Real and monetary factors in the de Santis-Serra controversy

International audienceUnderstanding the work of Antonio Serra requires some knowledge, however basic, of the economic, monetary, and banking situation in the Kingdom of Naples at the time when Serra wrote his Breve trattato.1 The history of ideas consists all too often in making authors say what they ought to have said, what they are thought to have said, or what we imagine anticipates some later theory or another. Serra’s treatise, it is helpful to remind ourselves, was published in 1613. So it was probably written a few years before then. The two Discorsi of Marc’Antonio de Santis, against which Serra explicitly reacts, were written and presented in 1605 and 1606.2 The time lapse between their interventions, of more than six years, raises the question of what the real purpose of Serra’s Breve trattato actually was