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² Brooke, Christopher, ‘Grotius, Stoicism and Oikeiosis’, Grotiana, 29 (2008), pp. 25–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Tuck, Richard, Natural rights theories: their origin and development (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 101–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mortimer, Sarah, Reason and religion in the English Revolution: the challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 89–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Hobbes, Thomas, De cive: the Latin version, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford 1983), i.2: pp. 90–3Google Scholar; English translation as On the citizen by Silverthorne, Michael ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 21–5Google Scholar.

⁵ Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ch. xiii: ‘Of the natural condition of mankind, as concerning their felicity, and misery’, in the edition by Noel Malcolm (3 vols., Oxford, 2012), ii: The English and Latin texts (i), pp. 188–97.

⁶ No natural superiority was thereby implied, as the solitary man would discover when he met a hungry lion: Brett, Changes of state, pp. 59–61.

⁷ Hoekstra, Kinch, ‘Hobbes on the natural condition of mankind’, in Springborg, Patricia, ed., The Cambridge companion to Hobbes's Leviathan (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 109–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more extended discussion of the extent to which Hobbes thought men in the state of nature would exist in groups, S. J. [Kinch] Hoekstra, ‘The savage, the citizen, and the foole: the compulsion for civil society in the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes’ (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford, 1998), Part i. The classical references are to Lucretius, De rerum natura, v.925–1027, and Diodorus Siculus, Library of history, i.8.

⁸ Hobbes, , Leviathan, ch. xii: ‘Of religion’, in Malcolm, , ed., The English and Latin texts, pp. 164–87Google Scholar.

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¹⁰ Hobbes, De cive, cap. xvi–xvii; Leviathan, part iii, esp. chs. xxiii, xlii. On Hobbes's engagement with sacred history, the remarkable early essay by Pocock, John, ‘Time, history and eschatology in the thought of Thomas Hobbes’, in Pocock, J. G. A., Politics, language and time: essays on political thought and history (London, 1971), pp. 148–201Google Scholar.

¹¹ Skinner, ‘A genealogy of the modern state’, pp. 348–54.

¹² Skinner, Quentin, Hobbes and republican liberty (Cambridge, 2008)Google Scholar.

¹³ Harrington's criticism of Hobbes, on which Fukuda, Arihiro, Sovereignty and the sword: Harrington, Hobbes, and mixed government in the English Civil Wars (Oxford, 1997), pp. 75–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Parkin, Jon, Taming the Leviathan: the reception of the political and religious ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England, 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar – although, as Parkin demonstrates, it was the flagrancy of Hobbes's Erastianism which offended many, not the doctrine itself.

¹⁵ On the Renaissance popularizers of the classical sources, such as Johannes Boemus, and on the observations and histories of travellers and missionaries to the Indies and Americas, Rubiés, Joan-Pau, ‘Ethnography, philosophy and the rise of natural man 1500–1750’, in Abbattista, Guido, ed., Encountering otherness: diversities and transcultural experiences in early modern European culture (Trieste, 2011), pp. 97–127Google Scholar. Rubiés emphasizes the uneven use of these sources, depending upon the intellectual, religious, and political purposes of those who had recourse to them.

¹⁶ As Istvan Hont has pointed out, Hobbes failed to grasp the extent to which there were ‘economic limits to modern politics’, as international commerce set bounds to national sovereignty: Hont, Istvan, Jealousy of trade: international competition and the nation state in historical perspective (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2005)Google Scholar, especially pp. 1–156: ‘Jealousy of trade: an introduction’.

¹⁷ Pufendorf, Samuel, De jure naturae et gentium libri octo: editio ultima, auctior multo, & emendatior (Amsterdam, 1698)Google Scholar, Lib. ii, Cap. i, xv, also xvi–xvii; trans.: Of the law of nature and nations, by Basil Kennet (3rd edn, Amsterdam, 1712). On which, Istvan Hont, ‘The language of sociability and commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the theoretical foundations of the “four-stages” theory’ (originally published 1986), now in Hont, Jealousy of trade, pp. 159–84; see also the ‘Introduction’ to the volume, pp. 37–51. Hochstrasser, T. J., Natural law theories in the early Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 40–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also Hunter, Ian, Rival Enlightenments: civil and metaphysical philosophy in early modern Germany (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 170–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹⁹ Bernard Mandeville, The fable of the bees (1723), Volume ii (1728), edited in two volumes by F. B. Kaye (Oxford, 1924; repr. Indianapolis, IN, 1988). Hundert, E. J., The Enlightenment's fable: Bernard Mandeville and the discovery of society (Cambridge, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robertson, John, The case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 256–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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²¹ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l'origine et les fondemens de l'inégalité parmi les homes (1755), in Oeuvres complètes, iii:Du contrat social, écrits politiques, ed. B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris 1964), esp. pp. 146–51 (on the origin of language) and 192–3 (on savage and civilized man); for Rousseau's critique of natural sociability, Wokler, Robert, ‘Rousseau's Pufendorf: natural law and the foundations of commercial society’, repr. in Rousseau, the age of Enlightenment, and their legacies (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2012), pp. 88–112Google Scholar.

