"Michel de Marolles's Translation of Lucretius (1650) and its Reception in England"
Résumé
Thanks to the work of a whole generation of scholars we now know how far-reaching the reception of Lucretius was in the early modern period, both in manuscript and print. Particularly well researched has been the so-called “Epicurean revival” of the 1640s and 1650s, which, as Howard Jones, Stephen Clucas, Reid Barbour, and David Norbrook (among others) have shown, saw a crystallization of the interest in Epicurus and Lucretius that led to the publication of a series of important texts. In this history, manuscript culture naturally played an important part, as the recent edition of Hutchinson’s version of De Rerum Natura has usefully reminded us. The present chapter focusses on a particular moment in the history of the reception of Lucretius in the 1650s, when the very first French and English translations were published. In 1650, Michel de Marolles, Abbé de Villeloin, published in Paris what constitutes the very first translation in any vernacular language of De Rerum Natura under the title Le Poëte Lucrèce, Latin et françois. Following suit, and even while Lucy Hutchinson was most probably penning her translation of the same text, John Evelyn published in London in 1656 a translation of Book I of De Rerum Natura under the title An Essay on the First Book of T. Lucretius Carus De rerum natura, keeping the rest of his translation private. Evelyn’s debt to Marolles has often been overlooked by historians. This essay hopes to shed some light on the context of the reception of Lucretius in England, by looking at Marolles’ possible influence on Evelyn and his contemporaries. As will be apparent, this reception has much to do with the milieu of English exiles in Paris, which included intellectuals such as Walter Charleton and Kenelm Digby, among others, and points to hitherto overlooked links between France and England.
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