explained, that people who saw what they thought to be ghosts were falsely persuaded of the existence of an afterlife. Such apparitions were not in reality the souls of the dead but films of atoms still floating through the world after the death and dissolution of the person from whom they had emanated. Eventually, the atoms in these films too would be dispersed, but for the moment they could astonish and frighten the living.

The theory now only makes us smile, but perhaps it can serve as an image of the strange afterlife of Lucretius' poem, the poem that almost disappeared forever, dispersed into random atoms, but that somehow managed to survive. It survived because a succession of people, in a range of places and times and for reasons that seem largely accidental, encountered the material object-the papyrus or parchment or paper, with its inky marks attributed to t.i.tus Lucretius Carus-and then sat down to make material copies of their own. Sitting in the room with her children, counting the syllables of translated verses on the threads of her canvas, the Puritan Lucy Hutchinson was serving in effect as one of the transmitters of the atomic particles that Lucretius had set in motion centuries and centuries earlier.

By the time Hutchinson reluctantly sent her translation to Anglesey, the idea of what she called "the foppish, casual dance of atoms" had already long penetrated the intellectual imagination of England. Edmund Spenser had written an ecstatic and strikingly Lucretian hymn to Venus; Francis Bacon had ventured that "In nature nothing really exists besides individual bodies"; Thomas Hobbes had reflected wryly on the relations.h.i.+p between fear and religious delusions.

In England, as elsewhere in Europe, it had proved possible, though quite difficult, to retain a belief in G.o.d as the creator of atoms in the first place. Thus Isaac Newton, in what has been called one of the most influential pieces of writing in the history of science, declared himself an atomist, making what appears to be a direct allusion to the t.i.tle of Lucretius' poem. "While the Particles continue entire," he remarked, "they may compose Bodies of one and the same Nature and Texture in all Ages: But should they wear away, or break in pieces, the Nature of Things depending on them, would be changed." At the same time, Newton was careful to invoke a divine maker. "It seems probable to me," Newton wrote in the second edition of the Opticks (1718), That G.o.d in the Beginning form'd Matter in solid, ma.s.sy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles, of such Sizes and Figures, and with such other Properties, and in such Proportions to s.p.a.ce, as most conduced to the End for which he form'd them; and that these primitive Particles being Solids, are incomparably harder than any porous Bodies compounded of them; even so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary Power being able to divine what G.o.d himself made one in the first creation.

For Newton, as for other scientists from the seventeenth century to our own time, it remained possible to reconcile atomism with Christian faith. But Hutchinson's fears proved well grounded. Lucretius' materialism helped to generate and support the skepticism of the likes of Dryden and Voltaire and the programmatic, devastating disbelief expressed in Diderot, Hume, and many other Enlightenment figures.

What lay ahead, beyond the horizon of even these farsighted figures, were the astonis.h.i.+ng empirical observations and experimental proofs that put the principles of ancient atomism on a whole different plane. When in the nineteenth century he set out to solve the mystery of the origin of human species, Charles Darwin did not have to draw on Lucretius' vision of an entirely natural, unplanned process of creation and destruction, endlessly renewed by s.e.xual reproduction. That vision had directly influenced the evolutionary theories of Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, but Charles could base his arguments on his own work in the Galapagos and elsewhere. So too when Einstein wrote of atoms, his thought rested on experimental and mathematical science, not upon ancient philosophical speculation. But that speculation, as Einstein himself knew and acknowledged, had set the stage for the empirical proofs upon which modern atomism depends. That the ancient poem could now be safely left unread, that the drama of its loss and recovery could fade into oblivion, that Poggio Bracciolini could be forgotten almost entirely-these were only signs of Lucretius' absorption into the mainstream of modern thought.

Among those for whom Lucretius was still a crucial guide, before this absorption had become complete, was a wealthy Virginia planter with a restless skeptical intelligence and a scientific bent. Thomas Jefferson owned at least five Latin editions of On the Nature of Things, along with translations of the poem into English, Italian, and French. It was one of his favorite books, confirming his conviction that the world is nature alone and that nature consists only of matter. Still more, Lucretius helped to shape Jefferson's confidence that ignorance and fear were not necessary components of human existence.

Jefferson took this ancient inheritance in a direction that Lucretius could not have antic.i.p.ated but of which Thomas More, back in the early sixteenth century, had dreamed. Jefferson had not, as the poet of On the Nature of Things urged, withdrawn from the fierce conflicts of public life. Instead, he had given a momentous political doc.u.ment, at the founding of a new republic, a distinctly Lucretian turn. The turn was toward a government whose end was not only to secure the lives and the liberties of its citizens but also to serve "the pursuit of Happiness." The atoms of Lucretius had left their traces on the Declaration of Independence.

