The Neapolitan Enlightenment

Repositions eighteenth-century Naples as a dynamic center of scientific innovation, intellectual exchange, and civil progress that helped shape the foundations of modern knowledge across Europe and beyond.

Naples in the eighteenth century was far from a peripheral outpost; it was a vibrant “European Laboratory” where scientific inquiry was inextricably linked to civil progress and international exchange. The present volume seeks to ground broad theoretical debates into the lived experiences of eighteenth-century protagonists. By doing so, we aim to showcase how the Neapolitan scientific contribution was not merely a theoretical chapter in the Republic of Letters, but a dynamic, choral, and co-constructed process of local knowledge that continuously reshaped the city’s standing on the global stage.
We adopt intellectual biography not as a static end, but as a dynamic lens to explore the internal machinery of Neapolitan knowledge production—its institutions, practices, and local environments—alongside the external networks through which ideas, methods, and actors circulated across Europe. By looking beyond the university chair, this collection offers a fresh and comprehensive re-evaluation of the Neapolitan Enlightenment, intentionally including figures who represent the era’s institutional and social diversity.
The volume is organized into three thematic sections. The first, Epistemological Mediations and the Republic of Letters, explores the intellectual authority of female scholars like Faustina Pignatelli and Maria Angela Ardinghelli. Operating from their salons and private networks, they acted as crucial knowledge brokers and mediators of Cartesian, Leibnizian, and Newtonian physics, translating and transforming European theories to fit the local context.
The focus shifts in the second section, From Clinical Observation to the Secrets of Nature, which examines the figures who institutionalized the study of medicine and natural history. From the groundbreaking anatomical and clinical discoveries of Domenico Cotugno and Francesco Serao to Nicola Caputi’s provincial research in the Salento region, this section reveals a scientific culture characterized by rigorous empirical observation. It highlights how the scientific renewal of the capital was deeply fed by a “situated science” conducted in the peripheries.
The final part, Global Networks and Theoretical Frontiers, extends the narrative beyond the city’s walls. It explores how Sir William Hamilton’s visual and descriptive codification of volcanology projected Neapolitan expertise onto a worldwide stage, examines the tragic intersection of science and politics in the life of the socially committed physician Domenico Cirillo, and analyzes the unique epistemological resistance of Nicola Fergola’s geometric school against European algebraic hegemony.
By weaving together specialized research and social responsibility, Neapolitan science reveals its deepest distinctiveness: its inherent civic dimension. Whether through clinical practice, mathematical rigor, or environmental observation, these actors transformed the production of knowledge into a high form of civic service. Ultimately, The Neapolitan Enlightenment illustrates how the investigation of nature in the Kingdom was always, at its heart, a science of and for society.