Biography

Stephen Cummins is a historian of the early modern Spanish Empire with a focus on the Kingdom of Naples. His research centers on violence, civil conflict and the politics of criminal justice through banditry and statecraft in the highlands of southern Italy. After his PhD at Cambridge, he was a researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. His monograph States of Enmity: The Politics of Hatred in the Early Modern Kingdom of Naples will soon be published by Manchester University Press. He is co-editor of Cultures of Conflict Resolution in Early Modern Europe and a special issue of the Journal of Religious History. He has been Robert Owen Bishop Research Scholar at Christ’s College, an award-holder at the British School at Rome and fellow at the Academy for Advanced Studies in the Renaissance.

Project Summary

Two years after the apparent end of the 1647-8 revolt of Naples – which saw scores of uprisings break out across southern Italy – a saying attributed to the viceroy of Naples circulated: ‘that this is a new world, and that there is no kingdom any more’. The purported lament of the viceroy, the Count of Oñate, testified to very serious challenges for public order in the Kingdom of Naples: thousands of bandits needed to be coerced or induced to obedience; local aristocratic wars boiled; many political actors, hoping for another French invasion, continued to conspire against Spain. The war machine of the Spanish crown exerted huge force upon the south. Not only did the people of Spanish Italy live alongside the garrisons and soldiers of Spain, many served in both regular forces and militias. Military experience was extremely common and central to masculine identities. There was no neat separation of international from civil conflict in early modern Italy and this project places the history of civil unrest and banditry in early modern Italy in the context of the militarization of the peninsula and the geopolitical struggle between Spain and France.