Helsinki Legal History Series: Adriana Luna-Fabritius

Date: 21.10.2025 

Time: 15:00-16:30

Location: P673, , University of Helsinki

Link for online participation:

Translating Power: Legal Agency in the Construction of the Language of Rights in Eighteenth-Century Naples.

Abstract

This text examines the role of translation as a form of legal and political agency in the transformation of Neapolitan legal-political discourse during the long eighteenth century. Focusing on key jurists and intellectuals of the Kingdom of Naples —particularly Francesco D’Andrea, Giuseppe Valletta, and Nicolò Caravita— it investigates how Grotian concepts of natural law were not only invoked, but also articulated into concrete legal practices. Special attention is given to the ways in which these Grotian strategies were reinterpreted, adapted, and translated to defend local privileges against both papal and monarchical authority.

Rather than portraying Neapolitan thinkers as passive recipients of early modern European legal thought, this study highlights their agency by showing how they actively reshaped non only conceptual categories but also legal practices. Through translation, they constructed a new language of rights grounded in historical claims, civil law, and secular explanations of political authority and state formation. Crucially, this text argues that all these jurists directed their claims primarily to the Spanish monarch, situating their legal actions — particularly the defence of local liberties and forms of self-government— within the broader legal culture of the Spanish monarchy. Within this legal framework, in specific contexts, practices of conceptual translation became central to the emergence of a political vocabulary that distinguished theological from civil authority and laid the groundwork for modern notions of legal subjectivity.

While in the Dutch case these strategies contributed to the path toward independence, in Naples they led to the construction of a new language of rights and the first steps toward theorising the foundations of  a modern political state. In doing so, the text reframes translation not merely as a process of linguistic mediation, but as a mode of active political intervention.

Bio

 is a docent in Intellectual History at the University of Helsinki, where she teaches and conducts research on imperial and legal cultures, as well as the political and economic languages of the Spanish Monarchy. At the Faculty of Law, she is part of the research project Comparing Early Modern Colonial Laws: the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, led by Professor Heikki Pihlajamäki, where she examines the evolution of science of police in the eighteenth century. Her work highlights the role of local elites in renegotiating Spanish Imperialism, offering an innovative perspective on both monarchical governance and colonialism, grounded in the circulation, adaptation, and legitimisation of administrative and legal knowledge. Her research reconstructs legal and economic practices across territories connected to the monarchy through transimperial networks of communication, with particular emphasis on the role of Naples in transitions to modernit(ies). She actively participates in several international research networks on European political, economic, and legal history, as well as on colonial and transimperial contexts.

She has published widely on cultures of innovation and improvement, natural law, political economy, cameralist texts, the science of police, and early liberalism. She is also the PI of the research project Narratives of Crisis (founded by the Kone Foundation), and Labour Evolution (Founded by the Research Council of Finland), which explores how conditions of forced labour were gradually reframed as claims to individual rights across the Spanish, Portuguese, and British empires.