Whoever studies the receptions of classics in early modern culture is aware of two (relatively) obvious facts. The first is that Lucretius’ Nachleben in the Renaissance, particularly over the last twenty years, has been investigated by a growing number of research studies. The second is that the so-called rediscovery of the De rerum natura in 1417, especially its alleged long-term consequences for Western civilisation, has aroused interest both inside and outside of academia. The clearest (and most often given) evidence of that is the editorial success of S. Greenblatt's The Swerve, widely acclaimed in newspapers and popular magazines. What seems less clear and obvious are the reasons for such a widespread interest, the motives driving many scholars to focus on the return of Lucretius to Renaissance Europe – to paraphrase slightly the title of A. Brown's book. Of course, these motives differ according to each person's intellectual trajectory and stem from a wide range of stimuli, including the choice to follow recent and successful trends in scholarship to gain benefits in terms of job opportunities and professional advancement. Nonetheless, I think there is something more at stake here than a career-oriented decision, however important in its own right; something that relates to and resonates with today's historical phase.

We live indeed in an age of changes that impact on our belief-systems and challenge the politico-institutional frameworks we became acquainted with. This ongoing situation has a disorienting effect on many people, but at the same time leads some of them to understand what is happening by studying another period of transformation, which is commonly assumed to lay at the core of the world as we know it. I refer to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or better still, to the early modern transformative phenomena that are believed to have paved the way for the scientific revolution as well as for the rise of the modern thought, conceived (perhaps too narrowly) in terms of a secular, naturalist and materialistic world view. These phenomena are considered as being connected, among other things, with the Renaissance reception of Lucretius and, more generally, the spread of Epicureanism. It is therefore not by chance that the US subtitle of Greenblatt's bestseller is How the World Became Modern. In other words, the remarkable stream of scholarship on this reception might conceal the need to go back to the supposed intellectual foundations of our world in order to understand better, and give meaning to, the changes it is experiencing.

Assuming this to be true, we should ask ourselves to what extent Lucretius’ Epicurean poetry can be rightly counted among such foundations; and we should try to give an answer keeping in mind that modernity – whatever that word means – is the result of a complex and contradictory historical process, which cannot be reduced to one of its components, i.e. the cultural ferments setting the stage for the paradigm shift in scientific thought. The interpretative strategies of reductio ad unum always entail the risk of oversimplification and say more about the interpreters’ agenda than about the objects of interpretation. Some good ideas to formulate that kind of answer are now provided in the volume under review, originating from a conference held in 2017 in Alghero (Italy) to celebrate the 600th anniversary of Poggio Bracciolini's fortuitous discovery of a codex containing the De rerum natura.

Made up of eighteen essays and divided into five parts, the book's structure revolves around a distinctive methodological principle set out in the introductory pages. Unlike other recent contributions on the subject that focus mostly, if not exclusively, on the early modern afterlife of Lucretius, this book relies indeed on the principle that ‘the troubled history of Lucretius’ disappearance-and-reappearance’ cannot be properly understood without ‘a critical reconstruction of the philosophical methods and theories which inform the [De rerum natura]’ (p. 2). Put differently, a comprehensive interpretation of Lucretius’ Rezeptionsgeschichte is possible in so far as it is connected to ‘the “direct” inquiry into Lucretius himself as a philosopher and, in particular, as a critical receiver of Epicurus’ philosophical message’ (p. 4). This is why the first part of the volume gathers five essays dealing with specific tenets of Lucretius’ philosophy and the relationship to both Epicurus and the early Epicurean tradition, which should ‘shed light on the vicissitudes of disappearance/reappearance/reception(s)’ (p. 2).

I say ‘should’ for two different but closely related sets of motives. The first set is that the essays, while delving deeper into such tenets, do not explicitly address and/or explain the role they played in shaping these vicissitudes. Therefore, after reading the entire volume, one might get the impression that the first part is not fully integrated with the remaining four, which instead are linked as they are devoted to examining various aspects of the diffusion across the centuries of the De rerum natura. More specifically, the second and third parts are respectively about the ancient receptions and the early modern scholars, readers and translators of the poem; the fourth and fifth parts draw attention to the modern readings of the De rerum natura and the images of Lucretius. The second set is that the methodological principle would have benefited from a more thorough explanation of its own assumptions. In fact, the reasons why ‘the very manner of Lucretius’ reception cannot be totally told apart from the manner of Epicurus’ reception by Lucretius himself’ (p. 4) risk not being immediately clear to the readers; nor have they been clarified by the editors, who seem to take them for granted and self-evident. Although they rightly observe that these two kinds of reception ‘are significantly different if not incommensurable phenomena’, the editors conclude that ‘they are parts of the same broad and non-linear history of transmission, rings of the same (heterogeneous and non-continuous) chain’ (p. 4). This might be true, but it would have made sense to specify, even briefly, why and how one ring relates to the other, what kind of cultural processes puts them in relationship to each other.

