Neapolitan thinkers defended what they saw as their local liberties, privileges, property and honor by recourse to natural law.

In arguing for the superiority of natural law over the laws propounded by the Pope on the one hand and by the Spanish monarch on the other, Neapolitans found a source of reference in Grotius.

Neapolitan giurisdizionalisti, in dialogue with Grotius in his Apologia (1619) and De imperio circa sacra (1647), started a transformation of the language of privileges into the language of natural rights between 1650 and 1750. They did so through three distinct moves. Firstly, by arguing that privileges are claim rights towards their Spanish sovereign, for instance the privilege to be judged in one's own episcopal trials with ordinary procedures and local judges in cases concerning matters of faith. Secondly, by arguing that those privileges turn into claim per se rights when defended by force, as in the revolt of Masaniello,^{[930] [931] in the threats of tumults that took place on the squares of Naples in 1675 against the devaluation of the coin,[932] [933] and in the pamphlets that circulated dur­ing the trials of the atomists-atheists in the period 1688 to 1697.}

We will see how a new account of providence was deeply informed by the developments and discussions of the scientific revolution, which had a signif­icant impact around 1650 to 1680 in Naples, and which Vico concluded in the different versions of his Scienza Nuova from 1725 to 1744. The publication of the last works of Vico's generation around 1750 marks the chronological end of this study.

If during the monetary crisis of 1675 the giurisdizionalisti and members of the social group in the process of rapid transformation, the ceto civile, made use of known and shared practices within the Spanish monarchy to defend the privileges and local liberties,^[935] by the end of the century these Neapolitan thinkers improved those practices by assimilating new ones. For instance, there were innovations in the practices used in the negotiation of the deval­uation of the coin in the kingdom of Naples (1675),^[936] and in the trial of the atomists-atheists (1688-1697). In the latter, besides the jurisdictional practices regarding the competence and authority of those who were to decide on mat­ters of money or faith, Neapolitan jurists included discussions on the legiti­macy of procedures in the administration of justice. In this particular case, they criticized the introduction of extraordinary trials and the procedures of the Roman Inquisition during the trial of the atomists-atheists. They critiqued the validity of anonymous witnesses and their testimonies, and the legitimacy of declarations under torture, among other things. Moreover, Neapolitan thinkers introduced historical accounts of the concession of their privileges and liberties, setting the date of the concession at the very moment of the union of Naples with the Crown of Aragon in the thirteenth century, stressing the nature of their association with the Spanish monarchy.^{[937] [938] In this manner, this historical account was transformed into a contractual theory.}

The central claim of this study is that by threatening to end the peace within the Neapolitan kingdom, Neapolitans changed the language of privileges into rights. They did not so much cede their privileges but formed a historical argu­ment where something resembling a pact with the Spanish monarch emerged and was renewed over time. Neapolitan authors steered these jurisdictional conclusions to a new theoretical level in order to demarcate matters of politics from matters of faith in their political philosophies, but also in everyday legal and political practices.

As a backdrop to this complex process there is also a process of secular­isation of politics that was underpinned by the jurisdictional distinction between matters of faith and politics and the idea of the utility of religion and providence; that is, religion should be maintained because it guarantees the peace in the kingdom as it would avoid questioning the bond to the laws. This conviction was added to the commonplace, which was beginning to gain wide currency, that natural law was an element of primitive societies, and that therefore needed to be replaced by an alternative new science on which the foundations of civil society could be built.^[939] The latter argument was the main motivation in the search of a new historical understanding of the uses of laws. These Neapolitan thinkers were convinced that by looking at the uses of the laws in the past they would be able to grasp the laws' meaning and use them in the present to develop their new science. For Giuseppe Valletta, the historical understanding of the uses of the laws in the past and their application in the present would allow him and his intellectual colleagues to argue for the uni­versal character of civil laws.^[940]

This transformation of the language of privileges into the language of rights between 1650 and 1750 was, this study argues, similar to the one accomplished by Grotius in the Netherlands in an analogous context, namely the negotia­tions between political and juridical actors within the Spanish monarchy. The Grotian moment in Naples thus occurred in the context of the defence of the ancient privileges and local liberties of the Kingdom of Naples in the second half of the seventeenth century.

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