Abstract

This dissertation is a study of the life and thought of the Italian Dominican philosopher, Tommaso Campanella . Campanella, a contemporary of Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Paolo Sarpi, has been viewed by scholars from a number of often very different perspectives. While early biographers saw him as mad and his philosophical ideas a confusing complex of often contradictory ideas, modern scholars have depicted him as either a utopian revolutionary, a fervently orthodox Catholic apologist for the Counter-Reformation papacy, or a sly Machiavellian schemer, but in truth, he may have been all of these and more. ;While Campanella has been depicted as a dissimulator, this study attempts to understand the nature of his dissimulation and to place him within the context of the intellectual culture of Counter-Reformation Italy, a complex culture where things were not always as they seemed. Campanella's dissimulation, seen by his great biographer, Luigi Amabile, as somehow insincere and contrived, may have been a more consistent facet of his intellectual personality than previously believed and sheds light into the intricacies involved in maintaining one's genuinely held beliefs in a culture in which repression was a fact of life. ;His life, probably as much, if not more than that of Bruno or Sarpi, suggests the extremes, including a feigned madness, to which some intellectuals may have gone to avoid the scrutiny and censorship of the Counter-Reformation Church and its Roman Inquisition. It also provides great insight into the social and cultural world of Counter-Reformation Italy and of early modern Europe. ;The analysis of Campanella's life thus focuses upon the trial transcripts of his treason and heresy trials after the failure of his conspiracy against the Church and Spanish in his native Calabria in 1599. These records, still accessible at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples, were supplemented by other Inquisition trial records available at the Archivio di Stato in Florence, and at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in Rome, in order to complete this study