Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) Bookhunter
Poggio Bracciolini worked as a "papal secretary in the service of a famously corrupt pope" Baldasarre Cossa (also known as John XXIII) at the beginning of the fifteenth century (Greenblatt 181), but his true passion was finding and uncovering lost manuscripts from the ancient world (19). Inspired by Petrarch, a scholar of the previous generation, whom our textbook calls "the father of humanism", Poggio and others like him hunted for lost books in monasteries all across Europe (24). According to Stephen Greenblatt, it was during a period of unemployment after the pope was deposed and imprisoned (171), that Poggio made his greatest find: the complete text of Epicurean philosopher Lucretius' long poem De rerum natura, also known as On the Nature of Things (181). This is the only copy to have survived from Roman times. The only other traces of it are some fragments that were found in a library at Herculaneum (64), a city which, like Pompeii, was buried when Vesuvius erupted in classical times. If Poggio had not found it when he did, Lucretius' work might have been lost to fire, water, bookworms and disappeared forever (83).
Greenblatt sees the finding of De rerum, and the effects that it had, as marking a shift that took place in the Renaissance away from "a preoccupation with angels and demons and immaterial causes... to (a) focus on the things of this world" (10). Lucretius, writing 1500 years before the Renaissance, claimed that we should feel awe and wonder at the fact that we are made of atoms like everything else in the universe and that we should see the "embrace of pleasure and beauty... as a legitimate and worthy human pursuit" (8). These ideas were a major departure from the worldview which had dominated the past thousand years. If they do not seem very radical today, it is because we are the inheritors of a cultural shift which Greenblatt argues that took place during the Renaissance and is articulated so clearly in Lucretius (8).
One other item which might be of interest, considering that all books during this period were still written by hand, is that fact that Poggio was very famous for his beautiful, "almost magical" (116) handwriting which he based on Carolingian miniscule from the court of Charlemagne (115).
Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2011.
Image is from:
"The Origins of Archaeology." Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture. Library of Congress. Online exhibition. June 2002. Jan. 15, 2012.
Greenblatt sees the finding of De rerum, and the effects that it had, as marking a shift that took place in the Renaissance away from "a preoccupation with angels and demons and immaterial causes... to (a) focus on the things of this world" (10). Lucretius, writing 1500 years before the Renaissance, claimed that we should feel awe and wonder at the fact that we are made of atoms like everything else in the universe and that we should see the "embrace of pleasure and beauty... as a legitimate and worthy human pursuit" (8). These ideas were a major departure from the worldview which had dominated the past thousand years. If they do not seem very radical today, it is because we are the inheritors of a cultural shift which Greenblatt argues that took place during the Renaissance and is articulated so clearly in Lucretius (8).
One other item which might be of interest, considering that all books during this period were still written by hand, is that fact that Poggio was very famous for his beautiful, "almost magical" (116) handwriting which he based on Carolingian miniscule from the court of Charlemagne (115).
Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2011.
Image is from:
"The Origins of Archaeology." Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture. Library of Congress. Online exhibition. June 2002. Jan. 15, 2012.