Conclusion

Whilst the historiography has questioned the character of the discussions on providence and the forms of appropriation of Grotius's ideas at the turn of the eighteenth century in Naples, the foregoing study has provided enough evidence to establish the appropriate context for a contextual discussion that revolved around science, anthropology, history and rhetoric.

This study has shown that rather than passively repeating ideas in Grotius's texts, Neapolitan giurisdizionalisti came to terms with Grotius's ideas in differ­ent ways and that the discussions and practices produced in Leiden played a key role in this process. The study argued that Grotius's editions of classic texts were equally important as channels of dissemination of his ideas and Leiden's discussions. It suggested the possibility that the jurists of the Spanish monarchy, converged in Leiden or somewhere else, developed and shared practices to deal with the Spanish monarch; those practices transformed at a higher speed over the late seventeenth-century political events. In the case of the Neapolitans, their practices transformed when they had to use their expertise to deal with the Pope and the Inquisition in a crucial moment of the Counter-Reformation era.

The core thesis of this study is that a set of practices to defend local privi­leges and liberties were in constant transformation and they ended up trans­forming the language of privileges into the language of rights across Europe. Grotius taught that these privileges turn into rights when they can be histori- cized, defended by force, and theorized in a more subjective manner - argu­ments which lead to the emergence of modern political philosophies in both Protestant and Catholic political states. Grotius developed this theoretical model in Apologia (1619) and in De Imperio circa sacra (1647), that Neapolitans learned from it either in person, through the channels of communication of the girusdizionalisti within the Spanish monarchy, the reading of his texts, or by the formulations of commonplaces transmitted through the main channels of the Republic of Letters. By reconstructing the appropriation of this Grotian theoretical and argumentative strategy, this study has thus attributed to Grotius and the Academy of Leiden a key role in the transformation of legal practices and the evolution of political philosophy in Naples between 1650 and 1750.

This study has also shown how the impact of European scientific knowl­edge, which the Neapolitans discussed informed and contributed to the developments of natural jurisprudence in Naples. In so doing, this chapter has expanded Vico's scientific context created by the paramount studies by Badaloni in 1995 and 2005 to the scientific authors included by Valletta in his Discorso, in which Grotius's editions and commentaries to important scien­tific discussions played a crucial role. Neapolitan thinkers, much like their European counterparts, discussed appetitus societatis in the terms settled by the new physiological discoveries, and the most refined texts on the customs of ancient and contemporary groups beyond the sphere of Christianity. This line of comparative enquiry is proof of Neapolitans' engagement in Pufendorf's developments thereof.

Finally, this study has shown how providence and il fato, were reformulated in Neapolitan texts simultaneously with the foundation of modern philoso­phy and that a strong scientific background characterized the research that informed their conceptualizations.