A long review of Stephen Greenblatt's Swerve looks at how the rediscovery of Lucretius shaped the modern world. It's a brilliant essay, and hard to excerpt from, but the following (especially the bit about hunting for books as a refuge from trouble) gets at the core of what sets Greenblatt's story in motion .
In 1414, however, a swerve worthy of Epicurus himself brought On the Nature of Things back, not just to life but also into the cultural swim. Poggio Bracciolini, a humanist scholar who worked as a secretary for Pope John XXIII, accompanied his
master to Konstanz, to attend a council of the Church, which was deep in trouble. The council had to deal with the fact that there were three rival popes, each with followers, as well as the Hussite heretics in Bohemia, one of whom it executed, breaking a promise of safe conduct. When John realized that his support was gone, he fled the city. Arrested and deposed he capitulated, bringing his papal name into such discredit that none of his successors would adopt it until Angelo Roncalli did so in 1958. Poggio found himself for the moment without a job. A passionate book hunter, he took refuge from his troubles throughout his life by hunting for truffles in libraries.
Now he decided to brave the difficulties of traveling in German lands, where he did not speak the language, and of hunting for books in dusty, cobwebbed monastic libraries guarded by obdurate and suspicious monks, whom he did not like. (In a tradition that went back to Boccaccio and before, Poggio suspected them of corruption and hypocrisy.) In 1417, in one of the collections that Poggio explored—probably that of the great Benedictine house of Fulda, in south Germany—he found the text of Lucretius. Poggio read the shocking book and changed the world. Or at least he let loose a text powerful enough to frighten some readers and fascinate others.
The Dish 