²² Immanuel Kant, Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht (1784), trans. as ‘Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose’, in Kant's political writings, ed. Hans Reiss (rev. edn, Cambridge, 1991), p. 44.

²³ On the language debate: Lifschitz, Avi, Language and Enlightenment: the Berlin debates of the eighteenth century (Oxford, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on political economy and the international order, Nakhimovsky, Isaac, The closed commercial state: perpetual peace and commercial society from Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton, NJ, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ A recurring observation of Brett, Changes of state, pp. 3–7, 10, 61, 83, 88–9, 114, 167–8.

²⁵ An eighteenth-century exponent of natural law is mentioned by Brett, Annabel, ‘Natural right and civil community: the civil philosophy of Hugo Grotius’, Historical Journal, 45 (2002), pp. 31–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on pp. 50–1, referring to the Sicilian Jesuit, Giovanni Guarino.

²⁶ On the Augustinian–Scholastic debate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the Scholastic elaboration of a concept of ‘pure nature’: de Lubac, Henri, Augustinisme et théologie moderne (Paris, 1965)Google Scholar, chs. v–vi, viii.

²⁷ See Rubiés, J.-P., ‘The concept of cultural dialogue and the Jesuit method of accommodation: between idolatry and civilisation’, Archivium historicum Societas Jesu, 74 (2005), pp. 237–79Google Scholar; Mungello, D. E., Curious land: Jesuit accommodation and the origins of sinology (Honolulu, HI, 1989)Google Scholar.

²⁸ Imbruglia, Girolamo, ‘Le Lettere provinciali e la critica di Pascal all'idolatria gesuita: tra propaganda e opinione pubblica’, in Donattini, M., Marcocci, G. and Pastore, S., eds., L'Europa divisa e i nuovi mondi: per Adriano Prosperi (Pisa, 2011), pp. 217–26Google Scholar.

²⁹ See Pocock, John G. A., Barbarism and religion, v: Religion: the first triumph (Cambridge, 2010), p. 2Google Scholar; and, for the genesis of ecclesiastical history, the earlier article by Momigliano, Arnaldo, ‘Pagan and Christian historiography in the fourth century ad’, in Momigliano, , ed., The conflict between paganism and Christianity in the fourth century (Oxford, 1963), pp. 79–99Google Scholar.

³⁰ For Hobbes, see above, n. 10; Isaac La Peyrère, Prae-adamitae [with] Systema theologicum, ex Praeadamitarum hypothesis (1655). On La Peyrère, Popkin, Richard H., Isaac La Peyrère (1594–1676): his life, work and influence (Leiden, 1987)Google Scholar, and, with a light touch, Anthony Grafton, ‘Isaac La Peyrère and the Old Testament’, in idem, Defenders of the text: the traditions of scholarship in an age of science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1991), pp. 204–13.

³¹ Benedict Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670), parallel Latin and French edition and trans. F. Akkerman, J. Lagrée and P.-F. Moreau, as vol. iii of the edition of Spinoza Oeuvres, ed. Pierre-François Moreau (Paris, 1999); English trans. by Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel, Theological-political treatise (Cambridge, 2007). Commentary by Popkin, Richard H., ‘Spinoza and Bible scholarship’, in Garrett, Don, ed., The Cambridge companion to Spinoza (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 383–407Google Scholar; Preus, J. Samuel, Spinoza and the irrelevance of biblical authority (Cambridge, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³² Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes, Ezra, and the Bible: the history of a subversive idea’, in idem, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), pp. 383–431.

