ABSTRACT
The intellectual revival in Italy can be traced back to the last decade of the seventeenth century. Its origins are to be found in the renewed curiosity about scientific and philosophical developments outside Italy, in the spread of new critical standards of erudition and an avid ‘encyclopedic’ search for knowledge, in the emergence of a secular culture out of the ‘jurisdictionalist’ struggle to confine papal authority within its proper limits. One important source for the development of this challenge to a conformist, traditionally minded, religious mentality was to be found within the Church itself, initially outside Italy. The early eighteenth-century Italian movement to restrict papal authority embraced heterogeneous, even contradictory beliefs and personalities. By the 1740s the new scientific mentality, faith in science's utility to man, strengthened the belief not only in the desirability, but in the practicality of reform.