On August 15, 1820, the seventy-seven-year-old Jefferson wrote to another former president, his friend John Adams. Adams was eighty-five, and the two old men were in the habit of exchanging views on the meaning of life, as they felt it ebb away. "I [am] obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne," Jefferson wrote: "I feel: therefore I exist." I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial s.p.a.ce. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.

These are the sentiments that Lucretius had most hoped to instill in his readers. "I am," Jefferson wrote to a correspondent who wanted to know his philosophy of life, "an Epicurean."

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

THE ANCIENT PHILOSOPHER whose work gave rise to the story that I trace in these pages believed that life's highest end was pleasure, and he took particular pleasure in the community of his friends. It is only fitting then that I acknowledge the rich and sustaining network of friends and colleagues who have enhanced the writing of this book. Over the course of a year at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin I spent many pleasurable hours discussing Lucretius with the late Bernard Williams, whose marvelous intelligence illuminated everything that it touched. And some years later at the same wonderful Berlin inst.i.tution I partic.i.p.ated in an extraordinary Lucretius reading group that gave me the critical impetus I needed. Generously guided by two philosophers, Christoph Horn and Christof Rapp, the group, which included Horst Bredekamp, Susan James, Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus, Quentin Skinner, and Ramie Targoff, along with more occasional visitors, worked its way with exemplary care and contentiousness through the poem.

A second wonderful inst.i.tution-the American Academy in Rome-provided the perfect setting for the bulk of the book's writing: Nowhere else in my experience is the precious opportunity to sit quietly and work so exquisitely braided together with Epicurean pleasure. To the Academy's director, Carmela Vircillo Franklin, and its capable staff, along with a host of fellows and visitors, I owe a deep debt of grat.i.tude. My agent, Jill Kneerim, and my editor, Alane Salierno Mason, have been extraordinarily helpful, generous, and acute readers. Among the many others who have given me advice and a.s.sistance, I want to single out Albert Ascoli, Homi Bhabha, Alison Brown, Gene Brucker, Joseph Connors, Brian c.u.mmings, Trevor Dadson, Kenneth Gouwens, Jeffrey Hamburger, James Hankins, Philip Hardie, Bernard Jussen, Joseph Koerner, Thomas Laqueur, George Logan, David Norbrook, William O'Connell, Robert Pinsky, Oliver Primavesi, Steven Shapin, Marcello Simonetta, James Simpson, Pippa Skotnes, Nick Wilding, and David Wootton.

My students and colleagues at Harvard have been a source of constant intellectual stimulation and challenge, and the stupendous library resources of this university have never ceased to amaze me. I owe particular thanks for research a.s.sistance to Christine Barrett, Rebecca Cook, Shawon Kinew, Ada Palmer, and Benjamin Woodring.

My deepest debt of grat.i.tude-for wise advice and for inexhaustible pleasure-is to my wife, Ramie Targoff.

ALSO BY STEPHEN GREENBLATT.

Shakespeare's Freedom.

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.

Hamlet in Purgatory Practicing New Historicism (with Catherine Gallagher).

Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture.

Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England Renaissance Self-Fas.h.i.+oning: From More to Shakespeare.

Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley.

EDITED BY STEPHEN GREENBLATT..

Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto The Norton Anthology of English Literature (general editor) The Norton Shakespeare (general editor).

New World Encounters.

Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies Representing the English Renaissance.

Allegory and Representation.

NOTES.

PREFACE.

2 "First, G.o.ddess": Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. Martin Ferguson Smith (London: Sphere Books, 1969; rev. edn., Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 1:1220. I have consulted the modern English translations of H. A. J. Munro (1914), W. H. D. Rouse, rev. Martin Ferguson Smith (1975, 1992), Frank O. Copley (1977), Ronald Melville (1997), A. E. Stallings (2007), and David Slavitt (2008). Among earlier English translations I have consulted those of John Evelyn (16201706), Lucy Hutchinson (16201681), John Dryden (16311700), and Thomas Creech (16591700). Of these translations Dryden's is the best, but, in addition to the fact that he only translated small portions of the poem (615 lines in all, less than 10 percent of the total), his language often renders Lucretius difficult for the modern reader to grasp. For ease of access, unless otherwise indicated, I have used Smith's 2001 prose translation, and I have cited the lines in the Latin text given in the readily available Loeb edition-Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.

10 "Spring comes": On the Nature of Things 5:73740. Venus' "winged harbinger" is Cupid, whom Botticelli depicts blindfolded and aiming his winged arrow; Flora, the Roman G.o.ddess of flowers, strews blossoms gathered in the folds of her exquisite dress; and Zephyr, the G.o.d of the fecundating west wind, is reaching for the nymph Chloris. On Lucretius' influence on Botticelli, mediated by the humanist Poliziano, see Charles Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli's "Primavera" and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 3649; Horst Bredekamp, Botticelli: Primavera. Florenz als Garten der Venus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag GmbH, 1988); and Aby Warburg's seminal 1893 essay, "Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Spring: An Examination of Concepts of Antiquity in the Italian Early Renaissance," in The Revival of Pagan Antiquity, ed. Kurt W. Forster, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Inst.i.tute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), pp. 88156.