³³ Simon, Richard, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (first published Paris, 1678Google Scholar, an edition almost all of whose copies were destroyed on the orders of Bishop Bossuet; republished by Reinier Leers, Amsterdam, 1685). See especially ‘Preface de l'auteur’ and Book i.

³⁴ [Jean Le Clerc], Sentiments de quelques théologiens d'Hollande sur l'Histoire critique du Vieux Testament par le P. Rich. Simon de l'Oratoire VIe lettre (Amsterdam, 1685); Prolegomena in Vet. Foederis…III dissertatio: de scriptore Pentateuchi Mose (c. 1693–6). On Le Clerc's method, Pocock, Barbarism and religion, v, pp. 89–114: ‘Jean Le Clerc and the history of language’, albeit more concerned with Le Clerc's criticism of the New Testament.

³⁵ Grafton, Anthony, ‘Joseph Scaliger and historical chronology: the rise and fall of a discipline’, History and Theory, 14 (1975), pp. 156–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; more generally: Rossi, Paolo, The dark abyss of time: the history of the earth and the history of nations from Hooke to Vico, trans. from the Italian by Lydia Cochrane (Chicago, IL, and London, 1984)Google Scholar.

³⁶ On Spencer: Assmann, Jan, Moses the Egyptian: the memory of Egypt in Western monotheism (Cambridge, MA, 1998)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 3; Stolzenberg, Daniel, ‘John Spencer and the perils of sacred philology’, Past and Present, 214 (2012), pp. 129–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, matching Spencer for erudition as well as insight, Levitin, Dmitri, ‘John Spencer's De legibus Hebraeorum (1683–5) and “enlightened” sacred history: a new interpretation’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 76 (2013)Google Scholar. More generally, although its teleological perspective invites reservations, Stroumsa, Guy G., A new science: the discovery of religion in the age of reason (Cambridge, MA, 2010), pp. 95–100Google Scholar (on Spencer), 101–13 (on the Persian cult of Zoroaster).

³⁷ Sarah Mortimer and John Robertson, ‘Nature, Revelation, History: intellectual consequences of religious heterodoxy c. 1600–1750’, in idem, eds., The intellectual consequences of religious heterodoxy, 1600–1750 (Leiden, 2012), pp. 1–46, esp. 26–39.

³⁸ See esp. Leviathan, ch. 42; and further references in n. 10 above.

³⁹ Spinoza, Theological-political treatise, esp. chs. 7–16; for an introduction, Nadler, Steven, A book forged in Hell: Spinoza's scandalous treatise and the birth of the secular age (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2011)Google Scholar; and for thorough commentary, James, Susan, Spinoza on philosophy, religion, and politics: the Theologico-political treatise (Oxford, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁰ A recent study of Neapolitan intellectual and artistic culture in the centuries of Spanish rule is Marino, John A., Becoming Neapolitan: citizen culture in Baroque Naples (Baltimore, MD, 2011)Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Robertson, The case for the Enlightenment, ch. 3, for a rebuttal of this image.

⁴² The two major libraries were those of Cardinal Brancaccio, donated to the public, and Giuseppe Valletta, kept in his house, and open to fellow men of letters. Valletta's collection was catalogued on its transfer to the Oratorian Convent of the Girolamini: ‘Antico Catalogo della Biblioteca dei Girolamini, attribuito a Giambattista Vico’, Biblioteca Oratoriana dei Girolamini, Naples, MS consulted on microfilm: 27.1.10. Vico was involved in the acquisition of the books from Valletta's heirs, but the attribution to him of the catalogue is uncertain. On Valletta and the significance of his collection, Comparato, V. I., Giuseppe Valletta: un intellettuale napoletano della fine del Seicento (Naples, 1970)Google Scholar.

⁴³ Biblioteca Oratoriana dei Girolamini, Naples, MS 28.4.1.(2), fos. 13r–30r: The untitled MS consists of 18 folios (35 sides), and begins ‘Il P. Simon, vuol che il Pentateuco, almeno nel modo, come oggi l'habbiamo, non sia fatto scritto da Mosè, ma che sia stato scritto del suo ordine da gli scribi, e Profeti.’ In the following paragraph, there is a reference to ‘L'autor del libro de Sentimenti de’ theologi d'Ollanda, circa il libro del P. Simone’. The MS is included in a vellum-bound volume of manuscripts with the title on the spine ‘L. Porzio Lettere ed altri miscellanei’. The contents of the volume are described, not altogether accurately, in Mandarini, Enrico, I codici manoscritti della Biblioteca Oratoriana di Napoli (Naples and Rome, 1897), pp. 285–6Google Scholar. That Lucantonio Porzio, a natural philosopher interested in atomist theories of nature, was the author of the MS cannot be ascertained; but the hand in which it is written resembles that in another MS in the collection (fos. 126–43), of a work more probably by Porzio. The similarity of the hands may at least strengthen the likelihood of a date before 1700. I am grateful to the staff of the Girolamini for making the MS available to me during a particularly difficult period for the Library, a state institution within the confines of a religious order.

