Umanità contesa

Alessandro Tuccillo, Roberti, Giovanni Battista 1719-1786

"The new book by Alessandro Tuccillo - who has just been appointed as associated professor at the Università di Torino - offers an accurate case study on conservative Catholic discourse against enlightened humanism and anti-slavery, focussing on two texts by Giambattista Roberti (1719-1786), an erudite Jesuit from Bassano, a small city on the Venetian mainland. The Annotazioni sopra la Umanità del secolo decimottavo [Annotations on Mankind in the Eighteenth-Century], published in 1781, highlights a fundamental feature of eighteenth-century apologetics: the Catholic offensive against the self-emancipation of humans championed by the Enlightenment. In his fight against "philosophism", Roberti intended to bring the feeling of "humanity" back into the sphere of Christian piety. The Annotazioni were a direct response to the article "Humanité" in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D'Alambert....