Resources of Intellectual Legitimacy in Italian Cosmological Affairs: Cremonini and Bellarmine’s Authority Conflict (c. 1616)

This essay deals with the cultural-political motivations behind the cosmological conceptions of the Padua Aristotelian, Cesare Cremonini (1550-1631). A defender of the interests of the university against Jesuit teachings, and one of the philosophers who was most frequently scrutinized by the Inquisition, he was an important actor in Venetian cultural politics during years of European wars of religion culminating with the Thirty Years War. In those years, he was officially entitled ‘protector’ of the multi-confessional German Nation of Artists, one of the largest groups of foreign students at the University of Padua, and had to act as a mediator in cases of conflict. His efforts to keep teaching free from religious concerns is reflected by his commitment to pursue philosophical and cosmological inquiries without engaging in revealed theology. In particular, his strict adherence to Aristotelian cosmology proved to be at odds with central Christian dogmas as it relinquished, among other concepts, the ideas of Creation and divine Providence. I argue that this position of Cremonini’s fostered a tolerant and universalistic attitude in line with a secular programme that could enable cross-confessional coexistence in a cosmopolitan institution like Padua.