New Books for 2011

Vico and Naples

The Urban Origins of Modern Social Theory

Barbara Ann Naddeo

$49.95s cloth

Available in March, 312 pages, 6.125 x 9.25

ISBN: 978-0-8014-4916-1

Vico and Naples is an intellectual portrait of the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) that reveals the politics and motivations of one of Europe’s first scientists of society. According to the commonplaces of the literature on the Neapolitan, Vico was a solitary figure who, at a remove from the political life of his larger community, steeped himself in the recondite debates of classical scholarship to produce his magnum opus, the New Science. Barbara Ann Naddeo shows, however, that at the outset of his career Vico was deeply engaged in the often-tumultuous life of his great city and that his experiences of civic crises shaped his inquiry into the origins and development of human society.

With its attention to Vico’s historical, rhetorical, and jurisprudential texts, this book recovers a Vico who was keenly attuned to the social changes transforming the political culture of his native city. He understood the crisis of the city’s corporate social order and described the new social groupings that would shape its future. In Naddeo’s pages, Vico comes alive as a prescient judge of his city and the political conundrum of Europe’s burgeoning metropolises. He was dedicated to the acknowledgment and juridical remedy of Naples’ vexing social divisions and ills. Naddeo also presents biographical vignettes illuminating Vico’s role as a Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Naples and his bid for the prestigious Morning Chair of Civil Law, which foundered on the directives of the Habsburgs and the politics of his native city. Rich with period detail, this book is a compelling and vivid reconstruction of Vico’s life and times and of the origins of his powerful notion of the social.

Reviews

"Barbara Ann Naddeo makes a powerful new case for Vico's originality as a social thinker; and she does so with fine historical craftsmanship, setting his work back into the Naples he knew and the circles of lawyers and noblemen for whom he wrote. This is high scholarship, as precise as it is imaginative."—Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

"A book such as Vico and Naples is long overdue. Barbara Ann Naddeo places Vico squarely within both the intellectual debates and the historical and political circumstances of eighteenth-century Naples. Naddeo treats Vico as a politically engaged individual, and the result is a fascinating and very believable argument about one of the most innovative thinkers of his time. It is also an illuminating explanation of what Vico meant by what he said. This is intellectual history at its best."—Helena Rosenblatt, The Graduate Center, CUNY

About the Author

Barbara Ann Naddeo is Associate Professor of History at CUNY: The City College of New York.

(Reprinted from Cornell University Press)

Representing the

King's Splendour

Communication and reception of symbolic forms of power in Viceregal Naples

Gabriel Guarino

Compensating for a general neglect of Iberian civilization in Southern Italy, this book seeks to shed light on the viceregal court of Spanish Naples in the seventeenth century, a time when this European metropolis reached the zenith of its splendour.

It looks at the cultural projection of Spain and its values, either via the direct visual representations of power of the viceregal court, or the public policies and actions that fostered Spanish attitudes. It explores cultural and social manifestations as court ceremonial, state festivities, and fashion. Each of these issues also takes into account the social and political structure of the city, and the various pressure groups that interacted with the Spanish government.

Aimed at students and scholars of early modern Europe, the Spanish Empire, and the princely courts of Europe, this study will also be of interest to scholars of communication and cultural studies, and to readers interested in cultural history during the Baroque era.

Acknowledgements
List of figures
List of abbreviations
List of Spanish viceroys of Naples
1. Introduction
2. The ritual power of viceroys
I. The viceregal institution
II. Court ceremonial
III. The viceregal public image
3. The power of precedence: social and political hierarchies of civic processions
I. The hierarchical structure of cavalcades in early modern Naples
II. Extraordinary cavalcades and conflicts of precedence
4. State celebrations
I. The festive system of early modern Naples
II. Management, patronage, and reception of civic celebrations
III. Spanish tournaments in Neapolitan state festivities
5. Spanish fashion and the governance of appearances in viceregal Naples
I. Regulating appearances: Spanish fashion and the Catholic Reformation, 1517-1648
II. Successes and limitations of Spanish fashion
III. Governing appearances and luxury
6. Political utilisation of imprese in viceregal Naples
I. The uses of imprese in tournaments
II. Neapolitan imprese for the obsequies of the Habsburg monarchs
7. Conclusions
8. Bibliography

Gabriel Guarino is Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Ulster

234x156mm 272pp

hb 9780719078224 01 January 2011 £60.00

16 b&w illustrations

(Reprinted from Manchester University Press)