⁴⁴ Michele Rak with Conforti, Maria and Lombardi, Carmela, eds., Lezioni dell'Accademia di Palazzo del Duca di Medinaceli (Napoli 1698–1701) (5 vols., Naples 2000–5)Google Scholar; vol. v contains introductory material on the history and significance of the Academy, on which there is a considerable literature. The lectures on the Assyrians, by Emmanuele Cicatelli and Giuseppe Lucina, on the republic of the Hebrews, by Niccolò Caravita, and on the Persians, by Giuseppe Valletta, are all in vol. i. Rak believes that they are likely to have been among the first to be given, in 1698. On these and other historical lectures: Conforti, Maria, ‘Scienza, erudizione e storia nell'Accademia di Medina Coeli: spunti provisori’, Studi filosofici, 8–9 (1985–6), pp. 101–27Google Scholar. For Giannone's memories of the Academy: Giannone, Pietro, Vita scritta da lui medesimo, ed. S. Bertelli (Milan, 1960), pp. 36–9Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Aulisio, Domenico, Delle scuole sacre: libri due postumi (Naples, 1723)Google Scholar; on the significance of the work, Ricuperati, Giuseppe, L'esperienza civile e religiosa di Pietro Giannone (Milan and Naples, 1970), pp. 47–78Google Scholar. Giannone paid warm tribute to the importance of Aulisio's legal teaching in his Vita, pp. 9–10, 14–15, 17, 21. Vico too recalled Aulisio with respect, describing him as ‘uomo universale delle lingue e delle scienze’: Vita di Giambattista Vico scritta da se medesimo (c. 1723–8), in Giambattista Vico: opere, ed. Andrea Battistini (2 vols., continuously paginated, Milan, 1990), pp. 37–8.

⁴⁶ Osbat, Luciano, L'Inquisizione a Napoli: il processo degli ateisti, 1688–1697 (Rome, 1974)Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Fragnito, Gigliola, La Bibbia al rogo: la censura ecclesiastica e i volgarizzamenti della Scrittura (1471–1605) (Bologna, 1997)Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ The processes against Spinoza and Simon are recorded in documents in the Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede, the Vatican, Index Diarii, vol. vii (1665–82), fo. 126: Dec. 1678, and fos. 159–61: Apr., June, Dec. 1682; Index Protocolli RR, fo. 556 and fos. 410–12: report of the Consultor, Laurentius Bulbul, on Simon's Histoire critique. On the broader context of Simon's condemnation, Mandelbrote, Scott, ‘Isaac Vossius and the Septuagint’, in Jorink, Eric and van Miert, Dirk, eds., Isaac Vossius (1618–1698) between science and scholarship (Leiden, 2012), pp. 85–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁹ See Fragnito, Gigliola, ed., Church, censorship and culture in early modern Italy (Cambridge, 2001)Google Scholar, esp. the contribution by Fragnito, ‘The central and peripheral organisation of censorship’, pp. 13–49.

⁵⁰ Galiani, Celestino, Conclusiones selectae ex historia veteris testamenti: ab orbe condito ad Abrahae in Chananaeam profectionem (Rome, 1708)Google Scholar; with a second, expanded version, without title, but catalogued by the Biblioteca Nazionale di Roma as Assertationes theologica: disputabuntur praeside D. Coelistino Galiano in Monasterio Sancti Eusebii Sacrae Theologiae Praelectore (n.p., 1710); on this drawn-out process, which lasted over three years from August 1710 to January 1714, Costa, Gustavo, ‘Celestini e inquisitori: Galiani, la Bibbia e la cultura napoletana’, Annali della Scuola Normale di Pisa: Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, 5th ser., 2 (2009), pp. 593–620Google Scholar, although the author gives no references for the archival sources, including the Index records in the Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede. Garofalo, Biagio, Considerazioni di Biagio Garofalo intorno alla poesia degli Ebrei e dei Greci (Rome, 1707)Google Scholar. Garofalo's work provoked an extended controversy with a Jewish writer from Padua before it was referred to the Index in 1711. Garofalo's case is mentioned at several points in Barbara Ann Naddeo's recent monograph, Vico and Naples: the urban origins of modern social theory (Ithaca, NY, and London, 2011). I intend to discuss these cases and their wider implications elsewhere.

