ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how ideas from the cameral sciences entered late eighteenth-century Habsburg Lombardy in textual form. While it is common knowledge that Milan was home to one of the earliest university chairs in cameral science, held by the philosopher Cesare Beccaria, little attention has been paid to the forms in which the extensive, predominantly German, written discourse on cameral science became available in Lombardy in the years surrounding the creation of this new subject of study. In order to understand late eighteenth-century Lombard engagement with this written heritage, this chapter will analyse the circulation of cameralist texts in Lombardy and their forms, be they translation, reprint or abridgement. By focusing on these translations, adaptations and mediations of cameralist texts, the chapter will show how cameralist ideas were aligned with the existing political thought and political language of the Milanese Enlightenment. In so doing, it will argue that the written cameralist discourse underwent a process of regionalisation as it entered the Lombard bookscape, driven by concerns for the applicability of cameralist ideas to the Lombard context during the “age of reform” – a period in the mid- to late eighteenth century marked by significant political, administrative and institutional reform.
