Gerard Passannante’s project will link the early material and textural fortunes of Lucretius’s Latin poem De Rerum Natura with key developments in the histories of literature, philosophy, and science. In it he argues that this poem occupied a unique and central position between the history of learned readers and the development of philosophy and scientific thinking. The libraries and archives of Rome will prove indispensable to him, as his research will entail close studies of the many fifteenth- and sixteenth-century print editions of the poem.