⁵¹ For his own account, Giannone, Vita, pp. 63–80.

⁵² Vico to Filippo Maria Monti, 18 Nov. 1724, to Cardinal Lorenzo Corsini (future Pope Clement XII), 20 Nov. 1725, to the Abbate Esperti, [early 1726], in Sanna, M., ed., Giambattista Vico: epistole, con aggiunte le epistole dei suoi corrispondenti, Opere di Giambattista Vico, xi (Naples, 1992), pp. 108–10Google Scholar, 117–18, 126–9.

⁵³ Costa, Gustavo, ‘Vico e la Sacra Scrittura alla luce di un fascicolo dell'Inqusizione’, in Hidalgo-Serna, E, Marassi, M., Sevilla, J. M. and Villalobos, J., eds., Pensar para el nuevo siglo: Giambattista Vico y la cultura europea (Naples, 2001), pp. 253–73Google Scholar; and ‘Monsignor Celestino Galiani e G. B. Vico’, Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani, 40 (2010), pp. 23–36.

⁵⁴ For such readings in the case of Vico: Bedani, Gino, Vico revisited: orthodoxy, naturalism and science in the Scienza nuova (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar, chs. 1–2 – but modified and informed by ‘years of study as a Dominican’; more simplistically, Israel, Jonathan I., Radical Enlightenment: philosophy and the making of modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 665–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁵ The recently discovered ‘prefazione’ to the ‘Triregno’, addressed ‘Alle Alte, Potenti e Sovrane Potestà della Terra’, dated 18 July 1735, makes this clear. It is reprinted by Giuseppe Ricuperati as an appendix to his article ‘Dopo la Giannoniana: problemi di edizione, nuovi reperimenti di fonti e l'introduzione perduta del Triregno’, included in his collection, Nella costellazione del ‘Triregno’: testi e contesti Giannoniani, ed. Duccio Canestri (San Marco in Lamis, 2004), pp. 195–202.

⁵⁶ Vico to Filippo Maria Monti, 18 Nov. 1724, in Sanna, ed., Epistole, p. 109.

⁵⁷ Giannone, Pietro, Il Triregno: I Del regno terreno, II Del regno celeste, III Del regno papale, ed. Alfredo Parente (3 vols., Naples, 1940)Google Scholar. For a résumé of the surviving manuscripts and related material, Bertelli, Sergio, Giannoniana: autografi, manoscritti e documenti della fortuna di Pietro Giannone (Milan and Naples 1968)Google Scholar; for material discovered more recently, including the ‘prefazione’ of 1735, Ricuperati, ‘Dopo la Giannoniana’, in idem, Nella costellazione del‘Triregno’, pp. 169–94.

⁵⁸ Giannone, Vita, p. 183.

⁵⁹ Ibid., pp. 183–5.

⁶⁰ Ibid., pp. 200–8, 210–21.

⁶¹ Giannone, Triregno, i, ‘Introduzione’, pp. 3–7.

⁶² Ibid., i, pp. 9–13.

⁶³ Ibid., i, pp. 14–19.

⁶⁴ Ibid., i, pp. 19–27.

⁶⁵ Ibid., i, pp. 33–8. (The argument of these pages seems to be continuous with that printed as the ‘Introduzione’.) There are two excellent studies of Giannone's approach to sacred history in the context of contemporary scholarship and speculation: Ricuperati, L'esperienza civile e religiosa, pp. 437–92; and Mannarino, Lina, Le mille favole degli antichi: ebraismo e cultura europea nel pensiero religioso di Pietro Giannone (Florence, 1999)Google Scholar. See in particular chs. i–ii of the latter for commentary on the issues discussed in this and the previous two paragraphs.

⁶⁶ For the dating and interpretation of the Book of Job, Giannone referred explicitly to the work of his Neapolitan teacher, Domenico Aulisio: Triregno, i, pp. 121–5.

