This exhibition explores a curated selection — drawn from McMaster Archives and Research Collections’ broader corpus — of significant editions containing the work of Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 99BCE – 55BCE).

We focus particularly on Lucretius’ sole surviving work and masterpiece, De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) and its ongoing significance over time. Lucretius, a Roman poet and philosopher in the first century BCE, was a dedicated follower of Epicurism. In the spirit of this philosophical school, Lucretius sought to explain the universe through an early idea of atomistic physics; his text often regarded as a foundation for modern scientific thought.

De rerum natura was first rediscovered during the Renaissance by Poggio Bracciolini, a renowned Italian book-hunter. The text had been lost to western European scholarship in the ninth century; once reintroduced, the poem offered the most extensive surviving source of an Epicurean doctrine then available to the public. Early editions of the text were often accompanied by controversial commentaries, occasioned in part by its perceived disregard for divinity in an early modern context intensely devoted to religious thought. Even in this milieu, many humanists engaged with the text for its rich Latin verse, which expanded the existing Western European corpus of other ancient poets’ works like those of Virgil, Ovid, and Cicero.

This collection — or narrative bibliography — of fourteen volumes takes a thematic approach to illustrating several ways Lucretius influenced European society and book culture from the Renaissance through the Early Modern Period.