Sunday, December 27, 2015
Would You Keep Reading?
Ada Palmer, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. xi:
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If you were told that reading this book could send you to Hell, would you keep reading? If you believed that heresy was contagious, that you could acquire a lethal mental illness from contact with incorrect ideas, would you choose to study them? Would you cross dangerous mountain ranges searching for unorthodox texts, and spend years working to correct and copy them? Would you publish such a book, and put your name on the title page as you turned one copy of a dangerous contagion into a thousand? Would you risk prosecution for it? And would you go through all this to preserve a book whose fundamental claims you thought were wrong?
