A look at the history of censorship, science, and magic from the Middle Ages to the post-Reformation era.
 
Neil Tarrant challenges conventional thinking by looking at the longer history of censorship, considering a five-hundred-year continuity of goals and methods stretching from the late eleventh century to well into the sixteenth.
 
Unlike earlier studies, Defining Nature’s Limits engages the history of both learned and popular magic. Tarrant explains how the church developed a program that sought to codify what was proper belief through confession, inquisition, and punishment and prosecuted what they considered superstition or heresy that stretched beyond the boundaries of religion. These efforts were continued by the Roman Inquisition, established in 1542. Although it was designed primarily to combat Protestantism, from the outset the new institution investigated both practitioners of “illicit” magic and inquiries into natural philosophy, delegitimizing certain practices and thus shaping the development of early modern science. Describing the dynamics of censorship that continued well into the post-Reformation era, Defining Nature's Limits is revisionist history that will interest scholars of the history science, the history of magic, and the history of the church alike.
 

The story of Naples' overlooked scientific contributions and its pivotal role in early modern European scientific culture.

Long neglected in the history of Renaissance and early modern Europe, in recent years scholars have revised the received understanding of the political and economic significance of the city of Naples and its rich artistic, musical, and political culture. Its importance in the history of science, however, has remained relatively unknown. The Science of Naples provides the first dedicated study of Neapolitan scientific culture in the English language. Drawing on contributions from leading experts in the field, this volume presents a series of studies that demonstrate Neapolitans’ manifold contributions to European scientific culture in the early modern period and considers the importance of the city, its institutions, and its surrounding territories for the production of new knowledge.

Individual chapters demonstrate the extent to which Neapolitan scholars and academies contributed to debates within the Republic of Letters that continued until deep into the nineteenth century, and how studies of Neapolitan natural disasters yielded unique insights that contributed to the development of fields such as medicine and volcanology. Taken together, these studies resituate the city of Naples as an integral part of a scientific culture that has increasingly globalized and present a rich and engaging portrait of the individuals who lived, worked, and made scientific knowledge there.