Conclusion

Summary

In a recent article, Eric Cochrane has analyzed the field of Neapolitan historiography over the past few decades. Although some of his comments are polemical, he points out correctly that the attention of historians has been unevenly distributed, and that large gaps remain in our understanding of the history of Spanish Naples. Demography, popular religion, literature, law, and administration have all been the object of historical analysis. Several studies have treated the social and economic history of the kingdom, though the general context and broader interpretations provided by Galasso and Villari in the 1960s have not been significantly challenged or revised.

Several recent studies on the social and economic history of Spanish Naples have discussed the position of the aristocracy, and stressed the persistence of aristocratic power and privilege in the kingdom throughout the Spanish period and into the eighteenth century. Most of this work, however, has focused primarily on agrarian history and has presented only a limited picture of aristocratic wealth and power. It has often neglected the broader social and political aspects of aristocratic power and the non-landed elements of aristocratic wealth. The feudal nature of the Neapolitan aristocracy and the pervasiveness of feudal institutions in the kingdom have been acknowledged by these writers, but they usually regard feudalism only as the root of aristocratic lawlessness and of social conflict at the local level.