Luca Giangolini

Walter Raleigh is a well known name in historiography, and yet, some of his texts have been relatively neglected. A Dialogue was written by Raleigh in 1615, while he was imprisoned in the Tower, and it received little attention. The main purpose of this article is to set a general overview on the Dialogue and its author. It considers the Raleigh’s rise and fall to power as a statesman and his struggle to reclaim a place in the Court, and the influences of the political context in England on his process of writing. It analyses what criteria he conceived in order to demonstrate to James I his affection and his ability as a counselor. Finally, it shows how Raleigh, a fallen favourite of Elizabeth I, managed to find a practical political balance between the interests of the king and the Commons during the reign of the first Stuart king

Pietro Gabrielli was a cleric tried by the Roman Inquisition for being the patron of a group of libertine intellectuals in 1692. He was sentenced to life detention in the fortress of Perugia. This article analyses his time in prison and describes how he managed to continue his studies with the intellectuals present in Perugia between 1702 and 1704. Gabrielli dis¬cussed with Antonio Felice Marsili, Alessandro Burgos and Domenico Lazzarini during this period of time. Therefore, he was in contact with a heterogeneous group of professors and clergymen, that were committed to reform the Universities’ teachings in the Papal States. This article has reconstructed the activities of these intellectuals, describing how they were the branch of a much larger movement, that created a precedent for the successive enlightened reforms