⁶⁷ Ibid., i, pp. 125–7.

⁶⁸ Ibid., i, pp. 126–36.

⁶⁹ Ibid., i, pp. 197–9; for the daughter of Jepthah, Judges 11:30–40.

⁷⁰ Giannone, Triregno, i, pp. 198–9; for Samson, Judges, 14–16; for Solomon, 1 Kings, 11:1–3.

⁷¹ Giannone, Triregno, i, pp. 135–6.

⁷² Ibid., i, pp. 200–1.

⁷³ Ibid., i, p. 202; for Ehud and Jael, Judges, 3:15–30, 4:17–22; for Samuel's slaying of Agag, 1 Samuel 15:32–3.

⁷⁴ Giannone, Triregno, i, p. 115.

⁷⁵ Ibid., i, p. 111.

⁷⁶ Ibid., i, pp. 161–78. The story of Abraham's adoption of circumcision is in Genesis 17. The ancient authorities cited by Giannone included Herodotus, Diodorus, and Strabo. On Giannone's treatment of the religions of the Hebrews and gentiles, see Mannarino, Le mille favole, ch. iii, esp. pp. 139–45, on circumcision.

⁷⁷ Giannone, Triregno, i, p. 221: we may suppose that Giannone used these terms wittingly, aware of their significance in the Inquisitors’ lexicon.

⁷⁸ Ibid., i, p. 224: 1 Kings 18.

⁷⁹ Giannone, Triregno, i, pp. 220–2: 2 Kings 2:23–4.

⁸⁰ Giannone, Triregno, i, pp. 232–41, 244–8. Giannone specifically criticized Spencer for distinguishing between a heavenly reward for moral justice and the earthly benefits of ceremonial observance (p. 237).

⁸¹ Ibid., i, pp. 377–91: Parte Terza, ‘Della resurrezione de’ morti secondo il sentimento degli ultimi Ebrei’. The suggestion in the title, and in the titles of several chapters in this Part is, however, undeveloped in the surviving text, which consists of little more than a series of historical notes.

⁸² Cicero, De inventione, i.ii (in the Loeb edition: Cambridge, MA, and London, 2006, pp. 4–7). Ricuperati, L'esperienza civile e religiosa, p. 440, suggests that the earthly kingdom does have a Hobbesian character, while Mannarino, Le mille favole, pp. 131–9, emphasizes rather Giannone's proximity to Pufendorf. But both in the ‘Triregno’ and in the (later) summary in his Vita, Giannone explicitly frames the problem as a passage from the beastly to the civil.

⁸³ Giannone's account of the biblical Hebrews thus bears no resemblance to that recently identified in a number of seventeenth-century writers by Nelson, Eric, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish sources and the transformation of European political thought (Cambridge, MA, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Giannone did use the term ‘Hebrew republic’ (‘la repubblica ebrea’) to refer to the period of government by the Judges: see, for example, Triregno, i, p. 185, but political authority, in any form, was not central to his account of the formation of civil society.

⁸⁴ He did so, however, after first attempting to formulate his principles within a work of universal jurisprudence: De universi iuris uno principio et fine uno, in two parts, I De uno universi iuris principio et fine uno, II De constantia iurisprudentis, with a third part of Notae in duos libros (1720–2), reprinted with facing Italian translation in Giambattista Vico, Opere giuridiche: il diritto universale, ed. Paolo Cristofolini (Florence, 1974). The jurisprudence with which Vico engaged was predominantly Humanist rather than Scholastic; sacred history is discussed within this framework, notably in De constantia, but is not the starting point. Consideration of the work, essential for a full account of Vico's decision to draw his principles from sacred history rather than jurisprudence, has been set aside here: I shall return to it elsewhere. See, however, Enrico Nuzzo, ‘L'umanità di Vico tra le selve e le città: agli inizi della storia della civiltà nel Diritto universale’, in his Tra ordine di storia e storicità: saggi sui saperi della storia in Vico (Rome, 2001), pp. 109–64, for discussion of the relation between the Diritto universale and the Scienza nuova.