Be that as it may, one thing remains true: as mentioned above, the volume gives food for thought about the function Lucretius performed in promoting modernity. There are two essays worth mentioning about this point, the first of which is A. Palmer's ‘The Persecution of Renaissance Lucretius Readers Revisited’. Here Palmer brilliantly challenges those current mainstream narratives that, on the one hand, see the Renaissance as the ‘triumph of secular Reason against a wicked Church’ and, on the other hand, characterise Lucretius and his early modern readers as ‘founding fathers of secular modernity’ and bearers of ‘modern rationalist values’ (pp. 168–9). In doing so, Palmer adopts a well-balanced approach to the subject. Indeed, she is aware and openly acknowledges that Lucretius’ dissemination ‘had a great and well-documented influence on radicalisms and modernity’, especially during the Enlightenment (p. 169). At the same time, however, Palmer points out that those radicals in the Renaissance who held Epicurean views as the denial of the afterlife and of the immortal soul ‘were clearly a small minority’ (p. 191). Consequently, she suggests relocating the intellectual forces that vitalised the Renaissance and ended up transforming and modernising the European thought. Palmer maintains that some readers of the De rerum natura ‘helped diffuse Lucretius and many ideas we recognize as modern within humanism while commixing them with a panoply of distinctly un-modern heterodoxies which cannot be called secular in any sense’. Moreover, and more importantly, Palmer claims that ‘the small minority whose ideas seem most modern to us’ was not ‘the most influential in disseminating Lucretius or intellectual innovation’. In short, the radicals who studied Lucretius were driven for Palmer by different interests, ‘the majority of them orthogonal, or even opposed to, anything we might call secularization, and more aligned with theist or mystical radicalisms of the day’ (pp. 191–2).

There is no doubt that Palmer's suggestion may seem too general and needs not only to be put to work, but also to be verified through an array of specific textual analyses. Nonetheless, I find it intriguing and useful, both because it opens new research possibilities about the place Lucretius occupies in the genealogy of modernity and because it reminds us of the complexity of Renaissance culture, to which some traditional, if not stereotypical, conceptual oppositions (i.e. science vs religion, reason vs faith, secularism vs Christianity) do not apply at all or only to some extent. Another lesson concerning the complex and multi-layered nature of these phenomena comes from E. Nicoli's essay ‘Atoms, Elements, Seeds. A Renaissance Interpreter of Lucretius’ Atomism’, which examines Johannes Baptista Pius’ commentary on Lucretius (published in Bologna in 1511). Like Palmer, Nicoli tackles the widespread narrative that charges Lucretius with being the forerunner of modernity, meaning that his ideas would have ‘anticipated and even made possible certain intellectual developments that are commonly associated with the idea of modernity’ (p. 235).

To show the shortcomings of this narrative, Nicoli makes two points that stem from the peculiarities of Pius’ exegesis, specifically the tendency to re-contextualise and adapt Lucretius’ philosophy within an Empedoclean and Aristotelian framework – a tendency in line with the syncretism characterising early modern reading practices. The first point is that the spread of Epicurean atomism is not the sole reason responsible for the overturning of Aristotle's physics and the development of modern scientific outlook. Nicoli writes that, if an atomistic philosophical system managed at some point to replace Aristotle's model of nature, ‘it is only because some atomistic explanations were harmonized with more vitalistic theories of matter and embedded in a teleological account of nature’ (p. 248). The second point has a more general meaning and concerns the critical question of how the classics were received and read in the Renaissance. I strongly agree with Nicoli when she says that there is no ‘linear and univocal correspondence between an ancient text and its modern responses’, since classical reception is mediated through ‘stages of reception, possible “contaminations”, and subjective interpretations’ (pp. 248–9). It can never be emphasised enough that, as K.A.E. Enenkel rightly states, early modern scholars ‘rarely read classical authors in a simple and “direct” form’, but generally by way of ‘intermediary texts’ (i.e. different kinds of paratexts and commentaries) that ‘determined and guided the reader's perception of the text being commented upon’ (Transformations of the Classics [2014], p. 1). Hence, I cannot but embrace Nicoli's conclusion that any interpretation of the De rerum natura as the trigger of the scientific revolution ‘is too linear and unsophisticated, and therefore gives us only a partial view’ (p. 249). This conclusion applies to other aspects of Lucretius’ Nachleben in the Renaissance and warns us against the risk of overestimating his intellectual impact, which should be studied in a balanced way and by keeping in mind those features that, like the reading habits and the modes of knowledge transmission, define the early modern world and distinguish it from ours.