Selected Philosophical Poems of Tommaso Campanella: A Bilingual Edition

By Tommaso Campanella and Sherry Roush

A contemporary of Giordano Bruno and Galileo, Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) was a controversial philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet who was persecuted during the Inquisition and spent much of his adult life imprisoned because of his heterodox views. He is best known today for two works: The City of the Sun, a dialogue inspired by Plato’s Republic, in which he prophesies a vision of a unified, peaceful world governed by a theocratic monarchy; and his well-meaning Defense of Galileo, which may have done Galileo more harm than good because of Campanella’s previous conviction for heresy.

           

But Campanella’s philosophical poems are where his most forceful and undiluted ideas reside. His poetry is where his faith in observable and experimental sciences, his astrological and occult wisdom, his ideas about deism, his anti-Aristotelianism, and his calls for religious and secular reform most put him at odds with both civil and church authorities. For this volume, Sherry Roush has selected Campanella’s best and most idiosyncratic poems, which are masterpieces of sixteenth-century Italian lyrics, displaying a questing mind of great, if unorthodox, brilliance, and showing Campanella’s passionate belief in the intrinsic harmony between the sacred and secular.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9780226092072

Tommaso Campanella

Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) was an Italian philosopher, poet, astrologer, and Dominican friar. Born Giovanni Domenico Campanella in Calabria, he was the son of a cobbler. At fourteen, he entered the Dominican Order and took the name Tommaso after Thomas Aquinas. His early studies in theology and philosophy led him to the empiricism of Bernardino Telesio, a prominent Italian scientist of the sixteenth century. By 1590, Campanella was studying astrology in Naples, where he gained a reputation for heterodoxy and faced persecution during the Roman Inquisition. Arrested in Padua in 1594, he spent several years in confinement at a Roman convent before earning his freedom and returning to his native Calabria. In 1599, he was imprisoned and tortured for his role in a conspiracy against Spanish rule in the town of Stilo. Campanella eventually confessed and was incarcerated in Naples for twenty-seven years, during which time he composed such works as The Monarchy in Spain (1600), Political Aphorisms (1601), and The City of the Sun (1602). This last title, originally written in Italian and later translated into Latin by the author, is considered an important example of utopian fiction in which Campanella describes the traditions and organization of an egalitarian society. Released from prison in 1626, he fled to France in 1634 when one of his followers was implicated in a new Calabrian conspiracy. His final years were spent in Paris, where he earned the support of King Louis XIII and was protected by Cardinal Richelieu.

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