This essay sheds light on an important but largely overlooked chapter in the story of the early modern reception of Lucretius’ De rerum natura: the publication, in 1589, of Girolamo Frachetta’s Breve spositione di tutta l’opera di Lucretio, the first publication to systematically explicate the philosophical content of Lucretius’ poem in a vernacular language. Published more than half a century before the first vernacular translation of the poem, Frachetta’s commentary was a groundbreaking effort to make Lucretius’ version of Epicurean philosophy accessible not only to the Latin-educated elite, but to a broader vernacular readership – a potentially dangerous enterprise at a time when professing belief in the more controversial tenets of Epicurean philosophy could provoke investigation for heresy by the Inquisition. This essay shows how Frachetta crafted a commentary capable of effectively explicating Lucretius’ philosophy to a vernacular readership, while taking measures to proactively defend himself from possible accusations of heresy and his text from the threat of suppression.

Les chercheurs doivent citer ce travail comme suit :

• Coleman, J. K., (2025), "Translating Impiety: Girolamo Frachetta and the First Vernacular Commentary on Lucretius", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Coleman, James K. "Translating Impiety: Girolamo Frachetta and the First Vernacular Commentary on Lucretius." Quaderni d'italianistica 35 (1): 2015. 55-71. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v35i1.22352. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.