#56 Poggio Bracciolini Part 4

In 1417, Poggio made the greatest discovery of his career – Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, aka “On The Nature Of Things”, the last surviving copy of his five-book epic attempt to explain Epicurean philosophy to a Roman audience in poem. Little did Poggio realise the impact this book would have on the world. * Scholars aren’t exactly sure where he made it. * Because he kept it a secret. * Because he found a gold mine of old manuscripts and he didn’t want anyone else to find out about it * But one place might have been Fulda. * smack bang in the middle of Germany * Benedictine monastery founded In 744 by Saint Sturm, “Saint Storm” – pretty bad ass name * True story – Great-great ancestor of Susan Storm aka the Invisible Woman, wife of Reed Richards * Storm was a disciple of Saint Boniface, the so-called “apostle of the Germans” * Boniface is often pictured with a large book pierced by a sword * Because tradition has it that when robbers killed him, he tried to protect himself by holding up a gospel. * They killed him anyway * So much for that self-defense training * Money wasted * “Lads – what would like to learn? Gung Fu – or the ancient art of hiding behind a gospel?” * The monastery later served as a base from which missionaries could accompany Charlemagne’s armies in their military campaigns to fully conquer and convert pagan Saxony. * Fulda lends its name to the Fulda Gap, a traditional east-west invasion route used by Napoleon I and others. * During the Cold War, it was presumed to be an invasion route for any conventional war between NATO and Soviet forces. * contains two corridors of lowlands through which tanks might have driven in a surprise attack * Anyway – the monastery. * In the early 9th century, the abbot was Rabanus Maurus * a learned scholar and prolific author * He was one of the most prominent teachers and writers of the Carolingian age * Best known for his encyclopaedia De rerum naturis (“On the Natures of Things”) * Rabanus, who as a young man had studied with Alcuin, the greatest scholar of the age of Charlemagne, considered among the most important architects of the Carolingian Renaissance. * Which we haven’t talked much about but it happened in the 7th and 8th centuries. * Mostly confined to the clergy. * A lack of Latin literacy in eighth century western Europe caused problems for the Carolingian rulers by severely limiting the number of people capable of serving as court scribes in societies where Latin was valued. * Charlemagne ordered the creation of schools in 787. * A major part of his program of reform was to attract many of the leading scholars of the Christendom of his day to his court. * Carolingian workshops produced over 100,000 manuscripts in the 9th century, of which some 7,000 or 6% survive. * The Carolingians produced the earliest surviving copies of the works of Julius Caesar, Cicero, Horace, Martial * And so Rabanus knew where to get his hands on important manuscripts. * He had them brought to Fulda, where he trained a large cohort of scribes to copy them. * And so he had built what was for the time a stupendous collection. * And even thought the monastery’s intellectual seriousness had declined since the times of Rabanus, and a lot of those pagan documents might not have been looked at for centuries – he hoped some might have survived. * And boy – was he right. * He found the only surviving copy of the 17-book epic poem Punica, about the Second Punic War, the longest surviving poem in Latin at over 12,000 lines, by Silius Italicus around c. 83 to c. 96 CE * Born (c. 28 – c. 103 CE), a Roman consul, orator, and poet. * an informer under Nero,