'Experiences Are Not Successful Accompaniments to Knowledge of the Truth'. The Traial of the Ateists in Late Seventeent-Century Naples

During the last decades of the seventeenth century, the Roman Inquisition investigated a group of Neapolitan lawyers and legal scholars who, passion- ate about scientific and geometric reasoning, tried to reformulate the very concepts of science and truth. Leaving aside theoretical questions about the heuristic methods of this group, this chapter focuses on the response of the most reactionary wing of local society to this challenge, both in Naples and in Rome. Worried by the emancipation from the principle of authority taking shape in both lay and ecclesiastic culture, the Inquisition sought to maintain control over the different forms of religious and intellectual dissent unfolding in Naples.