13 an avid letter writer: A total of 558 letters by Poggio, addressed to 172 different correspondents, survive. In a letter written in July 1417 congratulating Poggio on his discoveries, Frances...o...b..rbaro refers to a letter about the journey of discovery that Poggio had sent to "our fine and learned friend Guarinus of Verona"-Two Renaissance Book Hunters: The Letters of Poggius Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Nicolis, trans. Phyllis Walter Goodhart Gordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p. 201. For Poggio's letters, see Poggio Bracciolini, Lettere, ed. Helene Harth, 3 vols. (Florence: Olschki, 1984).

CHAPTER ONE: THE BOOK HUNTER.

14 Slight of build: On Poggio's appearance, see Poggio Bracciolini 13801980: Nel VI centenario della nascita, Inst.i.tuto n.a.z.ionale di Studi Sul Rinascimento, vol. 7 (Florence: Sansoni, 1982) and Un Toscano del '400 Poggio Bracciolini, 13801459, ed. Patrizia Castelli (Terranuova Bracciolini: Administrazione Comunale, 1980). The princ.i.p.al biographical source is Ernst Walser, Poggius Florentinus: Leben und Werke (Hildesheim: George Olms, 1974).

16 Indeed, curiosity was said: On curiosity as a sin and the complex process of rehabilitating it, see Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983; orig. German edn. 1966), pp. 229453.

19 his "detestable and unseemly life": Eustace J. Kitts, In the Days of the Councils: A Sketch of the Life and Times of Balda.s.sare Cossa (Afterward Pope John the Twenty-Third) (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1908), p. 359.

21 George of Trebizond had salted: Peter Partner, The Pope's Men: The Papal Civil Service in the Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 54.

22 By the 1450s: Lauro Martines, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists, 13901460 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 12327.

22 in this difficult period: In 1416 he evidently tried, with the others in the curia, to secure a benefice for himself, but the grant was controversial and in the end was not awarded. Apparently, he could also have taken a position as Scriptor in the new papacy of Martin V, but he refused, regarding it as a demotion from his position as secretary-Walser, Poggius Florentinus, pp. 42ff.

CHAPTER TWO: THE MOMENT OF DISCOVERY.

23 Petrarch brought glory: Nicholas Mann, "The Origins of Humanism," in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 11. On Poggio's response to Petrarch, see Riccardo Fubini, Humanism and Secularization: From Petrarch to Valla, Duke Monographs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 18 (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003). On the development of Italian humanism, see John Addington Symonds, The Revival of Learning (New York: H. Holt, 1908; repr. 1960); Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948); Paul Oskar Kristeller, "The Impact of Early Italian Humanism on Thought and Learning," in Bernard S. Levy, ed. Developments in the Early Renaissance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1972), pp. 12057; Charles Trinkaus, The Scope of Renaissance Humanism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983); Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Peter Burke, "The Spread of Italian Humanism," in Anthony Goodman and Angus Mackay, eds., The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe (London: Longman, 1990), pp. 122; Ronald G. Witt, "In the Footsteps of the Ancients": The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, ed. Heiko A. Oberman, vol. 74 (Leiden: Brill, 2000); and Riccardo, Fubini, L'Umanesimo Italiano e I Suoi Storici (Milan: Franco Angeli Storia, 2001).

23 "Macer and Lucretius are certainly": Quintilian, Inst.i.tutio Oratoria (The Orator's Education), ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, Loeb Cla.s.sical Library, 127 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 10.1, pp. 299ff. Though a complete (or nearly complete) copy of Quintilian was only found-by Poggio Bracciolini-in 1516, book X, with its lists of Greek and Roman writers, circulated throughout the Middle Ages. Quintilian remarks of Macer and Lucretius that "Each is elegant on his own subject, but the former is prosaic and the latter difficult," p. 299.

24 literacy rates, by our standards: Robert A. Kaster, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988). Estimates of literacy rates in earlier societies are notoriously unreliable. Kaster, citing the research of Richard Duncan-Jones, concludes: "the great majority of the empire's inhabitants were illiterate in the cla.s.sical languages." The figures for the first three centuries ce suggest upwards of 70 percent illiteracy, though with many regional differences. There are similar figures in Kim Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), though Haines-Eitzen has even lower literacy levels (10 percent perhaps). See also Robin Lane Fox, "Literacy and Power in Early Christianity," in Alan K. Bowman and Greg Woolf, eds., Literacy and Power in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).