Lucretius to Poggio to Jefferson and The Swerve

I miss the handwritten letters of my mother, and still have some squirreled away.  We all know that cursive has gone out of style. To modern young people, deciphering the wavy old-fashioned script can seem as relevant as dialing a rotary phone or milking a cow.

In the spirit of hand written text, I stumbled upon Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) while reading The Swerve.  This fantastic story compels the reader to learn more, a passion of mine.  Credited with saving handwritten texts, Poggio painstakingly reproduced the words of many lost Roman humanists.  Among them the great poem, On the Nature of Things by Lucretius. 

Imagine a world weary scribe who turned his back on the riches of service to the papal court, his talents now given to saving lost manuscripts.  The darkened libraries of monasteries hold the treasure he seeks, his fingers brushing against pages unturned for centuries.  And in these hidden recesses of archives, he finds the only surviving copy of Lucretius’ text.  Poggio’s talents in transcription are a fitting tribute to words once considered lost to time.

Returning this manuscript to circulation changed the world when the poem was plucked from a remote monastery in the winter of 1417. History reached across time and beckoned from the gardens of the ancient philosophers to the flickering candles in the Roman scriptoria; the vision in these pages shaped the thoughts of Galileo, Freud, Darwin and Einstein, even coming into the hands of Thomas Jefferson, thus leaving its traces on the Declaration of Independence; beyond these possible influences, any book that has a chapter entitled ‘A Pit to Catch Foxes’ is worth a look.

Thanks for catching up with me this week.  Next week I will be looking at the US Census and what secrets can be found on these hand written pages.

Cheers!

MJ