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As becomes clear from this and other pages of his book, Greenblatt wants his readers to believe that the manuscript discovered by Poggio in 1417 contained the only surviving copy of DRN and that the text would have doubtlessly been lost forever, had it not been for this one serendipitous discovery. Furthermore, he heavily implies that the text”s survival was constantly endangered, not just by “fire and flood and the teenth of time,” but also by malignant monks and churchmen, who despised pagan learning and all too often destroyed ancient texts by turning their manuscripts into palimpsests (e.g. pp. 42-44). How realistic is this account?