Lost lore

Among the essays I'd missed toward the end of last month was O'Neill's Great Myths #13 on "the Renaissance". A French word, from a Frenchman - writing 1855 - but this translates Italians of the 1500s who saw their revived Classical artwork as rinascita. So O'Neill is overstating his case (as he's been known to do) when he says that contemporaries didn't use the term.

For now, I'm more looking at the O'Neill take upon Greenblatt's The Swerve, which ostensibly reviewed Lucretius' De rerum natura. Here O'Neill rings more true to me.

I knew The Swerve was out there, but I never got around to picking it up. As Lost Lore goes, I was more interested in A Most Dangerous Book - which I'll admit I also didn't read. O'Neill, it seems, is saving me some time.

"Lost Lore" memes, claiming that books like De rerum natura were "Suppressed", have the unhappy side-effect that paranoiacs from the outside question if those books ever existed in the first place. Then they doubt if any other such books existed. We already had cranks like Illig, and "Emmet Scott", asking if we had endured a Dark Age. Last year Unz readers had this fool asking if we even had Antiquity before all that.

SELFOUTED 3/31/23: Guyénot, all along. I should have guessed.