The Catholic Church attempted to stop Lucretius: in the Florentine Synod of December 1516, it prohibited the reading of Lucretius in schools. In 1551, the Council of Trent banned his work. But it was too late. An entire vision of the world that had been swept away by medieval Christian fundamentalism was reemerging in a Europe that had reopened its eyes. It was not just the rationalism, atheism, and materialism of Lucretius that were being proposed in Europe. It was not merely a luminous and serene meditation on the beauty of the world. It was much more: it was an articulate and complex
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