⁸⁵ For the 1725 and the 1744 editions, I have used the Opere, ed. Battistini. For the 1730 edition, I have used La scienza nuova 1730, ed. Paolo Cristofolini, in the (still incomplete) Opere di Giambattista Vico, viii (Naples, 2002). There is a translation of the 1725 edition as The first new science, ed. Leon Pompa (Cambridge, 2002); of the two available translations of the 1744 edition I prefer The new science of Giambattista Vico, unabridged translation of the 3rd edn, by T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1948; repr. 1991). References will be given in the form Scienza nuova followed by 1725, 1730 (or) 1744, followed in the case of the 1730 edition by page numbers, but in the cases of the 1725 and 1744 editions by paragraph numbers (§), to permit the reader's use of any edition or translation which adopts these.

⁸⁶ Vico, Scienza nuova 1725, Opere, §§ 8–9, 58; see Robertson, The case for the Enlightenment, pp. 226–32.

⁸⁷ Notwithstanding the comment of Grafton, ‘Joseph Scaliger and historical chronology’, p. 156, and the detailed notes by Nicolini on Vico's sources: Nicolini, F., Commento storico alla seconda Scienza nuova (2 vols., Rome 1949–50), i, pp. 28–9Google Scholar.

⁸⁸ Scienza nuova 1730, pp. 61–2: Bk i, Sect. i: ‘Annotazioni alla tavola cronologica’; Scienza nuova 1744, §§ 43–4.

⁸⁹ Scienza nuova 1730, pp. 67, 72–3, 75–6; Scienza nuova 1744, §§ 59, 74, 79, 81–2, 118.

⁹⁰ Vico's adaptation of sacred history is nowhere told as a continuous story: the most connected version is in the Scienza nuova 1725, §§ 94–116. In the Scienza nuova 1730, see pp. 139–46, elements of which are anticipated at pp. 94–5, 98–100, 121–5; and in Scienza nuova 1744, see §§ 369–73, along with the earlier passages §§ 142–6, 165–79, 330–7. The reference to Hobbes's ‘fieri, e violenti’ is in Scienza nuova 1730, p. 100 (comment on Degnità xxix), also p. 207; and Scienza nuova 1744, § 179 (comment on Degnità xxxi), also § 553.

⁹¹ Rubiés, ‘Ethnography, philosophy and the rise of natural man’, pp. 114–16. However, there is nothing in Vico's re-telling of the story which would confirm the significance attached by Rubiés to the work by Joannes Boemus, Mores, leges et ritus omnium gentium (1520, in the edition of Leiden, 1541).

⁹² Scienza nuova 1730, p. 98 (Degnità xxi): ‘La Storia Sagra è più antica di tutte le profane che ci son pervenute, perché narra tanto spiegatamente e per lungo tratto di più d'ottocento anni lo stato di natura sotto i Patriarchi, o sia il tempo delle famiglie, sopra le quali tutti i Politici convengono, che poi sursero i popoli, e le città: del quale stato la Storia Profana ce ne ha o nulla, o poco, e molto confusamente narrato.’ The translation is mine. Cf. the very similar wording in Scienza nuova 1744 § 165 (Degnità xxiii), except that the later version has ‘lo stato delle famiglie’ rather than ‘il tempo delle famiglie’. There was an interval of 800 years between the Flood and the Hebrews’ Exodus from Israel; see the ‘Tavola cronologica’.

⁹³ Scienza nuova 1744, § 166 (not in the 1730 edition). For the ‘conceit’ of nations, Scienza nuova 1744, §§ 125–6 (Degnità iii); Scienza nuova 1730, p. 92.

⁹⁴ Scienza nuova 1730, pp. 65, 140, 125, 161; Scienza nuova 1744, §§ 169, 170, 337. The references are to: Marten Schoock (1614–59), Diluvium Noachi universale (1692); Jean Chassagnon (1531–98), De gigantibus eorumque reliquiis (1580); and Hugo van Linschooten (1563–1611), Descriptio totius Guineae tractus, Congi, Angolae et Monomopotae (1599). These three works by no means exhaust Vico's modern sources. More such works are cited in the 1744 than in the 1730 edition, but most had been added by Vico in MS alterations to copies of the 1730 edition; these have been included in an appendix to the critical edition of the Scienza nuova 1730 as ‘Correzioni, miglioramenti ed aggiunte’.

