Gian Vincenzo Gravina, Papal Imperium, and Thomas Hobbes in Rome, 1649–1799

With distinguished exceptions, many focusing on the work of Vico, particularly the three recensions of his Scienza nuova (1725, 1730, 1744), the subject of Hobbes’s reception in Italy awaits comprehensive study. This remains true in spite of a recent burst of scholarship on Hobbes’s early Anglophone and European reception. The following article centers on Gravina’s Originum juris civilis, a book perhaps best known for its presence in Book I of Montesquieu’s L’esprit des lois (1748). Gravina’s Originum juris civilis has attracted little notice in studies of Hobbes’s intellectual “afterlife,” but it deserves close consideration, as one of the first instances in which a work, published in Italy, discussed Hobbes’s De cive or Leviathan.