Introduction to authors
The choice of the authors has represented a very tough challenge because selecting some literary figures rather than others is limiting. However, certain criteria that are suitable for the project purpose were chosen: the impact of the work on Italian language, the influence on a certain literary genre, the impact on a scientific discipline or on a literary movement, the existing and collected data in scientific literature. In fact, priority was given to those authors who had and have had a revolutionary significance for their own area of interests (e.g. Telesio for the Science of the 17th century) but whose translations are hardly known.
Giordano Bruno
Born in 1548, in Nola, Campania (Italy), he belonged to the Bruni family. At the age of 17, he entered the convent of Saint Dominic in Naples. In 1576, when in Rome, he requested to be removed from the clerical state after being accused of heresy due to his revolutionary opinions.
Tommaso Campanella
He was born in Stilo, Calabria (Italy), in 1568. When he was a teenager, he entered the Dominican Order and developed his own philosophical culture starting with the reading of Platonists’ and Telesio’s works.
Bernardino Telesio
He was born in 1509 in Cosenza (Italy) where he stayed for about a decade. Starting in 1518, in fact, he followed his uncle Antonio— a great humanist and intellectual— to Milan and then to Rome where, in 1527, was a prisoner of the troops responsible of the sack of Rome for two years.