Introduction

While interaction with people and nature was conducted through a common medium, print establishes separate realms, substituting the materiality of “that aeriall substance, which in the body of any living creature, gives it life and motion” (Hobbes 262) for paper. In effect, in the late seventeenth century, the English have embraced print technologies without any reservations about how removing some speech from circulation and injecting mass amounts of new compounds—words on the page transported across incredible distances—will affect the body and mind. Thomas Creech’s translation of De Rerum Natura foregrounds these atmospheric anxieties; as Lucretius characterizes speech as physical matter, like the air, his Epicureanism reminds the English of how oral culture—the theatre especially—transacts with wind currents and weather patterns.