Mondo Knows Facts
Poggio recovered lost classical texts from monasteries
A Florentine book hunter found Lucretius in a German library in 1417 Poggio Bracciolini worked as a papal secretary and spent his spare time searching monastic libraries for forgotten Latin works. In 1417 he found a manuscript of Lucretius at Fulda, and he also recovered speeches of Cicero and a text of Vitruvius. His copies are why several Roman authors survived the Middle Ages at all. It sits in Mondo's history collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
Where this comes from
Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana
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Tags: manuscripts, renaissance, libraries
Poggio recovered lost classical texts from monasteries: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- A Florentine book hunter found Lucretius in a German library in 1417. The figure is taken from Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a history fact?
- Yes. It sits on the History shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.