La Matrona di Efeso a Venezia e la doppia verità: Osservazioni sul libertinismo degli Incogniti e di Cesare Cremonini

The paper takes as its starting point a translation or, better, an adaptation into Italian of ‘The Widow of Ephesus’, the well-known story from Petronius’ Satyricon. The translation is by Annibale Campeggi (1593-1630), member of the Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti. Published in 1630 and then reprinted in the collective work by the Incogniti the Cento Novelle Amorose (Venice, 1651), Campeggi’s transposition exploits the Petronian model in order to display a proper conversion to libertinism: indeed, in the Italian version, at first the widow expresses her faith in the resurrection but, then, the rational speech by the soldier makes her abandon any metaphysical scruples for a life inspired to naturalism. Most of the studies devoted to the Incogniti libertinism recognise the influence exercised on the Accademia by the Aristotelian philosopher Cesare Cremonini (1550-1631), particularly stressing that the latter had denied the immortality of the individual soul. On the contrary, according to certain historians of the philosophy, Cremonini’s irreligiousness is nothing but a myth: actually, Cremonini had adhered to the so-called doctrine of double truth, denying the immortality of the soul as philosopher but not from the theological point of view. Thus, the paper examines the notion of ‘double truth’ to show that even the Church considered such an argument a stratagem to avoid censorship and concludes reaffirming the heterodoxy of Cremonini’s Aristotelianism