⁹⁵ Vico's knowledge of Hobbes's argument seems to have been derived from Georg Pasch, De eruditis huius saeculi inventis (Leipzig, 1700); on whom, Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the European republic of letters’, in Aspects of Hobbes, pp. 480, 511–12 n. 202. On the vexed question of the extent of his reading of Bayle, Enrico Nuzzo, ‘Attorno a Vico e Bayle’, in idem, Tra ordine della storia e storicità, pp. 165–239; also Robertson, The case for the Enlightenment, pp. 216–17. There seems little reason to doubt that he had read the major works of Grotius and Pufendorf.

⁹⁶ Scienza nuova 1733, pp. 303, 326; Scienza nuova 1744, §§ 816, 948. On neither occasion is Christ identified with divine grace; on the second, he is, rather, mentioned as revealing divine reason to the Apostles.

⁹⁷ Scienza nuova 1744, §§ 1046–56; not in the 1730 edition. On this point, Enrico Nuzzo, ‘Between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Italian culture in the early 1700s: Giambattista Vico and Paolo Mattia Doria’, in Mortimer and Robertson, eds., Intellectual consequences of religious heterodoxy, pp. 205–34, esp. p. 228.

⁹⁸ Scienza nuova 1744, §§ 2, 342. The formula of a ‘teologia civile ragionata della provvedenza divina’ was used for the first time in print in 1744, but it features among Vico's MS additions to the 1730 edition.

⁹⁹ Other than in the case of the proposed Venetian reprinting of the first, 1725, edition (see above, n. 53), the Scienza nuova avoided censure by the Index. More generally, see Nuzzo's balanced assessment of Vico ‘Between orthodoxy and heterodoxy’, n. 97 above.

¹⁰⁰ Scienza nuova 1730, pp. 27–8: ‘Iddio provvedendo, ha così ordinate, e disposte le cose umane, che gli huomini caduti dalla natural giustizia per lo peccato originale, intendendo di fare quasi sempre tutto il diverso, e sovente anco tutto il contrario, onde per servir’ all'utilità, vivessero in solitudine da fiere bestie, per quelle loro stesse diverse, e contrarie cose, essi dall'utilità medesima sien tratti da huomini a vivere con giustizia, e conservarsi in società, e sì a celebrare la loro natura socievole.’ The wording is similar in Scienza nuova 1744, § 2, except that for ‘natural’ justice has been substituted ‘entire’ justice.

¹⁰¹ On this theme, see further Robertson, The case for the Enlightenment, pp. 225–55.

¹⁰² For Giannone's ‘Triregno’ as a product of the ‘crise de la conscience européenne’ and radical Enlightenment, Ricuperati, Giuseppe, La città terrena di Pietro Giannone: un itinerario tra ‘crisi della coscienza europea’ e illuminismo radicale (Florence, 2001), pp. 165–85Google Scholar; cf. his more cautious judgement in L'esperienza civile e religiosa, pp. 620–1.

¹⁰³ The classic treatment of Vico as a Counter-Enlightenment thinker is of course that of Isaiah Berlin, albeit in essays, ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’ and ‘Vico and the ideal of the Enlightenment’, both in Isaiah Berlin, Against the current: essays in the history of ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford, 1981), pp. 1–24, 120–9, rather than in Vico and Herder: two studies in the history of ideas (London, 1976). In a similar vein, Lilla, Mark, G. B. Vico: the making of an anti-modern (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1993)Google Scholar. For the later anti-philosophes, McMahon, Darrin M., Enemies of the Enlightenment: the French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford and New York, NY, 2001)Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁴ Sheehan, Jonathan, The Enlightenment Bible: translation, scholarship, culture (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar; on Michaelis in particular, Legaspi, Michael C., The death of scripture and the rise of biblical studies (Oxford, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰⁵ Pocock, Barbarism and religion, v, passim; also Young, Brian, ‘Conyers Middleton: the historical consequences of heterodoxy’, in , Mortimer and , Robertson, eds., Intellectual consequences of religious heterodoxy, pp. 235–65Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁶ An excellent recent conspectus, offering a succinct, rigorous account of what intellectual historians do, is Annabel Brett's contribution, ‘What is intellectual history now?’, to Cannadine, David, ed., What is history now? (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 113–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also the contributions of several authors to Whatmore, Richard and Young, Brian, eds., Intellectual history (Basingstoke, 2006)Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁷ The recent volume edited by Floyd, Jonathan and Stears, Marc, Political philosophy versus history? Contextualism and real politics in contemporary political thought (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, many of whose more sceptical contributors are from Oxford, represents a case in point.