Dissertation | Papers | Projects
Dr. Palmer's dissertation, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, explores scholars' use of Lucretius' Epicurean didactic poem De Rerum Natura from its rediscovery in 1417 to 1600, focusing on the challenges its atomistic physics posed to Christian patterns of thought. In a period when atheism was often considered a sign of madness, the sudden availability of a sophisticated system that explained natural phenomena in non-theistic ways, and that argued powerfully against the immortality of the soul, the afterlife, and a creator God, threatened to supply the one weapon unbelief had lacked in the Middle Ages: good answers. At the same time, humanist scholars who idealized ancient Rome and all its works were eager to study a poem whose language and structure so often anticipated their beloved Aeneid. Her research focuses on manuscripts and early printed editions of Lucretius, using marginalia to examine how the first Renaissance readers actually used the text, and using the front matter and commentaries in printed versions to see how editors justified the reproduction and distribution of such a potentially dangerous work. This project uncovers the methods early modern scholars used to try to make Epicureanism safe in a Christian world. It sheds light on Renaissance methods for reconciling Christian and pagan philosophy, and shows how atomism and ideas of emergent order and natural selection, so critical to our current thinking, became situated in Europe's intellectual landscape at the beginning of the scientific transformations of the seventeenth century.