Books By Tommaso Campanella, Mint Editions - Author

Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) was an Italian philosopher, poet, astrologer, and Dominican friar. Born Giovanni Domenico Campanella in Calabria, he was the son of a cobbler. At fourteen, he entered the Dominican Order and took the name Tommaso after Thomas Aquinas. His early studies in theology and philosophy led him to the empiricism of Bernardino Telesio, a prominent Italian scientist of the sixteenth century. By 1590, Campanella was studying astrology in Naples, where he gained a reputation for heterodoxy and faced persecution during the Roman Inquisition. Arrested in Padua in 1594, he spent several years in confinement at a Roman convent before earning his freedom and returning to his native Calabria. In 1599, he was imprisoned and tortured for his role in a conspiracy against Spanish rule in the town of Stilo. Campanella eventually confessed and was incarcerated in Naples for twenty-seven years, during which time he composed such works as The Monarchy in Spain (1600), Political Aphorisms (1601), and The