Poggio Bracciolini [SEP] date of birth
Poggio Bracciolini
Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini (11 February 1380 – 30 October 1459), best known simply as Poggio Bracciolini, was an Italian scholar and an early humanist. He was responsible for rediscovering and recovering a great number of classical Latin manuscripts, mostly decaying and forgotten in German, Swiss, and French monastic libraries. His most celebrated find was "De rerum natura", the only surviving work by Lucretius.
Birth and education.
Poggio di Guccio (the surname Bracciolini was added during his career) was
had studied the archives of the famous Swiss monastery of St. Gallen, formerly one of the key centres of Catholicism, and discovered traces of the barbaric library raid made by Poggio Bracciolini and a friend of his, both of them highly educated servants of the Roman curia. They purloined numerous manuscripts and books that were considered ancient from the library of this monastery (however, the manuscripts may date to a more recent epoch, which wouldn't preclude them from serving as prototypes for the manufacture of numerous "ancient" works by Poggio