Gerard Passannante's The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of PDF

By Gerard Passannante

ISBN-10: 0226648494

ISBN-13: 9780226648491

With The Lucretian Renaissance, Gerard Passannante deals an intensive rethinking of a well-recognized narrative: the increase of materialism in early glossy Europe. Passannante starts by way of taking on the traditional philosophical inspiration that the area consists of 2 primary opposites: atoms, because the thinker Epicurus theorized, intrinsically unchangeable and relocating concerning the void; and the void itself, or nothingness. Passannante considers the truth that this pressure of historic Greek philosophy survived and used to be transmitted to the Renaissance essentially via a poem that had possible been lost—a poem insisting that the letters of the alphabet are just like the atoms that make up the universe.

By tracing this elemental analogy in the course of the fortunes of Lucretius’s On the character of Things, Passannante argues that, lengthy sooner than it took on its wide-spread form through the clinical Revolution, the philosophy of atoms and the void reemerged within the Renaissance as a narrative approximately analyzing and letters—a tale that materialized in texts, of their actual recomposition, and of their scattering.

From the works of Virgil and Macrobius to these of Petrarch, Poliziano, Lambin, Montaigne, Bacon, Spenser, Gassendi, Henry extra, and Newton, The Lucretian Renaissance recovers a forgotten heritage of materialism in humanist notion and scholarly perform and asks us to reassess probably the most enduring questions of the interval: what does it suggest for a textual content, a poem, and philosophy to be “reborn”?

Show description

Read or Download The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition PDF

Similar literary renaissance criticism books

The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early - download pdf or read online

Enticing with histories of the ebook and of studying, in addition to with reports of fabric tradition, this quantity explores ‘popularity’ in early glossy English writings. Is ‘popular’ most sensible defined as a theoretical or an empirical classification during this interval? How will we account for the space among sleek canonicity and early glossy print reputation?

Get Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern PDF

Turning into Christian argues that romance narratives of Jews and Muslims changing to Christianity sign up theological formations of race in post-Reformation England. The medieval motif of infidel conversion got here lower than scrutiny as Protestant theology notably reconfigured how participants gather spiritual identities.

Tracy Adams's Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France PDF

In Christine de Pizan and the struggle for France, Tracy Adams bargains a reevaluation of Christine de Pizan’s literary engagement with modern politics. Adams locates Christine’s works inside of a close narrative of the complicated background of the dispute among the Burgundians and the Armagnacs, the 2 greatest political factions in fifteenth-century France.

Download e-book for iPad: Futile Pleasures: Early Modern Literature and the Limits of by Corey McEleney

Opposed to the shielding backdrop of numerous apologetic justifications for the price of literature and the arts, Futile Pleasures reframes the present dialog via returning to the literary tradition of early sleek England, a tradition whose shielding posture towards literature opponents and shapes our personal.

Extra resources for The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition

Example text

Download PDF sample