Pietro Giannone and Great Britain

Abstract

ABSTRACTPietro Giannone was a revolutionary thinker who sought in the early decades of the eighteenth century to free Italy from the inveterate, legally entrenched feudal power of the church and then to free Christianity itself from the stifling and corrupting embrace of the political church. This essay tells the improbable story of how his writings were taken up and disseminated in Britain by the non-juring bishop and antiquary Richard Rawlinson, the learned but morally unsound Scottish journalist Archibald Bower, and an odd crew of Jacobites. It is shown that the translations of Giannone got into some very influential hands and represent part of an undervalued Jacobite contribution to the origins of the Scottish Enlightenment and to the thought of Edward Gibbon.