Arts & Humanities Colloquium: Renaissance Prince in the Enlightenment and the Case Against Lucretius

A Renaissance Prince in the Enlightenment and the Case Against Lucretius
Patrick M. Owens, visiting assistant professor in the Department of the Classics

Melchior Cardinal Polignac’s Anti-Lucretius is perhaps the strangest and most ambitious philosophical poem of the early 18th century: a full-scale refutation of the Epicurean worldview written in a genre made canonical by the very poet whom he sought to overthrow. This lecture explores how a humanist prince of the Church, writing in the age of Newton, appropriates the literary form, rhetorical strategies, and even the scientific prestige of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things in order to refute contemporary philosophical movements. The talk situates the Anti-Lucretius within classical reception and at the fault line between Renaissance classicism and Enlightenment thought, as a sophisticated bid to reclaim a literary genre and the authority of reason, poetry, and theology against the growing prestige of materialism.

This event is part of the Division of Arts & Humanities Fall 2026 Colloquium Series.