In her new book, a very welcome expansion of her 2001 essay for I Tatti Studies, Alison Brown traces the influence of the Latin poet Lucretius on three Renaissance humanists, employed in the chancery and the university in Florence, who were able to read De rerum natura “relatively unimpeded by religious constraints” (88). Like a radiocontrast agent used to isolate and make visible certain internal structures of the body under X-ray, Brown's analysis illuminates not only the impact of the poet's atomic vision of the universe on the early modern imagination, but the subtle traffic between readers that she calls a “Lucretian network” (4). What might seem at first glance like a fairly short book written for the Renaissance specialist contains the outlines of an explosive and wide-ranging thesis that will be of great interest to many: that a strain of Epicureanism pulsed through a tightly-knit group of readers in late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth-century Florence, radically shaping the threshold of modern political and social thought. There are, in other words, infinite riches in Brown's little room.

After an introductory chapter that describes an awakening interest in Epicureanism before and directly after the rediscovery of a manuscript of De rerum natura in 1417, the second chapter concerns the influence of Lucretius on the great reviver of Platonism, Marsilio Ficino, and the humanist and chancellor of Florence, Bartolomeo Scala. Later in life, Ficino famously bragged that he had burned his little commentary on Lucretius, written as a youth, as Plato is said to have once destroyed his own juvenilia. Brown here shows how Ficino's early flirtation with an Epicurean notion of pleasure gave way to a Platonic hangup about the insane poet and his philosophy. From here, she moves on to describe Scala's own “lifelong love-hate relationship” (23) with the author of De rerum natura, a relationship that emerged from the same Medicean context. Finding clues of a sustained engagement with the poet scattered everywhere, Brown is especially good on describing how a mature Scala used Lucretius to lend a “naturalistic direction” (28) to his thinking about law and society in the 1480s.

As the author argues, Lucretius gave a new or, as it were, ancient expression to “hybrid . . . and unsystematic clusters of useful ideas” (15, citing Germaine Greer, Shakespeare [1986], 59–60) circulating in this period from religious skepticism to an interest in the nature of primitive man. Her thesis emerges in full force when she turns to the work of Marcello Adriani, who took over the position of first chancellor after Scala and with whom he shared a longstanding interest in the poet's primitivism. Finding another unseen pattern of Lucretian allusions in Adriani's public prolusions, Brown shows how the humanist harnessed the influence of the poet in his own way to describe the post-revolutionary situation in Florence, to critique the demagoguery of Savonarola, and to connect his own “‘backward-looking’ republicanism” to a “forward-looking interest in natural science and history” (46). The penultimate chapter moves from Adriani to his successor in the chancery, Niccolo Machiavelli, adumbrating the deep connections between Machiavelli's early engagement in his manuscript copy of Lucretius and his later thinking about man's nature, religion, and place in the cosmos. A useful appendix to the book describes Machiavelli's manuscript at the Vatican in detail.

Looking briefly beyond Florence, the story of these three figures culminates in a concluding chapter that sketches out several intersecting networks of readers in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries bound together by a mutual attraction to the “sublime” and, as many still worried, dangerous verses of De rerum natura. In some ways here, Brown is transplanting René Pintard's argument for a group of libertines and atheists in seventeenth-century France (Le libertinage érudit [1943]) into a different soil, though she herself would rather not call anyone names. What is similar, and quite powerful, is the emphasis on the way reading constitutes communities of thought and bonds of friendship that can move fluidly between strict ideological and philosophical positions. One would inevitably like to know more about the worlds that Brown describes here in passing: the exchanges between merchants, travelers, and humanists, the heated Epicurean dinner parties, the implied homoerotic affinities that linger just beneath the surface of the narrative, hinting at another kind of sympathy. Likewise, the reader who is interested in the more literary dimensions of Lucretius's poem and its influence might miss an engagement with the poetry itself. This being said, Brown has written an important and groundbreaking book, and as Lucretius once put, “for a keen-scented mind, these little tracks are enough to enable you to recognize the others for yourself” (Lucretius, De rerum natura, trans. Rouse [1975], 1.402–03).